Juxtaposition in Vietnam: Rhetoric v. Reality
Reviewing the course of American history, it is difficult to find a more challenging era for this nation than the Vietnam War era. Debates concerning why the United States was at war, to what effect the war was being fought, and the sensibility of the costs involved are among the myriad considerations discussed during that turbulent era. Certainly these questions, as well as the many others asked at the time, are not new to any state that finds itself at war. However, unlike most wars before, in Vietnam Americans had no clear and visible element to grasp explaining why war was then necessary. Vietnam was clearly a different war from the recent World Wars, where a visible enemy could be known by its aggressive acts and then decisively defeated. Vietnam was a different kind of war. An American could not say “We will kill Hitler,” or the Kaiser, or some other tangible entity to bring down a warmongering government and secure peace. Certainly eliminating Ho Chi Minh would be an objective, but it would not end the war; America was fighting an ideology. More than fighting thousands of Viet Cong, America was fighting communism. More than liberating a nation, or securing its independence, America was saving it from the Evil Empire, although that particular bit of rhetoric was only to come later. Rhetoric, though, as much then as now, and as ever has been, is the device by which politicians build public support. If ever public support for a war needed creating, from an absolute lack of thereof, it would have been Vietnam. Although (perhaps?) less insidiously used in 1965 than in 2003, the words of President Lyndon B. Johnson sought to strike a chord in the American public. To do so would be to receive the support desperately needed by his administration to execute the war. To lack it would be a political death. Thus, the President addressed the nation with his full arsenal of rhetoric and determination.
In the case of having the support of the public or a lack of it, American troops went to Vietnam. The soldier had no opportunity to debate the decision, because Uncle Sam made it for him. In Robert Mason’s novel Chickenhawk, Mason gives a first-hand account of life in Vietnam. A few themes are preeminently woven through his narrative, including that the GI could not fully understand what purpose the war served. The general tone of the narrative is of ambivalence, as the narrator accepts that he is in Vietnam, but does not see that the campaign is greatly worthwhile because he sees no clearly defined goals. Mason sees his role in the war as being to do as instructed and to not get killed. Other than these two activities, the GI has little recourse. Certainly GIs who had been drafted felt even more strongly than did those who had volunteered, although few would actually want to be in Vietnam fighting an ambiguously defined war. Mason asks himself why he is fighting the war, only concluding that it is the price of learning to fly helicopters for the Army.
President Johnson had also asked why America was fighting the war, but his question had a different intention; he was politicking much more than pondering. In his 1965 speech, Johnson outlines idealistic reasons for American intervention in Vietnam; self-determination for Vietnam, combating communism, protecting South Vietnamese independence, bringing stability and peace to the region, modernization and reconstruction, provision for aid to the impoverished Vietnamese, etc. Johnson, then, is arguing for America to be the bulwark of peace and benevolent nation building. However well his arguments may or may not have succeeded at building the domestic support Johnson needed to execute the war, the delivery of his message was shot through with rhetoric, omissions, and misdirection in the effort to build his support. While honesty may never be truly expected from a politician, an informative speech should boil down to more than just propaganda. Certainly few politicians have risen through the ranks of government without a case or two of hyperbole or slight of hand, but the case for Vietnam was a grand stage and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people were at stake. Perhaps more substance and less rhetoric should have been the order of the day.
President Johnson’s call for self-determination was a sham because the United States had helped to create a divided Vietnam. Therefore, there need not have been a nation divided to allow for a civil war. This is not to blame the US for the internal circumstances of Vietnam; rather, it is to say that if true self-determination had happened in Vietnam, a shorter war would have produced the same results without foreign intervention. This argument may be called revisionist, or backward-looking, but certainly the evidence available at the time must have warned that the South was certain to fail against the overwhelming nationalist sentiment toward Ho Chi Minh, and its corresponding mass of popular support, throughout Vietnam. Mason attests to this sentiment in an exchange with an old Vietnamese man, who says “Ho is a great man and that someday he’ll unite the country.” A GI says, “Doesn’t that make him [the old man] a VC?” “I don’t know…. He seems like a nice guy.” Clearly, Ho was a captivating influence to nationalist minded Vietnamese, North and South. This situation caused the GIs to doubt their role in Vietnam, if the US was trying to “liberate” a nation that did not want to be liberated.
Apart from the ongoing political machinations to which the GIs had no say, the GIs in Mason’s unit did have concerns with how the war was being conducted. This matter related to GIs on a very personal level because if poor tactics were being used, more GIs were likely to never make it home. The Vietnamese, using their guerilla tactics, “seemed to control the situation. We wanted them to stand and fight and they wouldn’t—very frustrating….” Since Vietnam did not have the military or industrial capacity to fight the US on even terms, they used their numbers and geography to great advantage in hit and run battles. Rather than fighting head on to be annihilated, the Vietnamese would do what damage they could, and live to fight another day. The Americans adopted this tenet of their strategy, using helicopters to shuttle troops to battle. In essence, the US was fighting a war similar to guerrilla war—mobile and quick, not prolonged set campaigns, with the exceptions of having superior tech and capabilities. Even so, the US was fighting the VC’s style of war, which the men of Mason’s unit decry. The VC were controlling the pace of the war because the US was not occupying territory. One soldier, showing his anger, succinctly explained his feelings, saying, “We should be out there marching, taking real estate and keeping it. Fuck taking little landing zones over and over again.” Mason noted, “We only killed people; we did not take land. Such was the war of attrition.” If this was the US military strategy to win the war, planners had overlooked the sheer number of VC in Vietnam who would be able to consistently reoccupy territory temporarily won by the US in its hit and run helicopter campaigns. In such a way, the war would drag on indecisively and men would die on both sides of the battlefield, to every soldier’s dismay.
So the war continued. With distress on the battlefield and dissent on the home front, the war continued. With troop movements and political maneuverings, the war continued. Eight years of bitter fighting have been followed by years of bitter memories lingering in the Vietnam era, memories of angry protests, antipathy, and general mistrust. What did Vietnam accomplish? President Johnson’s opened his explanation by saying, “we fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny, and only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure.” It is apparent that the subsequent activities in Vietnam assured the security of neither of these two goals. National self-determination remained a catch phrase upon which to build public opinion, while the State Department dealt behind closed doors, and the military in the field, to build a pro-American world order. This indeed was a matter of vested interest, seeking to improve the American national security by rolling back communism. American freedom was not guaranteed by the debacle in Vietnam, though, because the US did not secure its war goals. The idealized goals heading into Vietnam enumerated by President Johnson, whether they were the fundamentally true goals of the US or not, could not be fulfilled. Instead, the war presents a juxtaposition of rhetoric and reality. To make the US more secure, the US pledged to keep the ill-conceived “first domino” from falling in Asia; instead, American unity and invincibility took a fall. Words conceived in the spirit of human advancement, of liberation, and of security fell silently into the thunderous, earth rending sounds of war.