The Vietnam War
A long war to stop communism in Vietnam costs about 58,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives, splits the country and ends in defeat.
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill (1979)
- Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics — U.S. National Archives
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
- Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam — Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of North Carolina Press (2012)
- Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate — Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston and Vu Manh Loi, Population and Development Review (1995)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
The United States backed France and then South Vietnam against the communist-led North from the 1950s. After a disputed naval clash in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson escalated; by 1968 over half a million US troops were there, many of them young draftees. The Tet Offensive of 1968 convinced many Americans the war could not be won, and huge protests, campus unrest and the 1970 shootings of students at Kent State divided the nation.
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill (1979)
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
US troops left in 1973 and Saigon fell in April 1975. The National Archives lists 58,220 US military deaths. Vietnamese deaths are much less certain; estimates of total Vietnamese military and civilian dead run from well over one million to about three million, and the bombing spread into Laos and Cambodia.
- Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics — U.S. National Archives
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill (1979)
The war in Vietnam
For Vietnamese it was a war fought on their own soil, among themselves as well as against foreigners. After partition in 1954, Hanoi resolved in 1959 to reunify the country by force, and in 1960 it created the National Liberation Front in the South, which Americans and Saigon called the Viet Cong. Supplies and soldiers moved south along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail through Laos. In the South, Ngô Đình Diệm’s government grew unpopular; in 1963 the monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death in Saigon in protest at the treatment of Buddhists, and Diệm was killed in a US-tolerated coup.
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
- Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam — Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of North Carolina Press (2012)
The fighting was brutal for civilians. American bombing of the North, free-fire zones and the spraying of Agent Orange in the South destroyed villages and forests; at Mỹ Lai in March 1968 US soldiers massacred several hundred unarmed villagers. Communist forces also killed civilians, most notoriously during their occupation of Huế in the 1968 Tết Offensive, when thousands were executed. South Korean troops, the largest allied contingent, carried out massacres of their own.
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
- The Vietnam War: An Intimate History — Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Alfred A. Knopf (2017)
- Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate — Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston and Vu Manh Loi, Population and Development Review (1995)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
The Republic of Vietnam’s army, largely forgotten in American memory, lost perhaps a quarter of a million soldiers. After US combat troops left under the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, the South fought on alone until April 1975. Inside Vietnam, the war’s dead are honoured in cemeteries for “martyrs” in almost every district, but only those of the winning side.
- Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War — Viet Thanh Nguyen, Harvard University Press (2016)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
Many veterans and conservatives see the war as a defence of South Vietnam against communist aggression, lost because politicians tied the military's hands and the public lost its will.
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill (1979)
Most historians and the antiwar movement see it as a misreading of a nationalist and anti-colonial struggle as a Cold War contest, pursued long after leaders privately doubted it could be won, as the Pentagon Papers revealed.
- America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 — George C. Herring, McGraw-Hill (1979)
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
A war of national liberation against American imperialism and its "puppet" regime in Saigon, continuing the struggle against France. The people of North and South, led by the Party and Hồ Chí Minh, won independence and reunification through immense sacrifice.
- Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam — Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of North Carolina Press (2012)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
A war to defend the Republic of Vietnam, a flawed but real state with its own soldiers, elections and civil society, against conquest by the communist North backed by the USSR and China. The South's soldiers, about a quarter of a million of whom died, were abandoned by their American ally and then erased from history by the victors.
- Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War — Viet Thanh Nguyen, Harvard University Press (2016)
- A History of the Vietnamese — K. W. Taylor, Cambridge University Press (2013)
- Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees — Yến Lê Espiritu, University of California Press (2014)
Recent scholarship, drawing on Vietnamese archives, stresses that the war was a civil war among Vietnamese as well as an anti-colonial and Cold War conflict. Hanoi's leaders, notably Lê Duẩn, drove escalation as much as Washington did, and South Vietnam had real if divided support.
- Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam — Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of North Carolina Press (2012)
- Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
Why it matters today
Vietnam broke many Americans' trust in their government and taught a generation to be wary of foreign wars; "another Vietnam" was invoked over Iraq and Afghanistan. The gap between those who served and those who protested shaped baby-boomer politics, and the respect now shown to veterans partly reflects regret at how Vietnam veterans were treated.
Vietnamese call it "the American War" or "the resistance war against the Americans to save the nation". It killed perhaps two to three million Vietnamese, left a landscape of bomb craters, unexploded ordnance and dioxin, and split the nation into victors and vanquished. In Vietnam it is remembered as the climax of a long struggle for independence and unity; for South Vietnamese and their children abroad it is the war that cost them their country.
South Korea sent more than 300,000 troops to fight alongside the Americans between 1964 and 1973, the largest foreign contingent after the US. The war brought money and contracts that fuelled Park Chung-hee's growth, but also massacres of Vietnamese villagers by Korean troops, such as at Phong Nhất and Phong Nhị in 1968, which South Korea has been slow to acknowledge.