one’s home village and ancestors’ graves was anathema.122 It is no shock that people whose villages and crops may have been wiped out by American bombs and chemicals were unfriendly towards Americans. Vietnamese were even more likely to dislike GIs if family members or friends had been killed or maimed in the fighting, as was the case for millions of people. In the early 1990s, journalist Martha Hess traveled throughout Vietnam and interviewed people about their memories of American air raids and atrocities. One man posed a question to her that was echoed by other interviewees: “With all the American soldiers did to the Vietnamese people, how can we not hate them?”123
Besides their own alienating actions, American troops were tainted in the eyes of many Vietnamese because their stated mission was to protect a government that was inept, oppressive, and thoroughly undemocratic. The corrupt South Vietnamese officials propped up by American power really represented only a small class of urban elites. A majority of the population was Buddhist, but many high-level Saigon politicians and bureaucrats, including President Diem, were Roman Catholics. American troops were also a foreign army, and Vietnam had a long, proud history of resistance to invaders. Such a history led many Vietnamese, rightly or wrongly, to regard GIs as the successors to the French colonialists who were driven out of Southeast Asia in the 1950s.
All of these reasons for hating Americans also served as compelling motivations to join the Vietcong insurgency. Whereas the South Vietnamese government frequently acted imperiously, the Vietcong generally adhered to policies designed to win villagers to its side. The Vietcong also produced propaganda that successfully appealed to ordinary Vietnamese, whereas the Saigon officials were never willing or able to convince many people of their worthiness to rule.124 One prisoner told his American interrogators that he had joined the Vietcong because he was a poor farmer. The message of Vietcong “propaganda cadres,” that he had been exploited by the government and the rich landlords it represented, appealed to him.125 It is unlikely that many South Vietnamese fully comprehended or believed in the ideology of the Communists who predominated in the Vietcong.126 Large numbers of Vietnamese nevertheless joined the insurgency because they, like the prisoner, saw it as the only alternative to a distasteful government seemingly controlled by the “puppets” of foreign imperialists.127
Another significant reason why many rural South Vietnamese hated their national government was because it drafted thousands of their sons into the ARVN. Rice agriculture in South Vietnam was labor intensive, and when the young men who performed much of that labor marched off to war, peasants suffered greatly. Maintaining a force of rice workers was so important that village leaders frequently helped local men avoid military service. In 1964, farmers in the Mekong Delta blocked roads in protest against conscription policies that emptied their fields of workers. Ever eager to exploit antigovernment sentiment, the Vietcong provided peasants with workers who aided in planting and harvesting.128
The major unrest caused by the draft is an indication that there was more to ARVN troops than the scathing portrayals included in American narratives. There is some truth in the memoirists’ depictions, as the ARVN’s twenty-year existence was marred by failure and defeat. The ARVN was born in 1955 after the United States decided to build an army for its newly formed ally, the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam).129 By the end of 1962, after nearly a decade of American training, advisement, and funding, the ARVN counted 219,000 soldiers in its ranks and seemed to be making some headway against the Vietcong insurgency.130 It was a shock to many Americans, then, when 1963 began with an embarrassing ARVN defeat. On 2 January, an ARVN “battalion of regulars . . . and a company of M113 armored personnel carriers complete with air and artillery support” attacked a contingent of Vietcong near the village of Ap Bac.131 The outnumbered guerrillas held off the assault “until nightfall, when they slipped away undetected.” The Vietcong, who possessed no armored vehicles or aircraft, shot down five helicopters and killed or wounded almost 200 ARVN soldiers before they retreated.132
Andrew Wiest maintains that the ARVN, despite the debacle at Ap Bac, made significant gains against the Vietcong during most of 1963.133 This progress, however, was wiped out virtually overnight when a November “military coup led to the downfall and assassination” of President Diem.134 The chaos resulting from the political turmoil in Saigon allowed the Vietcong to build strength and go on the offensive throughout South Vietnam. US President Lyndon B. Johnson finally decided in 1965 that this dire state of affairs could only be rectified with the deployment of American combat troops.135 The US military subsequently sidelined the ARVN and, in Wiest’s words, “simply decided to win the war for them.”136
America’s next president, Richard Nixon, promised the American people that he would bring their boys home from Southeast Asia while fulfilling the nation’s promise to protect its Vietnamese allies from Communist aggression. He would achieve this feat through “Vietnamization,” a gradual withdrawal of US troops accompanied by the strengthening of South Vietnam’s military. Suddenly, fostering ARVN victories became a US priority again. Between 1968 and 1975, the US provided South Vietnam with billions of dollars in military equipment, including top-of-the-line infantry weapons, tanks, and helicopters.137 By the end of 1972, South Vietnam’s armed forces (the ARVN plus other branches) “had grown to over one million men and women,”138 and its air force was the fourth largest in the world.139
Despite America’s attempt to prepare South Vietnam to fight on alone, the post-1968 ARVN was, for the most part, just as disappointing as its earlier incarnations. The Saigon government withstood the Tet Offensive in 1968, and the US was encouraged by the ARVN’s performance in the 1970 US-led invasion of Cambodia. But Operation Lam Son 719, the 1971 ARVN invasion of Laos, which quickly ended in a frantic, ignominious retreat back to South Vietnam, proved that such optimism was unfounded. News media images of terrified ARVN soldiers hanging off the skids of evacuation helicopters were broadcasted around the world. Nixon asserted that Lam Son 719 was a success,140 but the demoralized “South Vietnamese forces who retreated from Laos knew they had been defeated.”141
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