The Vietnam War

Contents

I. Introduction

II. Origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam

• Vietnamese independence and the First Indochina War
• The Geneva Agreements of 1954
• The creation of South Vietnam
• Repression and revolution in South Vietnam
• The expansion of U.S. involvement under Kennedy
• Lyndon Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
• Johnson takes the nation to war

III. The American War in Vietnam – conduct and costs

• “Pacification”
• The Phoenix program
• Search and destroy: The ground war
• Technological rampage: The air war
• An inhuman fate: The U.S. chemical war
• Peace negotiations
• Costs of war
• Associated wars in Laos and Cambodia (linked page)

IV. The American home front

• Consciousness raising
  
• Creating the antiwar movement
• The antiwar movement in the Nixon years
  
• Protest music of the Vietnam War (linked page)    

    
Read complete article on peacehistory-usfp.org.

By Gene Marx

Journalist Caitlin Johnstone has been castigated this week for her July 17th article, Please Just Fucking Die Already. In that article she wrote: "Defenses of McCain tend to include the phrase war hero, which is a nonsensical concept invented long ago by ruling elites to glorify the act of shedding blood for them. There is no such thing as a war hero. There are only war victims. For a time in Vietnam, John McCain was a war victim, a victim of a war that should never have happened. He then spent the rest of his life finding ways to victimize others, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria to Libya to Kosovo to his cartoonishly virulent NATO expansionism to his attempts to escalate tensions with Russia."
 
I couldn't agree with Caitlin more. Last month my friend Vietnam veteran and anti-war activist Bill Distler died from the same aggressive brain tumor. And while I'm sure John McCain never met Bill, he would have hated him and everything he worked for in the peace movement since returning home from the charnel of Vietnam.  Neither of us met a hero while we were there, just stupid cowards for ending up there in the first place.
 
McCain would have actually hated Bill Distler for doing whatever he could to impede the gears of an indiscriminate war machine to end the slaughter of innocents, especially the children. Their views couldn't have been more antithetical, but Veteran For Peace activist Bill Distler would still have been uncomfortable with the tenor of Caitlin Johnstone's piece. He would have even squirmed at this post. He was a good guy and certain that war-mongers like John McCain had moral cores and that they could be reached, somehow. Bill and I never saw eye to eye on that issue.
 
Unlike McCain, peacemakers like the Bill Distlers of the world will be missed, and for the children's sake should be emulated.
 
From Caitlin Johnstone's follow-up piece today:
 
"John McCain has spent his political career pushing for the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. I simply hope that stops. Why would anyone pray for that to continue? Why would you wish health and recovery for that? Why would you offer your lifeforce for this agent of death to continue his grisly work?"
 
Thank you, Caitlin.


The author of this post is Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington. Gene is a Vietnam veteran and former Naval Flight Officer with VAQ-135 aboard the USS Coral Sea in 1971-72. Past Secretary of the VFP National Board of Directors, Gene is currently a member of VFP-111.

By Gene Marx


Panel 2 West,

It’s been awhile, my old friend.  Nearly five years now since I last stood like a phantom in the shadows of Constitution Gardens, my reflection on glossy black granite welcoming me back.  You knew I’d be back then and are probably expecting me this month when peace veterans converge on Washington, DC.   
 

It’s now been over forty years since I was eligible for my own etching on your façade, and since the week of the dedication of The Wall I’ve visited only you, panel 2 West, always looking forward to our private, late night musings with my best friend Captain Richard Halpin, memorialized on line 122.  Our shared ruminations have always run the gamut from guilty rationalizations to fond reminiscences, and each provided much-needed solace.
 
You’ve no doubt noticed that I’ve never shed a tear.  Like many Vietnam veterans, I have long felt that the misguided, sometimes fake reverence I’ve observed from visitors, in the glare of daylight and ceremony, is unbefitting your arguably sacred ground status.  Don’t expect to see me on Memorial Day.  Like most of our war memorials, you have become an appeasement to unbloodied patriots or, worse yet, a recruitment tool for endless wars.  So why would I cry?  Anger is a better fit.        
 
Respectfully, my stoic friend, no country that flaunts its militarism at home and abroad is worth dying for.  Dick and I never admitted that.  We were used.  We should have known better, but we were used and never served any causes but family legacy and youthful, immortal egos.  And sadly, if every town common in the United States had similar polished gabbro walls embossed instead with the countless civilian casualties of US interventionist wars, instead of used service men and women, our imperial wars for profit would still be waged, for generations.          
 
So I’ll see you soon, near the apex, in the dark.  I’ll come alone.
 
Gene Marx


The author of this post is Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington. Gene is a Vietnam veteran and former Naval Flight Officer with VAQ-135 aboard the USS Coral Sea in 1971-72. Past Secretary of the VFP National Board of Directors, Gene is currently a member of VFP-111.

Letters to The Wall is a project of VFP's Vietnam Full Disclosure campaign.

By Bill Distler


Willie, I think about you and have thought about you every day since the mine went off that killed you.  I think about your family and I hope they have peace.

Even though we were arguing on the day you died, I think your family should know that you were so loved by everyone in our unit, that men were crying when the word came back to us that you had died in the field hospital.

My purpose in writing this is not to stir up painful memories for your family, but to hope that these words will comfort them.  I also hope that Bo, who was standing behind you when the mine went off, is doing okay.  I think about him, too.

Willie and Bo, two brave and honorable men. I hope you are in peace.

Willie, every day for 44 years, as if you were an angel, I saw your face behind my left shoulder, watching over me in a helpful way.  It seemed like you were always asking me: What are you going to do to make this right?

Willie, because of your presence in my life, I ask for God's help every day , to try to understand and to try to live a worthwhile life and to do the right thing.

Thank you, my friend.  I hope you are satisfied with what I've tried to do.
Peace to you and your family.


The author of this post is Bill Distler from Bellingham, Washington. Bill is a Vietnam veteran and former squad leader in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam from December 1967 to September 1968. He is a member of the Jonathan J. Santos Memorial Chapter of Veterans For Peace VFP-111.

Letters to The Wall is a project of VFP's Vietnam Full Disclosure campaign.

By Bill Distler

When King Herod heard rumors that a newborn Messiah might someday take his place, he ordered the killing of all newborn male children.  An angel came to Joseph in a dream and told him to take the Holy Family and flee into Egypt, where they found sanctuary.  If the Holy Family arrived at the U.S. border today would they be treated as undocumented aliens?  Someone in Egypt must have taken pity on them. Thank God that Donald Trump was not in charge of Egyptian border security in those days.

How does the story of Jesus have meaning in our lives today?  How many holy families (and under God, they are all holy), fleeing violence in Central America or the Middle East, has Donald Trump sent back to be killed? 

How did this cruel, sadistic man become president?  Every day he discovers new ways to disgrace our country.

Donald Trump needs to be impeached because, with his Muslim bans, he has violated the most important direction to the president that is written into the Constitution, "...he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed".

If, as Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. said, we want to save the soul of America, we must, as faithful citizens, resist Donald Trump's usurpations.


The author of this post is Bill Distler from Bellingham, Washington. Bill is a Vietnam veteran and former squad leader in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam from December 1967 to September 1968. He is a member of the Jonathan J. Santos Memorial Chapter of Veterans For Peace VFP-111.

By Jay Wenk


















During a warm Spring day in
Czechoslovakia.
The Germans were done.
Safe now, birds returned,
trilling, fluttering around my head,
seeking sustenance for tomorrows.
 
I was homeward bound,
unaware that for my sake,
Eisenhower murdered Eddie Slovik,
unaware the French,
trying to regain a cushy colony,
were destroying a world,
unaware that Korean menus were being
printed by MacArthur and  Co.,
unaware that my youthful interest in
Finland, Ethiopia, China and Spain
made them mine.
Unaware that Truman prepaid Vietnam
to the tune of 4 billion,
secret music the French would waltz with.
As an introduction to that dance,
lies were floated on the high seas.
 
Heroes trekked to Canada, while
Harry’s co-conspirators tangoed over the jungles.
Reverberations of their tunes left
common folks withering
with their trees and food and homes,
birds again taking wing to hidden places.
 
Today, these ancient danse macabres continue in
the Golden Triangle, where peace-proclaiming
leaders’ lies lubricate
the Birthplace of Civilization, compressing it with
greed into civilizations’ tomb.
 
Me, naïve, all those juddering decades ago.
My war never ended, never will.

 By Gene Marx
 March 10, 2017


Fifty years ago next month Martin Luther King, Jr warned us in his first public anti-war speech Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence that any nation that continues year after year “to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Arguably that led to his assassination exactly one year later.


Since the height of the American War in Vietnam, conditions have worsened exponentially, with military spending escalating unchecked. Since 2001 each new bloated Pentagon appropriation has become the new normal.
 
Barely a week after his inauguration, President Trump’s executive order, as promised, obliterated the limits on Pentagon spending, setting in motion a military buildup to end all military buildups. As if on cue the House of Representatives voted this week to boost funding for more bullets and bombs, as well as some of the most deadly airborne killing machines in the US arsenal. Some weren’t even on the Pentagon’s wish list, 11 and 12 more F-35 and F/A-18 fighters, respectively. The new $578 billion stop-gap bill keeps the U.S. military operating through September and sets the stage for even more increases to the Pentagon black hole of expenditures, as if budget caps were merely inconvenient workarounds.
 
Predictably, the House of Representatives minority saw fit to ignore Dr King’s “fierce urgency of now” plea delivered from the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church in April 1967, lining up instead with Congressional hawks and defense industry contractors. Come this fall there will be even more at stake. If the GOP majority has its way housing, transportation, environmental protection, biomedical research, education and health care would take huge hits to pay for a fiscal 2018 defense measure approaching $640 billion. We will need Capitol Hill representation that exceeds our expectations. Forestalling nay votes in opposition to the unfettered destructive agenda of the Pentagon would only benefit war profiteers and further derail the full potential of domestic achievements for another generation.
 
MLK Jr, never one to pull punches at the expense of peace and social justice, concluded his controversial, certainly prescient speech with this forethought:  “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time."

Call your Congressional representatives and remind them once more that in 2017, as it was in 1967, time is still at a premium. Insist, moreover demand, that they oppose any increases at all to military spending.


The author of this piece is Veterans For Peace Lifetime Member, Past VFP Board Secretary and Naval Aviation Veteran Gene Marx. He is also an active member of the CPL Jonathan Santos Memorial Veterans For Peace Chapter 111 and has been living in Bellingham, Washington with his wife, Victoria, since 2004.

Friends of VFP-111 member George Jartos are invited to gather together to celebrate his life at The Wild Buffalo, 208 West Holly Street, on Saturday, March 4, 2017, from 2:00-4:30pm.

George was a beloved icon in Bellingham. He was known not only for his extraordinary artistic talent, but also for his sense of humor and his kindness.

George's sudden passing on October 20, 2016 left many of his friends saddened and bewildered.

The Chapter is hopeful that this celebration of George's life will bring peace and closure to his passing for all his friends.