Discover North : THE VIETNAM WAR (1955-1975)

1968, the year the war turned upside down

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 were never able to completely halt traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which supplied the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) with men and equipment. By 1968, more than 500,000 American troops were engaged in Vietnam. The Tet offensive, launched on January 30, 1968, marked a turning point in the war. The combined forces of the FNL and the Vietnamese People's Army attacked over 100 towns 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, pacifist opposition to the Vietnam War became a veritable social movement. Elected in November 1968, the new American president, R. Nixon, negotiated an end to the conflict. Signed on January 27, 1973, the Paris Accords officially marked the end of the Vietnam War, but hostilities between South and North Vietnam would only end with the capture of Saigon by Communist forces on April 30, 1975.

"We were wrong, we were horribly wrong."

Officially, 58,220 American soldiers lost their lives during the conflict. On the Vietnamese side, the figures are much more uncertain due to the nature of the war, the weapons and the combat methods used. In 2005, the Vietnamese authorities reported that one million combatants and 4 million civilians had been killed. The Vietnam War - or, for America's adversaries, "the war against American aggression for national salvation" - was all the more tragic for the fact that the American commitment was the consequence of an ill-founded strategic vision. According to the authoritative "domino theory" of the time, Communist expansion in South Vietnam had to be halted or the whole of Southeast Asia would fall into Beijing's orbit. A premise that made little use of the region's history and underestimated Vietnamese nationalism. Tensions between Vietnam and China arose as soon as reunification took place, and in February 1979, Deng Xiaoping launched a punitive war against Vietnam. Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson from 1961 to 1968, Robert McNamara was the "architect" of the Vietnam War. "We got it wrong, we got it horribly wrong", he wrote in his memoirs published in 1995(Avec le recul. La tragédie du Vietnam et ses leçons, 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 calmed down, but the scars of 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 bead bombs, from dart bombs to the CBU-55 bomb, repeatedly tested, which absorbed oxygen from the air and asphyxiated soldiers who would have survived the intense heat and sudden rise in atmospheric pressure. The Vietnam War was also a war against the environment. " Trees are our enemy " was the justification for Operation Ranch Hand, conducted between 1962 and 1971, during which the US Air Force sprayed more than 80 million liters of herbicides on what was then South Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in order to eradicate the tropical forest that protected the combatants. Agent Orange alone accounts for over 60% of the volume of defoliants sprayed on Vietnam. Agent Orange contains dioxin, a highly toxic compound. It is carcinogenic and teratogenic (likely to cause birth defects). According to the Vietnamese Red Cross, today the country counts between 3 and 4 million victims of Agent Orange, including Vietnamese veterans, second and third post-war generations (the fourth is starting to arrive), suffering from severe malformations and multiple pathologies. While the United States has recognized and compensated "its" Vietnam War veterans, who were themselves affected by Agent Orange, it has still not admitted responsibility for the consequences of the chemical warfare conducted in Vietnam. Since 2012, however, the United States has been involved in the clean-up of certain contaminated areas. The cleanup of Danang airport was completed in 2018. That of Bien Hoa air base (near Ho Chi Minh City), a former Agent Orange storage site, began in 2019.

Films and books

The Vietnam War has spawned an abundant filmography. In the late 1970s, the major Hollywood studios began producing films about the war. Released in 1978, Michael Cimino's masterpiece Voyage au bout de l'enfer(The Deer Hunter) tells the story of a group of Ukrainian Orthodox friends living in the small Pennsylvania town of Clairton. As steelworkers, they learn one day that they have been drafted 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) describes the journey of young recruits to the Marine Corps, from Parris Island training camp in South Carolina to the battlefield. At the age of 21, Oliver Stone served as a volunteer in Vietnam, an experience that would have a considerable impact on his career as a filmmaker. With Platoon (1986), Born on July 4th (1989) and Between Heaven and Earth (1993), he delivered a trilogy exploring three facets of the conflict. The Vietnam War (Netflix, 2017) by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick is a vast ten-episode documentary fresco 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. The film has met with mixed reviews from specialists, due to certain historical approximations. Finally, we'd like to mention two French films. The first, La section Anderson, is a documentary by P. Schoendoerffer, broadcast in early 1967 on the French TV program Cinq Colonnes à la une. In 1968, it won the Oscar for best documentary film. Schoendoerffer, a veteran of the Indochina war, filmed the progress of a thirty-man platoon commanded by Lieutenant Anderson in the^1st Cav'(First Cavalry Division) over a six-week period. The second film, Les Âmes errantes (2005), directed by Boris Lojkine, deals with the painful search for the bodies of missing North Vietnamese soldiers left unburied (Les Films du Paradoxe, 2007).

As for readings, L'innocence perdue. Un Américain au Viêt Nam (Seuil, 1990) by journalist Neil Sheehan, a cult book that traces the conflict through the biography of an exceptional man, John Paul Vann, who was special advisor in South Vietnam from 1962 to 1972. And if we had to choose just one book, it would undoubtedly be Le chagrin de la guerre de Bao Ninh (Philippe Picquier), a superb work that was the first account of the fighting on the side of the North Vietnamese army. Bao Ninh was 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 had intended to write a post-war novel [...]. But, irresistibly, the pages of the manuscript filled with the dead, sinking slowly into the jungle. "