History By Stanley Karnow The Vietnam War example essay topic

Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow The Vietnam War, to me, is the most interesting war in American history. As someone once said, it is like a "shroud of a mystery, wrapped inside an enigma". Before reading this book I had a general knowledge of the war. I knew about the communist insurgents, the Gulf of Tonkin, Saigon and Ho Chi Min. I knew about Presidents Johnson and Nixon, post traumatic stress disorder and demonstrations. What I did not fully understand was why.

Why were the North Vietnamese so resilient? Why did the US make such poor judgment? Why were we really there? What was Vietnam's history prior to our arrival? "History is an organic process, a continuity of related events, inexorable yet not inevitable". (pg 11) The roots of America's involvement in Vietnam were nurtured by what Professor Daniel Bell has called America's concept of its own "exceptionalism". George Berkeley, an Anglican bishop and philosopher stated in 1726 as he departed from England to America, "Westward the course of empire".

The phrase, 'manifest destiny,' was coined in 1845 to promote the annexation of Texas, originally, and to extend America to its natural boundaries. Promoters of the Homestead Act sought to open new territory for small farmers. Idealists such as Walt Whitman intended to project America's "happiness and liberty" to the ancient cultures of Asia, "facing west from California's shores, inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet un found... the land of migrations, look afar... ". Around the turn of the century, America did grab Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines, but it seemed that America kept a hands off approach with Asia, which the Europeans already had their hands on.

There was little inclination for America to dominate foreign territories, since Americans were former British Colonial rebels. So Cuba was granted independence, and bids by Haiti and San Domingo to become American dominions were rejected. America, unlike Europe, refrained from plundering China, however, the 'pacification' program in the Philippines foreshadowed US strategy in Vietnam. America's expansionism was almost evangelical, "as if the United States had been singled out by some divinity for the salvation of the planet". (pg 13) After World War II, FDR stressed that international post-war peace and stability would depend on America's global leadership, and Woodrow Wilson pledged to "make the world safe for democracy". Meanwhile, American missionaries began pouring into China. Many prominent Americans envisioned a Christian China with crosses on every hill and valley.

The idea was to cement China's ties to the US and spur democratic institutions with an Open Door policy, which would protect China's sovereignty from European imperialist intrusions. Many Americans saw China becoming a replica of the US. Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska stated in 1940, "With God's help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City". Chiang Kai-Shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader, converted to Methodist, largely to improve connections with the West. Henry Luce, the proprietor of Time and Life magazines was the son of missionaries and was born in China, he had a grand view of America's future as a Good Samaritan and a world power with "ever widening spheres of enterprise". At the end of the Vietnam War, these views changed dramatically.

Daniel Bell wrote, "The American Century foundered on the shoals of Vietnam". And Ronald Reagan vowed to rebuild the nation's strength. As LBJ sent ground troops in 1965, most American's supported the commitment. After the war, an overwhelming majority of Americans viewed the war as a blunder. Opinion polls show that Americans blame the politicians for denying victory to US forces in Vietnam by providing restraints on their actions. A 1980 survey on the Veteran's Administration disclosed that 82 percent of US ground forces who engaged in heavy combat there believed that the war was not won because they were not allowed to win and 66% indicated a willingness to fight again under less constraints.

General William Westmoreland criticized President Johnson in a catalog of grievance memoirs. Some of his complaints were: intensifying the war too slowly, giving the South Vietnamese Army inadequate equipment, refusing to approve incursions against enemy sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia, and failing to level with the American people. He also criticized television networks and newspapers for distortions, which turned people against the war. Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr., an instructor at the Army War College is less critical of the politicians and the press than of his fellow officers. A veteran of two tours there, he suggests that America won tactically, but failed strategically. Col Summers believes that planners made the mistake of chasing Vietcong guerrillas, who were deployed to grind down the American forces until NVA units were ready to launch major operations.

In other words, we exhausted ourselves in a costly counterinsurgency effort - "like a bull chasing a toreador's cape". Col Summers was describing Gen Westmoreland's "war of attrition" which was designed to combat the Vietnamese through superior firepower. In talking to an NVA Colonel, Col Summers once said, "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield", to which the NVA communist replied, "that may be so, but it is also irrelevant". Colonel Summers asserts that America should have gone on the offensive late in 1965 after spoiling a communist attempt to cut across South Vietnam. He would have driven through the zone that separates North from South Vietnam, pushed into neighboring Laos to the Thai border, cutting off enemy infiltration routes running southward. Colonel Summers believes that this action would have required fewer troops than Westmoreland's Search and Destroy missions.

Fighting off the guerillas would have been left to the South Vietnamese. Americans were prepared to fight and die as they had in other wars, but they had to be shown progress. They had to be given the goal and an estimate of when the war would end. In WWII they could trace the advance of the army across Europe. In Vietnam, where there were no fronts, they were only given meaningless body counts. Some pundits also note that the 6-month tour was too short, not enough time for troops to develop an esprit de corps.

The original aim for the intervention was by Eisenhower, who believed that if the communists had Vietnam, then the rest of Asia would topple like dominoes to communist rule. The reality was that the communists had an almost fanatical vision of a reunified Vietnam under their control, and the United States was just a continuation of 2000 years of resistance to the China and later, France. Ho Chi Minh warned the French in the 1940's, "You can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, I will win and you will lose". When the Americans came, General Vo Nguyen Gap, a communist commander spoke of fighting ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty years, regardless of the cost, until "final victory". American leaders believed that they knew the threshold of the Vietnamese. Gen Westmoreland believed that by "bleeding" them, the North Vietnamese leaders would awaken to the realization that the population was being drained to an extent which they would not be able to recover from.

Interestingly enough, the Vietnamese population has grown continuously for hundreds of years, despite wars and losing a loosely estimated 600,000 people during the war with the Americans. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, whose devotion to the anti-communist crusade dated back to the Truman administration, admitted in 1971 that he had "personally underestimated" the ability of the North Vietnamese to resist. Clark Clifford was for a strong military approach to Vietnam prior to taking over the defense department as defense secretary, but sharply attuned to the prevailing attitudes of the American people, he changed overnight and persuaded President Johnson to alter his course. Clifford stated in an interview, "Countries, like human beings, make mistakes. We made an honest mistake.

I feel no sense of shame, nor should the country feel any sense of shame. We felt that we were doing what was necessary. It proved to be unsound". The South Vietnamese discovered in 1973 that America was pulling out and that it would not fight the war indefinitely. Bui Diem, a Vietnamese ambassador to the US stated, "small nations must be wary of the Americans, since US policies shift quickly as domestic politics and public opinion changes. The struggle for us was a matter of life or death.

But, for the Americans, it was merely an unhappy chapter in their history, and they could turn the page". Stanley Karnow, the author of Vietnam: a History claims that the Vietnam War created a sort of collective disenchantment where US leaders have been reluctant to take on military ventures, however this might have been true at the time of the writing of this book, it is no longer true. After the Persian Gulf, and more importantly, Desert Shield / Desert Storm, the American public has regained its support of the armed forces, and the military has been on numerous ventures. The US Army in Vietnam was in shambles in the 1970's. With President Nixon's repatriation of troops, no one wanted to be the last to parish for a cause that was clearly lost. Anti-war protests in America had reached the battlefield by this time.

Some troops wore peace symbols and refused to go to battle. Soldiers not only disobeyed their superiors, but in an alarming number, superiors were being killed with fragmentation grenades, hence the term "f ragged". Soldiers who served in Vietnam have significantly more problems than their peers, but why? A soldier in WWII behind friendly lines may have never heard a shot, but a GI serving at a warehouse in Saigon or an office in Danang could be killed at any moment by enemy rocket or mortar fire. An infantry soldier was almost continually in combat - either direct combat, sniper fire, mines or booby traps were daily events. Marines during WWI who were heralded for fighting the Japanese fought for no longer than six to eight weeks during the entire war.

The average age of a soldier in Vietnam was 19, seven years younger than the age his father was in WWII. This made him more vulnerable to strains such as: any peasant could be a Vietcong terrorist. William Earhart, a former marine, recalls a flash from the past: "Whenever you turned around, you'd be taking it in the solar plexus. Then the enemy would disappear and you'd end up taking it out on the civilians. The way we operated, any Vietnamese seen running away from the Americans was a Vietcong suspect, and we could shoot. One day I shot a woman in a rice field because she was running - just running away from the Americans.

And I killed her. Fifty-five or sixty years old, unarmed, and at the time I didn't even think twice about it". The Vietnam memorial was erected in 1982 in Washington, D.C. Thousands of Vietnam veterans crowded the streets at its unveiling, some wore fatigues, some wore business suits, many were paraplegics, many more were amputees. There was a solemn service at the National Cathedral, and some 58,000 names of the killed and missing in action were recited. Vietnam is interesting to me. Schools teach a lot about other wars - the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, World War II, but why not Vietnam?

I think that America may be ashamed of this, or maybe it is because it is so recent and painful. That is why it interests me. The book goes into great detail on the history of Vietnam. From Portugal's missionaries, to French explorer's, trade and the East India Company, Emperors numerous wars and America's first landing on Vietnam with the 'Old Ironsides' or the USS Constitution. There were numerous attempts for the French to defeat Vietnam, much propaganda and lies told to the people back home for permission to go to Vietnam. The Vietnamese were resilient, though.

Not like the other weak countries that the Europeans had conquered. The French had been there for hundreds of years, and the Vietnamese continually resisted them, striking whenever the French had other problems such as the English or the Americas. Often the French drew up plans to conquer Vietnam. They would recruit mercenaries used to the climate in Vietnam, but they would fail because of weather, which was too hot for their heavy clothes, or disease.

There were accounts that a mere scratch would open a wound to gangrene, and amputation would be the only treatment. The book goes into all of this. I thoroughly intended to write on this, but it would take ten more pages to do so, and ten more on the tactics of the war, and ten more on the Tet offensive, and I now ironically realize that this report is much like the war. What I originally saw as an 8-page report became 10 and then twenty, so I attempted to narrow it down, but I don't feel that I did justice for such a great and thorough book. But unlike the Vietnamese, I can turn the page..