by Geoffrey Churchman

It was a war constantly in the news nearly the whole time I was at school and which ended in my first year at university. When it began, many assumed it was just another war which would last a few months. But just like those who predicted WWI would be over by Christmas 1914, they were wrong and it dragged on and on, eventually for 12 years.

We now know that President Lyndon Johnson or LBJ was a Democrat Party war hawk and one of the main pushers for the war, and that it’s possuble that JFK was assasinated over his reluctance for a war with the commies.

There were major differences, however — many south Vietnamese wanted reunification with the north and joined the Viet Cong which fought the South Vietnamese army along with the North Vietnamese Army or NVA. Thus the Americans were involved in a civil war as much as in a war against the commies. Often the Americans didn’t really know who was friend or foe and gave them all the same treatment.

Amother of the big differences was that there was almost no censorship and the main U.S. TV networks all had news people there sending footage home. Increasingly their footage became disturbing to the point where it wasn’t just the hippies in America, but the mainstream population which wanted the war to end. LBJ knew that his war was going badly and left it to a successor to take it over in the 1968 Presidential election. This happened to be Richard Nixon or ‘Tricky Dicky’ and, for some months after Nixon resigned in disgrace in August 1974, Gerald Ford.

Apart from the killing and destruction, the lasting images for many were the Americans evacuating their embassy in Saigon. Nearly all records had to be destroyed in case the North Vietnamese carried out reprisals against Vietnamese collaborators with the Americans. Apparantly $1 million in cash also had to be burned. There was not enough space on the evacuating warships for all the helicopters so some were just pushed off the sides.

Did the war achieve anything other than kill about 4 million Vietnamese, and some 58,000 American soldiers?

It demonstrated that carpet bombing strategy, as was also used in the Korean war, doesn’t work, Napalm / fire bombing produces horrific burns, and big body counts on the part of the enemy are no guarantor of victory. In fact those are lessons that could have been learned from WW2.

Fortunately the NZ government, while backing the Americans, did not send conscripts to Vietnam. According to nzhistory.govt.nz “More than 3000 New Zealand military and civilian personnel served in Vietnam between 1963 and 1975. At its peak in 1968, New Zealand’s military force numbered 548. Thirty-seven men died while on active service and 187 were wounded.”

The war has been the subject of several melancholic movies such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket.