Ostrow 1

The United States’ Justified Efforts in Vietnam in the Post Nineteen Forty-Five Period

Robbie Ostrow

US History Honors

Dr. Hong

May 20, 2011

Doan Van Toai was born in South Vietnam and attended Saigon University1. His path to

become a Berkeley intellectual was a long and arduous one. His family’s house was burned three

times during the First Indochina War, and when the war was over, he was happy to “support his

country” by working as an economic advisor for the new communist regime. Toai believed that

all foreign intervention was inherently bad, because the only intervention that he had experienced

was violence from the Japanese and the French colonists. Toai, now a prolific author, almost

joined the Viet Cong, but the regime decided that he could serve a better purpose as a member of

the new finance committee.

When Toai was given his first assignment, he realized that he had made a horrible

mistake. He was ordered to confiscate all South Vietnamese property, essentially destroying the

livelihoods of half of his countrymen. He tried to resign, but quote: “nobody resigns in a

communist regime”. He was promptly thrown into prison, eating sand and rice. After months of

solitary confinement, he was moved to a communal cell. Through the small window he could see

a sign inscribed with Ho Chi Minh’s slogan: “Nothing is more precious than liberty and

independence”.

The United States of America became intimately involved with Vietnam during the First

and Second Indochina Wars in the 1945-1975 period. The war was unpopular at home, and

executed poorly militarily. However, US foreign policy decisions were justified in Vietnam to

protect the national interest and to preserve natural human rights. The US acted nobly and

intelligently through the entire era, given the military intelligence that they possessed. The US

actions in Vietnam all stemmed from two principles: the idea of containment of communism,

1 Van Toai, Doan. "A Lament for Vietnam." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News &
Multimedia. http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/032981vietnam-mag.html
 Ostrow 3

which had become important to maintain a safe country and strong army, and the protection of

human rights.

In order to understand why the US foreign policy decisions in Vietnam were justified, one

must first understand some of Vietnam’s history. In the mid nineteenth century, Laos, Cambodia,

and Vietnam were absorbed into what became French Indochina. The French controlled the

region until World War II, when Japan took it from them in what came to be known as their

“First French Indochina Campaign.2” Due to oppressive leadership under both the French and

Japanese, a strong nationalist attitude emerged in Vietnam. A few militant groups emerged,

probably the most prominent of which was the Việt Minh. After World War II (1946), the French

came to reclaim their territory, but met resistance from the new “nationalist” group. In reality, the

organization was – ironically enough – initially funded and commanded by the Japanese, under

the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh3. Until 1949, the struggle consisted of small insurgencies taking

place mostly in rural areas. The fighting in Vietnam put the US in a tricky position: they wished

to maintain a strong alliance with France, but disapproved of violent colonization. The US

government released a statement: “it is not the policy of this government to assist the French to

reestablish their control over Indochina by force, and the willingness of the U.S. to see French

control reestablished assumes that [the] French claim to have the support of the population in

Indochina is borne out by future events.4” In this statement, Truman and the US lay out a very

firm moral position: the US will only support France while its actions are justified and supported

by the Vietnamese majority.

2 Liardet, Jean-Philippe. "L'Indochine française pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale." net4war le portail
en histoire militaire et jeux de stratégie. http://www.net4war.com/e-revue/dossiers/2gm/indochine-
sgm/indochine-sgm-01.htm
3 Ford, Daniel. "Japanese soldiers serving with the Viet Minh." The Warbird's Forum.
http://www.warbirdforum.com/japvi
4 New York Times. "Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Summary and Chapter I." Mount Holyoke College,
South Hadley, Massachusetts . http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent1.html.
 Ostrow 4

The firm, principled position in which the US had placed itself began to crumble in 1950,

when Mao’s communist China reached the northern Vietnamese border. China and the Soviet

Union began supplying the Việt Minh with weapons and funds, and the US began to fear that Ho

Chi Minh was a Soviet puppet. These fears were not unfounded, as the man had spend much of

his life in Soviet Russia,5 and was indeed a communist. The struggle between France and

Vietnamese nationals escalated into what some historians call a “proxy war” between the US and

USSR6. As the Cold War and Korean war were gaining momentum, the US could not afford

another regime that supported the communist ideals perpetrated by their enemies. America had

nobly opposed the violence in Vietnam until 1949, then assisted the French in their efforts from

1950 through 1954. US intervention in this case was completely justified, for two reasons. First,

in order to protect the national interest, the US needed to prevent the spreading of Soviet

communism. Second, the US realized that Ho Chi Minh was exploiting his country’s newfound

nationalism to create an oppressive and violent regime7. For example, the Việt Minh Prisoner of

War, or “reeducation” camps used physical and psychological torture against the French

prisoners8. In 1954, after French defeat, the Geneva Conference split Vietnam along the

seventeenth parallel into two distinct states: North and South Vietnam. The proposal was meant

to be temporary, but dates for Vietnam-wide elections were never agreed upon9.

5 Simkin, John. "Ho Chi Minh : Biography." Spartacus Educational - Home Page.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/VNhochiminh.htm.
6 Lind, Michael. "Vietnam." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lind-vietnam.html
7 Williams, William A.. America in Vietnam: a documentary history. New York [u.a.: Norton, 1989.
8 "Association Nationale des Anciens Prisonniers Internés Déportés." ANAPI.
http://www.anapi.asso.fr/index.php?langue=en
9 Mendès France, Pierre. Trans. "Assemblée nationale." Investiture de M. le président du Conseil.
http://www.assembleenationale.fr/histoire/pierre-mendes_france/mendes_france-7.asp
 Ostrow 5

By the time the communist North Vietnam and pro-west South Vietnam fell into war in

1955, about one million North Vietnamese had fled south, fearing communist rule10. During even

the oppressive Japanese occupation, there had been no such mass migration. Such a statistic

immediately shows that the Vietnamese citizens believed that the new, communist “Democratic

Republic of Vietnam” (DRV) was worse than any previous occupation. And they were right. In

1955 alone, Ho Chi Minh’s regime executed approximately eight thousand “class enemies,” or

political dissidents11. The US administration knew that if it allowed the oppressive and

communist regime to continue, “its military credibility would be seriously undermined… The

reputation of the United States for power and determination, the basis of its rank in the regional

and global hierarchy, was at stake.”12 In the Second Indochina War, the North Vietnamese were

the aggressors. The US was allied with South Vietnam; indeed, most of their military supplies

came from the US and NATO. The US was forced to take action. If they had not, they would

have lost military credibility, left Southeast Asia to be taken over by the communists (with whom

they were at war), and abandoned their South Vietnamese allies. Therefore, some kind of action

was certainly justified. The majority of Americans supported a bombing of Ho Chi Minh’s

important military and financial positions13, as a way to strong-arm the dictator into stopping his

aggressive tactics, especially after two US ships were fired upon, along with a US Marine

Barracks14. While the bombing was ultimately a failure, it was justified. The same can be said for

the required American influx of ground troops after the failed airstrikes. Lyndon Johnson’s

bombings were criticized by much of the media, and ended up killing thousands of civilians.

10 Manhattan, Avro. "Chapter 8." The Reformation Online. http://www.reformation.org/chapter8.html

However, one has to keep in mind that these airstrikes were in place as much to protect the lives

and rights of the Vietnamese people as to contain communism. The US government decided that

they could save more lives by fighting than by standing idly by and watching innocents get

slaughtered by the thousand. The US turned out to have grossly miscalculated, by

underestimating the Viet Cong guerrilla fighting force. In retrospect, the US never should have

intervened, because all lives lost were for nothing. But the same logic follows for any country

that has lost any war ever. Justification for a war can not be argued to be conditional upon victory

of said war. Hindsight is always better than foresight.

Doan Van Toai started his adult life vehemently anti-American. He had been

indoctrinated by the false nationalism of his leaders. After his imprisonment, Toai realized that

the American invasion was unlike that of the French or the Japanese. The Americans were in the

country to stop the spread of this kind of communism: the communism which is not really

communist -- for the community -- but instead tyrannical and immoral. Toai’s deepest regret is

supporting the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (eventually the Viet Cong) as it

deteriorated into such a system. He says, quote, “Naively, I believed that the Hanoi regime at

least had the virtue of being Vietnamese, while the Americans were foreign invaders like the

French before them.” In the First Indochina War and Vietnam War, he writes that the Americans

behaved nobly, if not effectively. The foreign policy decisions were justified in an attempt to

protect the Vietnamese people, maintain an alliance with the French while denouncing

unnecessary violence, and stop the spread of the oppressive strain of communism that was being

bred by the Soviet Union and China, and fed through Vietnam.

Popular American sentiment has always been against the Vietnam War. It is clear that the

US was poorly equipped to take on a guerrilla fighting force, and bombings authorized by
 Ostrow 7

Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, as well as the Viet Cong did take an atrocious number of

civilian lives. If the US had known all this before they (hesitantly), sent troops to Vietnam, the

US never would have gotten involved at all. But this essay deals with the justification of foreign

policy decisions, not the unexpected results of those decisions. The US and South Vietnamese

loss in the war makes the justification even clearer. The communist regime that was allowed to

develop after the war was, according to another refugee, “the most inhuman and oppressive [the

country] has ever known.”

Vietnam in the 1980’s remained superficially a communist community but truly a corrupt

dictatorship. The United States entered into both the First and Second Indochina Wars in order to

prevent an oppressive government from gaining power, and to protect the national interest

against such countries as China and the USSR. The US ended up losing the Vietnam War, but

such a loss does not imply unjustified foreign policy decision making. The loss only reflects

uninformed military strategizing. The US was placed into an extremely delicate position during

the Indochina Wars, and while they did not necessarily navigate elegantly, they accounted for

their actions every step of the way. It is easy in 2011 to blame the Vietnam-era administrations

for the problems in Vietnam today. However, without US intervention, the defeat of South

Vietnam would have been even swifter, and the situation could potentially have been even worse.

Since the war, anti-American characters and intellectuals such as Nguyen Cong Hoan, Hoang

Huu Quynh, and of course Doan Vak Toai have come forward, and announced that they have

changed their mind; the Vietnamese were fed with misinformation that skewed opinions.

Furthermore, the Americans never considered all of the available information. Russian exile

Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed in a Harvard commencement address: “But members of the U.S.

antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide
 Ostrow 8

and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear

the moans coming from there?15” To Solzhenitsyn, It is the duty of the United States to protect

innocents.

Some would claim that the US policy of containment was a flawed policy itself, and

subsequently would argue that the US intervention was not justified. In response, one of two

common modern Vietnamese sayings would suffice: “Don't believe what the Communists say,

look instead at what they have done.” and “In order to understand the Communists, one must

first live under a Communist regime.” Most people agree that theoretically, Communism is one

of the better -ism’s. But history has shown, time and time again, that true Communism has failed

and regressed into oppression and violence. The US might not have executed on their plans

correctly, but their policies of opposition of the Viet Minh, then the North Vietnamese, were

justified in order to protect human beings from the horrific experiences described in Doan Van

Toai’s memoirs.

15 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. "Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address." Columbia University in the City of New
York. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html
 Ostrow 9

Works Cited

.. "Chapter 8." The Reformation Online. http://www.reformation.org/chapter8.html

Appy, Christian G.. Vietnam: the definitive oral history told from all sides. London: Ebury, 2007.

"Association Nationale des Anciens Prisonniers Internas Dacportas." ANAPI.

Ford, Daniel. "Japanese soldiers serving with the Viet Minh." The Warbird's Forum.
http://www.warbirdforum.com/japviet.htm.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam, a history . New York: Viking Press, 1983.

Liardet, Jean-Philippe. "L'Indochine franaise pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale." net4war le portail en
histoire militaire et jeux de stratágie. http://www.net4war.com/e-revue/dossiers/2gm/indochine-
sgm/indochine-sgm-01.htm

Lind, Michael. "Vietnam." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lind-vietnam.html

Manhattan, Avro. "Chapter 8." The Reformation Online. http://www.reformation.org/chapter8.html

New York Times. "Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, Summary and Chapter I." Mount Holyoke College,
South Hadley, Massachusetts . http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent1.html

Simkin, John. "Ho Chi Minh : Biography." Spartacus Educational - Home Page.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/VNhochiminh.htm

Simon, Dennis. "The Vietnam War, 1965-1968." Southern Methodist University.

VAN TOAI, DOAN. "A Lament for Vietnam." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News &
Multimedia. http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/032981vietnam-mag.html

Williams, William A.. America in Vietnam: a documentary history. New York [u.a.: Norton, 1989.]

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. "Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address." Columbia University in the City of New York.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html

Chicago formatting by BibMe.org.