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How
long do you Americans want to fight?
One
year? Five years? Twenty years?
We
will be glad to accommodate you.
--
Northern revolutionary Pham Van Dong, 1966
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The first Indochina War
The independence Ho Chi Minh had so boldly declared
in Hanoi in 1945 was quickly squashed, as foreign
allies stepped in to help France reassert its
claims in Indochina. British leaders, eager to
protect their own shaky colonial empire, sent
troops to liberate French soldiers who had been
held by the Japanese. While Ho Chi Minh had once
hoped for support from President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, the U.S. instead gave France financial
assistance to buy munitions to quell the Viet
Minh rebellion. But from the beginning, French
control over their mutinous colony remained shaky,
and the Communist guerrillas of the Viet Minh
put up a fierce fight in the north and central
highlands. Saigon was rocked with acts of sabotage,
like the 1946 destruction of 4,000 tons of French
munitions and the assassination of a French police
inspector in 1950. In 1954, after a humiliating
military defeat at Dien Bien Phu, France declared
peace with it’s former colony at the Geneva
Conference, and the country was split in two—North
Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, and South Vietnam,
led by the emperor Bao Dai. The peace treaty called
for elections in 1956 to reunite the nation. They
never took place.
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America steps in
Throughout the Indochina War, the U.S. had watched
with growing anxiety as Vietnam grew to depend more
and more on the Soviet Union. Fearing that the loss
of Vietnam to Communism would tip the balance in Southeast
Asia toward the U.S.’s Cold War enemy, President
Eisenhower helped install a Catholic exile named Ngo
Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam in 1955. Communist
guerrilla units known as Viet Cong began to stage attacks
throughout the South, battles which would erupt into
full-fledged war. Repressive countermeasures to root
out Viet Cong recruited from Southern villages and the
closure of Buddhist temples quickly eroded what little
popular support Diem had. Diem was assassinated in 1963,
and in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson deployed the first
U.S. ground troops.
The number of American soldiers in Vietnam would soon
swell into hundreds of thousands. The streets of Saigon
teemed with American G.I.s, and soon neon signs lit
up the old Rue Catinat, now called Tu Do (Freedom) Street.
A thriving black market sold everything from Zippo lighters
to Levis to Budweiser beer, and the sounds of American
rock music could be heard filtering up from every back
alley. During the 1968 Tet offensive, V.C. units attacked
downtown Saigon, overwhelming military police who did
not expect the vicious onslaught. The scene of Communist
units fighting in the city’s airport, a broadcasting
station, and even the U.S. Embassy played out on American
television—an ominous sign that the military effort
in Vietnam was heading for an ignoble end.
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Buddhism and Catholicism during
the war
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French missionaries first introduced Catholicism
to Vietnam in the 1600s, and by the 20th century
Vietnam was second only to the Philippines in
Asia when it came to numbers of Christian converts.
Many of the civil servants who served the French
for almost a century were Catholic, and the victory
of the Communist Viet Minh prompted a mass exodus
of Christians from the North in 1954.
Still, the vast majority of Vietnamese still
practiced some combination of Buddhism and Confucian
ancestor worship when South Vietnam elected it’s
first leader, the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1955.
Diem appointed mostly fellow Catholics to top
positions in his administration and the army,
but the real trouble began when he launched a
series of repressive actions against Buddhist
practices in the early 1960s.
When Diem banned the carrying of Buddhist prayer
flags in religious celebrations in 1963, protests
erupted in the central city of Hue in which police
killed nine demonstrators. In June of that year,
a Buddhist monk in Saigon set himself ablaze at
a busy intersection to protest the government
action. Photos of his self-sacrifice horrified
the world, and set off anti-war protests throughout
the South that resulted in the closure of many
pagodas.
The Buddhists continued their anti-war activities
after Diem’s assassination in 1963, and demonstrations
that began on the streets of Saigon spread to
the United States and beyond.
Though the monks’ influenced waned in later
years, the protests they began eventually helped
bring America’s direct involvement in the
conflict to an end.
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The end is near
Opposition to the Vietnam War increased at home, but
the U.S. continued to support Diem’s successor,
Nguyen Van Thieu, until President Nixon began the gradual
“Vietnamization” of the war through troop
rollbacks starting in 1969. When the United States pulled
out of Vietnam in 1973, it was only a matter of time
for the Southern regime. The G.I.s had pulled out of
a now-sprawling city of 3 million, leaving behind a
legacy of prostitution, drug abuse, and shantytowns
of those now unemployed. As the war drew to a close
and the Northern army rolled southward in the spring
of 1975, panic reached a fever pitch in Saigon.
The thousands of Vietnamese who had worked for the
Americans feared that they would be killed or tortured
by the invading troops. Saigonese, desperate to escape,
quickly swamped the American Embassy and Tan Son Nhat
airport as the world watched on television. The city
fell on April 30, 1975. For most Americans watching
at home, Saigon would forever be inextricably linked
with the image of sobbing women and children mobbing
the gates, begging to be let in as helicopters took
off from the embassy roof.
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