VIETNAM: THE IMPOSSIBLE WAR

America At War

	
	With the South Vietnamese leadership still in disarray, more and more of the burden of 
opposition to the Viet Cong fell on the United States.  In February 1965, seven marines died 
when communist forces attacked an American military base at Pleiku.  Johnson retaliated by 
ordering American bombings of the north, which attempted to destroy the depots and transportation 
lines responsible for the flow of North Vietnamese soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam. 
The bombing continued intermittently until 1972.  A month later, in March 1965, two battalions
of American marines landed at Da Nang in South Vietnam.  There were now more than 100000 American
troops in Vietnam.  
	Four months later, the president finally admitted that the character of the war had 
changed.  American soldiers would now, he announced, begin playing an active combat role in the
conflict.  By the end of the year, there were more than 180000 American combat troops in Vietnam;
in 1966, that number doubled; and by the end of 1967, there were over 500000 American soldiers 
there--along with a considerable number of civilian personnel.  In the meantime, the air war had 
intensified; ultimately the tonnage of bombs dropped on North Vietnam would exceed that in all 
theaters during World War II.  And American casualties were mounting.  In 1961, 14 Americans 
had died in Vietnam.  By the spring of 1966, more than 4000 Americans had been killed.  
	Yet the gains resulting from the carnage were negligible.  The United States had finally 
succeeded in 1965 in creating a reasonably stable government in the south under General 
Nguyen Van Thieu.  But the new regime was hardly less corrupt or brutal than its predecessors,
and no more able that they to establish its authority in its own countryside.  The Viet Cong, 
not the Thieu regime, controlled the majority of South Vietnam's villages and hamlets.  


	For more than seven years, American combat forces remained bogged down in a war that
 the United States was never able either to win or fully to understand.  Combating a foe whose
strength lay less in weaponry than in its infiltration of the population, the United States 
responded with heavy-handed technological warfare designed for conventional battles against
conventional armies.  American forces succeeded in winning most of the major battles in which
they became engaged.  There were astounding weekly casualty figures showing that far more 
communists than Americans were dying in combat.  There was a continuous stream of optimistic
reports from American military commanders, government officials, and others--including a famous 
statement of Secretary of Defense McNamara that he could see "the light at the end of the tunnel."
But if the war was not actually being lost, neither was it being won.  
	Central to the American war effort was a commitment to what the military called
 "attrition," a strategy premised on the belief that the United States could inflict so many
casualties and so much damage on the enemy that eventually they would be unable and unwilling to
continue the struggle.  But the attrition strategy failed because the North Vietnamese proved
willing to commit many more soldiers to the conflict than the United States had expected.  
	It failed, too, because the United States relied heavily on its bombing of the north to
eliminate the communists' war-making capacity.  American bombers struck strategic targets 
(factories, bridges, railroads, shipyards, oil storage depots, etc.) in North Vietnam to weaken 
the material capacity of the communists to continue the war; and they bombed jungle areas of
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the infiltration routes by which
Hanoi sent troops and supplies into the south.  In addition, the Americans hoped bombing would
weaken the will of North Vietnam to continue the war.  
	By the end of 1967, virtually every identifiable target of any strategic importance in 
North Vietnam had been destroyed.  The bombing had badly damaged the North Vietnamese economy, 
killed many soldiers and civilians, and made life difficult for those who survived, but it 
had produced none of the effects that the United States had expected.  North Vietnam was not a 
modern, industrial society; it had few of the sorts of targets against which bombing is 
effective.  And in any case, the North Vietnamese responded to air raids with enormous 
ingenuity: they created a great network of underground tunnels, shops, and factories.  They 
also secured increased aid from the Soviet Union and China.  Infiltration of the south was 
unaffected; the North Vietnamese just kept moving the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  Nor did the bombing
weaken North Vietnam's will to continue fighting.  On the contrary, it seemed to increase the
nation's resolve and strengthen its hatred of the United States.  As one North Vietnamese
leader explained: "There was extraordinary fervor then.  The Americans thought that the more
bombs they dropped, the quicker we would fall to our knees and surrender.  But the bombs 
heightened rather than dampened our spirit.  "
	Another crucial part of the American strategy was the "pacification" program, whose 
purpose was to push the Viet Cong from particular regions and then "pacify" those regions by 
winning the "hearts and minds" of the people.  Routing the Viet Cong was often possible, 
but subsequent pacification was more difficult.  American forces were not adept at establishing
the same kind of rapport with provincial Vietnamese that the Viet Cong had created; and the 
American military never gave that part of the program a very high priority in any case.  
Gradually, the pacification program gave way to a more heavy-handed relocation strategy, through 
which American troops uprooted villagers from their homes, sent them fleeing to refugee camps or
into the cities, and then destroyed the vacated villages and surrounding countryside.  Saturation
bombings, bulldozing of settlements, chemical defoliation of fields and jungles--all were 
designed to eliminate possible Viet Cong sanctuaries.  But the Viet Cong responded by moving 
to new sanctuaries elsewhere.  The futility of the United States effort was suggested by the
statement of an American officer after flattening one such hamlet that it had been "necessary
to destroy the village in order to save it."
	As the war dragged on and victory remained elusive, some American officers and officials 
began to urge the president to expand the military efforts.  Some argued for heavier bombings and
increased troop strength; others insisted that the United States attack communist enclaves in 
surrounding countries; a few began to urge the use of nuclear weapons.  The Johnson
administration, however, resisted.  Unwilling to abandon its commitment to South Vietnam for
fear of destroying American "credibility" in the world, the government was also unwilling to 
expand the war too far, for fear of provoking direct intervention by the Chinese, 
the Soviets, or both.  In the meantime, the president began to encounter additional obstacles
and frustrations at home.  
	
	
	As late as the end of 1965, few Americans, and even fewer influential ones, had protested
the American involvement in Vietnam.  But as the war dragged on and its futility began to become
apparent, political support for it began to erode.  A series of "teach-ins" on university 
campuses, beginning at the University of Michigan in 1965, sparked a national debate over the 
war before such debate developed inside the government itself.  Such pacifist organizations as 
the American Friends Service Committee and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
organized early protests.  By the end of 1967, American students opposed to the war had become 
a significant political force.  Enormous peace marches in New York, Washington, and other cities
drew broad public attention to the antiwar movement.  In the meantime, a growing number of 
journalists, particularly reporters who had spent time in Vietnam, helped sustain the movement
with their frank revelations about the brutality and apparent futility of the war.
	This growing chorus of popular protests soon began to stimulate opposition to the war 
within the government. Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the powerful 
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, turned against the war and in January 1966 began to stage
highly publicized and occasionally televised congressional hearings to air criticisms of it. 
Distinguished figures such as George Kennan and General James Gavin testified against the 
conflict, giving opposition to the war greater respectability.  Other members of Congress joined 
the antiwar movement including, in 1967, Robert Kennedy.  Even within the administration, the
consensus seemed to be crumbling.  Robert McNamara, who had done much to help extend the 
American involvement in Vietnam, quietly left the government, disillusioned, in 1968.