The Mystery War Against Hanoi

Regarded as one of the most controversial and polarizing military conflicts in U.S. history, the Vietnam War has left a deep and lasting impact on American culture, politics, and foreign policy. From 1964 to the present day, the Vietnam War redefined the scope of U.S. influence both at home and abroad, and caused a fundamental shift in American society that dramatically changed the way in which Americans viewed their government and the role of the United States as a world power. For an entire generation of Americans, who watched as the horrors of the war in Vietnam unfold before the spotlight of the national media, the Vietnam War directly challenged the superiority of the American way and the infallibility of U.S military dominance. In truth, the U.S government, U.S. military, and the American people as a whole struggled to accept the lessons of America’s greatest military failure and the sobering reality of the war’s consequences. To this day, the legacy of this so-called “American War” continues to resonate throughout the fabric of American society as a cautionary tale of U.S foreign intervention and blind acceptance of open-ended conflict.

In his book, “One Day Too Long,” Timothy N. Castle talks about one of the Vietnam War's most closely guarded secrets. Castle writes about a highly classified U.S. radar base in the mountains of neutral Laos. Within this base, 11 military personnel disappeared with the government never fully mentioning how or why they did. Timothy N. Castle had many experiences with the Vietnam War. He had served two tours in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Also Castle has traveled to Laos ever since the 1900’s to work as a researcher for the Department of Defense. Castle is a senior in that department and he also works as a consultant for NBC News. Castle is a senior researcher at the CIA Center. Castle has another job worth mentioning as he teaches

Hess argues that the threat of the USSR and Communism “left the US no choice but to stand up to the challenge posed by Vietnam”. Direct confrontation was impossible as the USSR was a nuclear power, therefore the only choice available was “a policy of containment”; previous success in Korea gives validity to this view. Hess states Vietnam was the centre of the “Domino Theory”, that a communist Vietnam “would inexorably lead to the collapse of other non-communist states”. All communist states were believed to be puppets of the USSR so an increase in Soviet allies would tip the global power balance against the US.

Here Isserman and Kazin acknowledge that the military’s hands were tied, as they were, not only by popular discontent, but because Johnson did not want to risk making the Cold War hot. Insomuch as success in the conflict was measured by enemy body count in lieu of territorial gains, there would be no direct bombing of Hanoi. As much as the consummate Texan and his inherited Alamo mythology made him believe he was fighting for freedom, there was a line he would not cross, and the North Vietnamese took advantage of this. Americans who opposed the war by 1968 did so because they believed that it could not be won. Once the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, this purloined collection of documents related to the escalation of American involvement in Southeast Asia, spanning presidencies from Eisenhower to Johnson, further deteriorated the credibility of the American government, and helped to lead the majority of Americans to believe that the war in Vietnam was wrong

In her book The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, author Marilyn Young examines the series of political and military struggles between the United States and Vietnam, a nation that has been distinctively separated as the South and the North. Young chooses to express the daily, weekly, monthly progresses of the affairs collectively called the Vietnam Wars, focusing on the American interventions in the foreign soil. She seeks to provide an answer to a question that has haunted the world for years: What was the reason behind the United States interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country in which it had no claims at all? Young discloses the overt as well as covert actions undertaken by the U.S. government officials regarding the foreign affairs with Vietnam and the true nature of the multifaceted objectives of each and every person that’s involved had.

The Vietnam War lasted longer, bloodier, and more hostile than any U.S. President or American citizen imagined. Lyndon Johnson faced many other enemies during the war such as the duration, the immense number of deaths, and for the first time in most American’s history, failure. Through deep evaluation of Lyndon B. Johnson’s foreign policies as President during the Vietnam war, failure was a recurring outcome, as he faced military and political difficulties over having complete authority over political decisions made leading to the misuse of his respective power, receiving split support through torn Americans at home, and his accord to deport so many troops into combat in Vietnam.

The book follows in chronological order of events, but two important key elements are mentioned. First, McNamara addresses the important event that occurred on October 2, 1963, when President Kennedy announced to withdraw American forces from Vietnam by December 1963 (McNamara, 79). Unfortunately, that never happened since President Kennedy was assassinated on the following month and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, ultimately reversed the withdrawn by sending more American troops to Vietnam (McNamara, 97). The second important event was the overthrown and assassination of president Diem from South Vietnam (McNamara, 84). He started to develop a relationship with president Diem to participate in conferences to discuss issue present at the

One of McNamara’s central claims in this book was towards how his exceptional group of coworkers and he managed to get it all wrong in Vietnam. The problems made by the administration were not a matter of intentions or calculation, but rather those of judgments and capabilities of the region (McNamara, XIX). They should not have started a war with traditional military strategy with an enemy prepared to take a significant number of casualties. Vietnam had no political stability to conduct a peaceful and stable operation; it was simply not possible (McNamara, 49). Kennedy and Johnson believed that the loss of South Vietnam to the Communists would lead to the spread of Communism across Asia. To stop Communism from spreading, the United States

The Vietnam War and Era has been a strange configuration of differing parts. So many differing parts that more often than not Historians struggle to find a way to accurately make sense of this behemoth of history. In an effort to make sense of Vietnam, it must first be segmented. Unlike previous military consumed eras, the Vietnam era has no general consensus for long. It must be fragmented by topic, antiwar, politics, soldier’s perspective, cultural changes on the home front, and military engagements. But then it must also be split based on the years in which change is not occurring.

The Vietnam War escalated tension and anxiety in America and South Vietnam after North Vietnamese commander, Vo Nguyen Giap launched the Tet Offensive in the early morning of January 30th 1968. The traditional Buddhist New Year’s holiday, Tet, called on a day of ceasefire between the two Vietnamese nations, as it had in previous years. Vo Nguyen Giap aimed to extinguish the war in a ‘single blow’ and cause an uprising, effectively leading the Americans to withdraw and retreat South Vietnam into communist hands. After multiple surprise attacks on American strongholds and populated South Vietnamese cities, the anti-communist forces were caught, ‘unprepared’. American’s were initially called to Vietnam to contain the spread of communism into

To follow the thoughts of a reporter in the book, “Vietnam Now” trying to figure out Vietnam was like peeling back the skin of an onion: you went deeper, layer by layer, but never get to the core.

Four decades after the Vietnam War was declared officially over, American involvement in that war continues to throw a shadow over American politics and society, not to mention the history of American presence in Southeast Asia. The reason for that longstanding legacy of the war is that the Vietnam War was a monumental political blunder and consisted of a series of strategic military errors. These errors made a profound impact on America as well as Southeast Asia and haunts American leaders to this day in the form of, as some argue, the "Vietnam Syndrome." Due to a mixture of misguided understanding of international affairs and arrogance, America was bogged down in a protracted war where Third World guerilla warriors taught the United States a lesson in humbleness.

In his book titled “The Vietnam War: A Concise International History,” Mark Lawrence suggests that the United States’ Cold War foreign policy began to play a main portion in Vietnam. U.S. policy at the time was controlled by the domino theory. Which believed that the collapse of North Vietnam to Communism might cause all of Southeast Asia to descent, setting off a type of Communist chain reaction. The reason is that philosophy played a lashing force in policymaking, shows the notion that Vietnam had more to do with the global context of the cold war than it did the country itself. Losing a country of Vietnam to communist rulers in military totalitarianism was an example of failure to the US. Therefore, it was essential for the US to quickly respond in Vietnam’s

A quarter of a century after the Fall of Saigon, Vietnam continues to exercise a powerful hold of the American psyche. No deployment of American troops abroad is considered without the infusion of the Vietnam question. No formulation of strategic policy can be completed without weighing the possibility of Vietnanization. Even the politics of a person cannot be discussed without taking into account his opinion on the Vietnam Ware. This national obsession with Vietnam is perfectly national when viewed from a far. It was the only war that the United States has ever lost. It defined an era of American history that must rank with the depression as one of this nation’s most traumatic. It concluded with Watergate and led many to believe that the

As communism began to spread steadily and gain more and more attention, Americans became immensely concerned in what most saw as a detrimental threat. President Eisenhower only added to the hysteria by outlining the Domino Theory: the theory that a political event, in this case referring to the spread communism, in one country will cause a similar turn of events in neighboring countries, like a falling domino that causes an entire row to fall down. Although the Vietnam War is seen by many as the only option to try to end the spread of communism, the specious outcome of the war was not effective enough to justify the amount of unethical decisions and situations that were allowed to take place. In 1961, under President Kennedy, 100 Special Forces troops were sent to South Vietnam and by 1963, just two years later, U.S military advisors and Special Forces had increased to 21,000 troops. We will soon see that this is just the beginning and in my paper I will outline the full record of events all the way to the end of the war, including the reasons for U.S involvement, unethical decisions that were made, America 's effort to end the war, and the lasting impact the war had on the United States.