The Shocking Truth Behind Vietnam: Why Were We Really There?
My interest in the Vietnam War was recently renewed while researching Ronald Joseph Bates, a local young man from South Jersey who was killed in the Quang Tri province on July 31st, 1969. He is now buried in Bellmawr Cemetery, which happens to be right up the road from me. While at his gravesite the other day, I was taken aback by the fact that this young man never came home, and I couldn’t help but wonder even further what this war was all about in the first place. Back in November of 2024, I actually wrote an article exploring this question, but after visiting Bates’ gravesite, it forced me to revisit this question as well as other questions that have long interested me, such as why do wars happen in the first place? What interests do they actually serve? And are the stories we are given always accurate?
Ever since I was about 15 or so, I’ve always had an interest in history and warfare. While my interest has been in the European theater, mainly due to my love for the movie Saving Private Ryan, the Vietnam War has always been right up there, too. During the war, the US lost roughly 58,000 soldiers, while millions of Vietnamese lives were lost as well. Here in the US, the prevailing story behind the war has always been one of good intentions, that is to say, our involvement was about protecting South Vietnam from a communist takeover by the North. If we did not intervene, not only would South Vietnam fall, but communism would continue spreading not only there, but possibly here as well. Even the famous Ken Burns’ documentary echoes a similar story. Burns says that the war “was begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation.” But just how accurate is this story? Americans often don’t ask these kinds of questions insofar as we are conditioned to believe that we are fundamentally good. In other words, we are taught that America enters wars for the greater good, that we seek to liberate oppressed people, spread democracy, and promote peace.
The fact of the matter, however, is that many of these standard stories surrounding American involvement in Vietnam are deeply misleading, if not entirely false. The war, and this will surprise many of you, was largely fought against South Vietnam. However, our intervention was framed as though we were protecting South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. According to Noam Chomsky, what US policymakers feared the most was not simply communism, but the possibility of a successful and independent movement outside American influence. “Precisely what they were afraid of,” wrote Chomsky, “was that the ‘takeover’ of South Vietnam by nationalist forces would not be brutal. They feared it would be conciliatory and that there would be successful social and economic development, and that the whole region might work. This was clearly a nationalist movement, and in fact a radical nationalist movement which would separate Vietnam from the American orbit. It would not allow Vietnam to become another Philippines. It would trade with the United States but it would not be an American semi-colony.”
In The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World, Chomsky and Nathan Robinson argue that the fear was that this mostly peasant population would set a dangerous example of national independence that would provoke other nations in the region to do the same. In other words, if Vietnam achieved genuine independence and development, its neighboring countries might seek the same path, which would, in turn, weaken American influence across the region. So, the war had far less to do with protecting South Vietnam or defending the US from communism. Rather, it was about preserving American strategic and economic interests. In fact, in its opposition to Vietnamese independence from France in 1945, the US “funded France’s brutal campaign to retain possession of its colony.” Furthermore, after the French were defeated, the US overtook French rule and “thwarted every proposal to bring democracy to Vietnam.” To illustrate the sheer fervor behind the desire to dominate the region, France’s foreign minister, Georges Bidault, stated that the US went as far as to offer France two atomic bombs if doing so would guarantee the defeat of the Vietnamese. Although the bombs were never delivered, the US nonetheless unleashed enormous amounts of violence. Chomsky and Robinson cite staggering figures showing massive bombing campaigns all across Southeast Asia. For instance, from 1965 to 1968, the US dropped 32 tons of bombs per hour on North Vietnam and 400,000 tons of napalm on Southeast Asia. This is more than three times as many tons of bombs as were dropped in the entirety of World War II, and the sheer power of the explosives altogether amounted to more than 640 Hiroshimas. Chomsky wrote:
“We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam. The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock. It is therefore useful to recall that although new levels of cynicism are constantly being reached, their clear antecedents were accepted at home with quiet toleration.”
One of the most crucial things to understand when examining wars is the role of what are called, “pretexts.” If a state intends to invade a country, destroy infrastructure, and inflict enormous violence upon its people, it must first come up with a morally compelling story. In Vietnam, the story was about both the defense of South Vietnam and the defense of the US. What this sort of story does, of course, is that it casts America as both a protector and a savior. This is a powerful story, and usually, the public buys into it.
Similar rhetoric appeared decades later with the Iraq War, which many consider one of history's greatest atrocities. The invasion was justified by stories about democracy, freedom, and security. The Bush administration repeatedly claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat.” And yet, these weapons were never found. Like Vietnam, the Iraq War was tied deeply to questions about business interests, strategic influence, and regional power. However, such motivations are rarely, if ever, stated explicitly. Instead, governments employ lofty moral language that obscures their actual intentions. In the view of myself and many others, the Vietnam War is better understood not as a tragic mistake or a misunderstanding, but as a calculated intervention that sought to preserve American dominance in a strategically important region. But we often miss this, falling into a sort of historical coma, especially when we accept these stories without any serious reflection or skepticism.
“It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it.”
—John Jay, The Federalist, Number 4
