What was the Vietnam War for? Lots and lots of mommies killed Along with their children...

What was the Vietnam War for?

Lots and lots of mommies killed Along with their children husbands And their little critters too, and big ones like water buffalo... The more astute among us...might get it.

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Heartlander

Why Vietnam?

It's confusing, partly because the lead in and the war itself happened before the internet and much of the news from then has been scrubbed or polished. I'm old, and I distinctly remember the initial JFK radio broadcast about sending forces and advisors to prevent North Vietnam from invading the South and massacring mostly Catholic Vietnamese who had moved south after the Communist had secured the North.

South Vietnam in the 50s was the safe-haven from the Communist North. Much like Taiwan and Hong Kong were safe havens from China. The loss by the French of Vietnam was due in large part to US Truman's failure to support the French as well as the US Truman's Korean policy. When Truman insisted that the US would not cross the 38th parallel in Korea, China moved an army of a million to their Vietnam border to assist the Viet Minh in overthrowing the French. There's much more to it. When France returned to Vietnam after WW2, thy were more focused on punishing French Vichy civil service for collaborating with Japanese occupiers, so in effect there was an attempt to totally replace the established Vichy authorities without recognizing the Viet Minh's contribution against Japanese occupiers. So the Viet Minh fell into the arms of Mao's China revolution.

It gets more complicated with the migration of Vietnamese fro north to south after the French surrendered the north. The migrating Vietnamese were European like, more Christian, more French like, and that in turn created a cultural conflict with the Buddhist. Saigon was the Paris of the Orient, with one foot in the West the other in the East, and many considered Vietnam an integral part of France, and betrayed, but still enlightened European in many ways.

Oh God, it gets even more complicated ...

I'll stop here :)

I was one of those advisors to the South Vietnam Air Force. I was in the AF Reserves at the time and recalled on to active duty to serve s a flight instructor to the VNAF. tethnically assigned to MAC-V, but pretty free to roam the real estate in Vietnam. Before going I did a lot of research and had a friend in the Administration to ask about what's going on there. From that friend I got the inside story of what to expect, and when. Six months later my friend's timeline for the cease fire was dead on.

Also read a few books.

The one recognized authority on Vietnam history from WW2 to the US involvement is this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Quicksand-War-Prelude-Vietnam/dp/B0000CNNP9

Want to understand Vietnam, read it. Also read the reviews. There's one eye popping review that says it's a book that LBJ and Robert McNamara should have read.

I'd like to add JFK to that list, though the book was written after Kennedy was long gone. The assassination of Diem in 1963 was a critical mistake, encouraged by the CIA and sanctioned by JFK.

Heartlander

@Ohplease47 As I understood, Diem was caught in the middle. He was a Catholic who took oppressive measures against Buddhist. To the point where Buddhist monks were drenching themselves with gasoline and setting themselves on fire. On the other end were the military who thought he wasn't aggressive enough. Many of the military cadre were migrants from the North. The cultural difference was similar to Cambodia. The conflict between the 2 cultures in the south was exploited by the north. Progressives wanted to restore South Vietnam to the glory days they had experienced under French control and saw the future much like Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea.

The cultural unbalance disunited the south. Open distrust within segments of the population. That existed without the threat from the north and that was pretty obvious in the speed that South Vietnam fell to the North once the US had departed. .

swirlie · 31-35, F

The Vietnam war had been going on for decades before the USA got involved in 1958. Vietnam was not started by the US, Vietnam was merely a very old war that got continued by the US special interest groups who made money off the war back in America.

What the US government tried successfully to dupe the American public into believing, was that if communism spread into south Vietnam, then communism would end up in the USA as well, somewhat like how Covid-19 quickly spread across the globe in a short period of time.

The reason the USA lost the war in Vietnam after having been there from 1958 to 1975 was for many reasons, the most prominent reason being the distance Vietnam was from mainland USA.

That distance issue for getting supplies back and forth became the Achilles Heel of the US military, no different than the same little distance issue will become the Achilles Heel of the Iran War Trump is currently waging in the Middle East. The USA will lose the war in Iran because of the distance Iran is from the USA, just like the US lost the war in Vietnam for the same reason.

The United States makes big money from 'renting out' their military personnel and hardware to countries who have no military to speak of, but whom are under attack by an adversary nonetheless.

That is why the US had military bases all throughout the Middle East within the Persian Gulf Region, because those small countries do not really have adequate security forces of their own and never did have. Enter the USA with their "SOLDIER TO RENT" program, which the US government makes BIG money from. Vietnam was no different in that financial regard.

The fact that 58,000 US Servicemen and women were lost in that 17 year boondoggle in Vietnam is where the phrase "collateral damage" comes from. That is an American term that was invented by the US government to mitigate American losses; it is not a globally recognized phrase because no other civilized country in the world uses it's own citizens as cannon fodder like the US government does without conscience.