1968, the year when the war changed
The Gulf of Tonkin incident (1964), in which two American destroyers were allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats, provided President Johnson with the pretext for a massive engagement against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Americans and South Vietnamese began bombing North Vietnam on February 7, 1965, but they were never able to completely stop traffic on the Ho Chi Minh runway, which supplied the National Liberation Front (FNL) of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) with men and materials. In 1968, there were more than 500,000 U.S. soldiers engaged in Vietnam. The Tet offensive, launched on 30 January 1968, marked a turning point in the war. The combined forces of the FNL and the Vietnamese People's Army attacked more than 100 cities across the country. For the communist forces, the Tet offensive was a military defeat, but a political victory. On American campuses, the dirty war is increasingly contested. Initiated by students and hippies, the pacifist opposition to the Vietnam War is becoming a real social movement. Elected in November 1968, the new American president, R. Nixon, negotiates the end of the conflict. Signed on 27 January 1973, the Paris Agreements officially mark the end of the Vietnam War, but hostilities between South and North Vietnam will only end with the capture of Saigon by communist forces on 30 April 1975.
"We got it wrong, we got it horribly wrong."
Officially, 58,220 American soldiers lost their lives during the conflict. On the Vietnamese side, the figures are much more uncertain because of the nature of the war, the weapons and the methods of combat used. In 2005, the Vietnamese authorities reported that 1 million combatants and 4 million civilians had been killed. The Vietnam War, or, for the US adversaries, "the war against US aggression for national salvation", was all the more tragic because the US engagement was the consequence of an ill-founded strategic vision. According to the authoritative "domino theory" of the time, it was a matter of stopping communist expansion in South Vietnam or else the whole of Southeast Asia would fall into the orbit of Beijing. This was a cheap premise of the region's history and underestimated Vietnamese nationalism. Tensions between Vietnam and China appeared as soon as reunification took place and in February 1979, Deng Xiaoping unleashed a punitive war against Vietnam. Secretary of Defense of John Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson from 1961 to 1968, Robert McNamara was the "architect" of the Vietnam War. "We were wrong, we were horribly wrong," he wrote in his memoirs published in 1995 (With Hindsight: The Tragedy of Vietnam and its Lessons, Seuil, 1996). "My colleagues and I were deciding the fate of a region we knew nothing about"
The dirty war
Relations between Vietnam and the United States have now calmed down, but the scars of the war are still raw. The Vietnam War was a "dirty war". It is said that the United States used every weapon except the atomic bomb. From napalm to ball bombs, from dart bombs to the repeatedly tested CBU-55 bomb, which absorbed oxygen from the air and asphyxiated soldiers who survived the intense heat and sudden rise in atmospheric pressure. The Vietnam War was also a war against the environment. "Trees are our enemy"... This was the justification for Operation Ranch Hand, conducted between 1962 and 1971, during which the US Air Force sprayed more than 80 million litres of herbicides on what was then South Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh trail in order to eradicate the rainforest that protected the fighters. Agent Orange alone accounts for more than 60% of the volume of defoliants dumped on Vietnam. Agent Orange contains dioxin, a highly toxic compound. It has carcinogenic and teratogenic effects (likely to cause birth defects). According to the Vietnamese Red Cross, today, including Vietnamese veterans, second and third post-war generations (the fourth is beginning to arrive), the country has between 3 and 4 million victims of Agent Orange, suffering from severe deformities and multiple pathologies. Although the United States has recognized and compensated "their" Vietnam war veterans, themselves affected by Agent Orange, it has still not admitted its responsibility for the consequences of the chemical war conducted in Vietnam. Since 2012, the United States is nevertheless engaged in the clean-up of certain contaminated areas. The clean-up of Danang airport was completed in 2018. The clean-up of the Bien Hoa air base (near Ho Chi Minh City), the former storage site for Agent Orange, began in 2019.
The sites of the Vietnam War
In Vietnam, the visit of certain sites allows a better understanding of what the war was like, while at the same time inviting meditation. In Ho Chi Minh City, the War Memorial Museum is accumulating evidence of the atrocities committed by the American military during the conflict. An exhibition entitled Requiem displays a collection of photos taken by photographers from eleven different countries, all of whom were killed during the fighting. They were collected by Horst Faas and Tim Page, themselves photographers, who worked and were wounded in Vietnam, and were published in the book of the same name (Requiem.By Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina, Marval, 1998). To thenorthwest of Ho Chi Minh City, the Cu Chi tunnels tell the story of the ingenuity of underground warfare, of the rudimentary traps and close combat that manage to defeat American technological superiority. Further north, in the province of Quang Tri, another impressive underground infrastructure is the Vinh Moc tunnels. Unlike the Cu Chi site, this is not a combat device. The tunnels served as a shelter for the civilian population from intensive bombing by the US Air Force. 17 children were born in this real city which consisted of several levels dug at an average depth of 7 m. It is located a few kilometres north of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone). This demilitarized zone extended from the coast to the border of Laos, over a length of 65 km and a width of 10 km, on both sides of the river Bên Hai at the level of the 17th parallel, the provisional demarcation line between North and South Vietnam fixed by the Geneva agreements of July 1954. In order to monitor the area, the United States had set up several support bases along Route Nº 9: Lang Vei, Khe Sanh, Ca Lu, Rockpile, Camp Caroll, Cam Lô, Dông Ha... Violent fighting took place in this area. The establishment of the Khe Sanh base at the foot of the mountainous area that forms the border with Laos was intended to disrupt the traffic on the Ho Chi Minh trail and to reinforce the "McNamara line", a system of sensors intended to prevent the infiltration of men and material coming from North Vietnam. In January 1968, Khe Sanh was the scene of a fierce 77-day battle in which the Vietnamese People's Army attempted to seize the base. During Operation Niagara, the American B-52s dropped nearly 100,000 tons of bombs on the enemy positions that occupied the entrenched camp. The historical site of Khe Sanh is today little valorized. There are a few military wrecks, the remains of the Ta Con airfield, and a small museum.Films and books
The Vietnam War is at the origin of an abundant filmography. It was in the late 1970s that the major Hollywood studios began to produce films about the war. Released in 1978, Michael Cimino'sThe Deer Hunter is a masterpiece that tells the story of a group of Ukrainian Orthodox friends living in Clairton, a small town in Pennsylvania. The latter, steelworkers, learn one day that they are mobilized to fight in Vietnam. Apocalypse Now (1979) by F. F. Coppola, inspired by J. Conrad's short story, In the Heart of Darkness (1899), offers a psychedelic vision of the conflict. Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) depicts the journey of young Marine Corps recruits from training camp on Parris Island, South Carolina, to their commitment on the battlefield. At the age of 21, Oliver Stone served as a volunteer in Vietnam and this experience would have a considerable impact on his career as a filmmaker. With Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Between Heaven and Earth (1993) he delivers a trilogy that explores three sides of the conflict. The Vietnam War (Netflix, 2017) by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is a sprawling ten-part documentary mural that traces the history of the Vietnam War from the French defeat at Diên Biên Phu in 1954 to the American debacle in Saigon on April 30, 1975. It has been the subject of mixed reviews by specialists, due to certain historical approximations. Finally, two French films will be mentioned. The first, La section Anderson, is a documentary by P. Schoendoerffer, broadcast in early 1967 in the program Cinq Colonnes à la une. It won the Oscar for best documentary film in 1968. P. Schoendoerffer, a veteran of the Indochina war, filmed for six weeks the progression of a section of thirty men commanded by Lieutenant Anderson, within the1st Cav' (First Cavalry Division). The second film, Les Âmes errantes (2005), directed by Boris Lojkine, deals with the painful search for the bodies of North Vietnamese soldiers who disappeared and were left unburied (Les Films du Paradoxe, 2007).
As for the readings, we will retain L'innocence perdue. Un Américain au Viêt Nam (Seuil, 1990) by journalist Neil Sheehan, a cult book that retraces the conflict through the biography of an exceptional man, John Paul Vann, who was a special advisor in South Vietnam from 1962 to 1972. And if we had to choose only one book, it would be Le chagrin de la guerre de Bao Ninh (Philippe Picquier), a superb work, which was the first testimony on the fighting on the side of the North Vietnamese army. Bao Ninh is one of the ten survivors of the 27th Glorious Youth Brigade, out of five hundred who left in 1969. "When he began this first novel, he intended to write a post-war novel [...]. But, irresistibly, the pages of the manuscript filled with the dead, slowly sinking into the jungle. "
