In order to have a respectable understanding of the Vietnam
War, we have to rewind all the way back to the late 1800s
when France was colonizing Southeast Asia.
And in particular, it colonized what is now Laos, Vietnam,
and Cambodia-- and they were collectively
called French Indochina.
You can see Cambodia here, Vietnam along the coast,
and then, Laos, right over here.
And France stayed the colonizing power--
I have a little gap in my timeline here--
and they stayed a colonizing power
all the way through World War II.
And so you can imagine, during World War II,
France was quickly overrun by the Germans.
The Vietnamese wanted their independence,
and so you have a liberation movement that rises up.
And it was led by the Viet Minh, and the Viet Minh
were led by Ho Chi Minh.
This right here is a picture of Ho Chi Minh.
And besides being a liberation movement,
they were also communist, which, you could imagine, later
on during the Cold War will kind of bias
the United States against them.
But you fast forward through World War II.
Eventually, the Japanese take control over Indochina,
over Vietnam.
But by the time '45 rolls around, or at least
the end of '45-- and we know that the United States defeats
Japan-- now, all of a sudden, the Viet Minh
are able to declare a somewhat temporary independence.
And it's temporary because shortly
after that-- and the region is occupied temporarily
by the Chinese in the north, and the British in the south, who
were part of the Allied forces against the Axis.
But eventually, you have the French coming back,
and they want to reassert their control
over their former colony.
And you have this war that develops-- the First Indochina
War between the French and the people
sympathetic to the French-- the Vietnamese
who were loyal to the French-- and the North.
And the French-- just to make it clear
how it sets up, at the end of World War II
when you had the temporary occupiers, the British
and the Chinese, the Chinese, obviously,
had more influence in the North.
The British had more influence in the South.
When the French come back they, essentially,
are able to reinstate control over the South.
So right when the Indochina War is beginning,
the French already have more control over the South.
And actually, historically the French
had more influence in the South, as well.
During French colonial rule it was really the southern third
of Vietnam where you had a lot of French influence.
And this is a current map, and the current map
does not have this orange boundary over here
that we'll talk about in a second.
Vietnam is now unified.
But before the Vietnam War, this was not Ho Chi Minh City,
this was Saigon.
And Saigon was kind of where most of the French control
was centered.
But you fast forward to 1954, this
ends up in a bit of a stalemate.
And so you have the Geneva Conference of 1954
that partitions Vietnam along the 17th parallel between North
Vietnam and South Vietnam.
And the whole point of this partition
was, really, to just allow for a cooling
off period, a period where you can have thing
settling down, and then having elections.
It wasn't meant to be a permanent partition.
But there was a 300-day period where
people could move across the partition.
And during that partition, you actually
had 900,000 people, mainly Catholics, move from the North
to South.
You also had several hundred thousand people
moving from the South to the North,
so it wasn't a one-way movement.
But net net, most of the movements by Roman Catholic
Vietnamese was from the North to the south.
You fast forward a little bit, you eventually have--
and I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation here--
Ngo Dinh Diem take control.
He starts off as prime minister in '54,
eventually he takes control, and becomes president in '55.
This is him right here.
He takes control of South Vietnam,
and this guy is not a big fan of things like elections,
or non-corrupt government, and all the rest.
And he takes control of South Vietnam.
But you could imagine that the United States is positively
inclined to him.
One, he dresses in nice Western suits and all of that,
and had nicely combed hair.
But he was also anti-communist.
And at this time period, the United States
is starting to think in terms of the Cold War.
And in terms of, how do we stop communism?
How do we contain it?
This whole theory of containment--
that the best way to stop the Soviet Union
is to just make sure that communism can not spread.
That it gets contained.
We have the domino theory in the United States
that if one country falls to communism in a region,
that the rest of the countries will eventually fall.
And that is not good for containment.
So we did not want South Vietnam to fall.
We essentially start supporting these characters over here.
And even from the early '50s, the United States
starts supporting the anti-communist.
And at first, this support, it's in the-- I
guess we should say-- the guise of advisers.
But these advisers-- one, we start
sending more and more aid, and more and more advisers.
And these advisers started getting more and more involved
in the actual conflict.
And so after this partition, you can imagine,
that you still have an ongoing conflict
between the North and the South.
And on top of that, you have actors
who are sympathetic to the North,
sympathetic to the Viet Minh, sympathetic to Ho Chi Minh,
in the South.
Some of them were in the North, they come back to the South.
Some of them were just in the South.
And they did not like the Diem government.
Besides just being sympathetic to Ho Chi Minh,
Diem was a fairly corrupt autocratic ruler,
who wasn't a big fan of democracy.
And so these players in the South
who started to rise up against President Diem or the Viet
Cong.
And so this really sets up what the Vietnam War is all about.
You have the communist Ho Chi Minh-controlled North
that was fighting a conventional war against the South.
You have this partition on the 17th parallel.
And on top of that, you have an unconventional fighting force--
I guess you'd call them guerrillas--
in the South of Vietnam called the Viet Cong.
So it was, kind of, a double-- There were two things
that the South had to fight against-- the North officially,
and also this insurrection that was occurring within the South.
And so the whole time the United States did not
want this insurrection to succeed-- they did not
want all of Vietnam to become communist.
We keep sending more and more advisers.
It actually started even before Kennedy,
but Kennedy he starts sending-- he escalates
the number of advisers that gets sent.
It's still not, at this point, it's still not a formal war.
We haven't officially declared-- where
we don't have, officially, soldiers in battle.
You fast forward to 1963, besides all
of the great characteristics of Diem that I already mentioned,
he also was into persecuting Buddhists.
So to make matters worse, not only was he corrupt,
not only did he not like elections,
but he liked persecuting his own people.
And by 1963, this kind of got out
of hand, his level of persecution of the Buddhists.
He started toward storming temples, and all the rest.
And so he was assassinated.
And not only was he assassinated,
it kind of leaves this power vacuum,
and you have all these people jockeying for control,
none of these really especially savory characters
inside the South.
These two guys eventually come to power, Nguyen Cao Ky
and Nguyen Van Thieu.
Wait a few years, Nguyen Van Thieu
is able to get this guy out of the picture.
And then by 1967-- I don't have it
over here-- you have Thieu has now taken control.
But during that period-- or actually,
before Ky and Thieu take power-- in 1964,
you have one of the shadiest incidents in American history.
As you can imagine, we, in our function as advisors,
we had sent ships into the Gulf of Tonkin, right off
of the coast of North Vietnam.
So the original story goes-- and this
is a very suspect original story-- in 1964,
the US Maddox-- and this is the original story-- claimed
to that it was attacked, or it was
claimed that the US Maddox was attacked
by North Vietnamese patrol boats,
and that there was a little skirmish-- there
was an exchange of fire.
And it was also claimed that a few days later another boat
in the Gulf of Tonkin, another US vessel,
was attacked by a North Vietnamese boat.
That was the original story.
This angered Congress, this angered the American people.
How dare they attack ships that are sitting off of the coast,
warships that are sitting off the coast.
And so this kind of gave the emotional fuel
to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
So these incidents, or these purported incidents-- this,
kind of, attack on the USS Maddox,
and this other thing that might have happened-- these
were called the Gulf of Tonkin Incidents.
This angered Congress, angered the American people,
so we passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,
and what's relevant about it is that it gave LBJ, here,
it gave him the authority to officially
engage in a war in Vietnam, to officially escalate it
to an actual war that the US was involved in.
And this whole time I've been saying it's
shady, because it's now been shown
that one, the Gulf of Tonkin-- well it's not clear
that really anything happened.
There might have been some firing from the USS Maddox.
They might have actually engaged the North Vietnamese patrol
boats.
The other possibility that might have happened
is that nothing happened.
But any way you look at it, it's now been fairly established
that it was not a real incident.
It was not really North Vietnam attacking the United States.
But it was relevant because it really escalated the war.
So now you have Johnson-- did I say North Korea originally?
I apologize for that.
We're talking about North Vietnam.
I don't remember what my brain actually said.
Of course, North Vietnam.
But it gave Johnson the power to escalate the war.
And so his administration is really
the heart of the Vietnam War, when
the war was really escalated.
We eventually get to 500,000 US troops.
But the whole time this is happening, you can imagine,
Johnson and the American military leaders in Vietnam
are telling the American people, oh, we're fighting communism.
We're about to win.
This is a noble war.
And you fast forward, and especially,
the part about to win-- you fast forward to 1968,
and all of a sudden you have the Viet Cong, who
the American leaders have told the American people
and the Congress, that they're about to be defeated,
and then in 1968, the Viet Cong orchestrate the Tet Offensive,
which is this massive coordinated attack
on a bunch of targets throughout South Vietnam.
And so even though it was wasn't completely successful
militarily, the intent of the Tet Offensive
was to completely turn the tides in the war.
It made the American people and the Congress
rightfully suspicious.
You, Mr. Johnson, you had told us
that we were about to win the war,
and the Viet Cong were almost defeated, and all of a sudden,
they orchestrate this sophisticated attack on us.
It rightfully made the American public suspicious.
On top of that, and this probably made matters
a lot worse, the My Lai Massacre comes out.
And in every war there are massacres,
but the United States, at least believes,
that its soldiers can kind of take the high road.
They don't engage in these type of things.
But the My Lai Massacre showed that, really, no soldiers
are immune to massacres.
And this is really a disgusting massacre,
and it was documented.
And if you really want to be disturbed,
do a Google search for images of the My Lai Massacre.
It will ruin your weekend.
It'll depress you.
It's US soldiers killing a village of innocent women
and children.
There's pictures of dead babies.
It's horrible, and to make matters worse--
or even, add insult to injury-- the soldiers who committed
it-- there was actually a few who
tried to defend the villagers and when they came back,
they were treated almost like traitors.
But the soldiers who actually did the attack, only one
of them got jail time and it was only a couple years of jail
time, and this was for massacring
a village of women and children.
So already, you had the Tet Offensive.
It makes the American public suspicious
of whether we can even win this war.
Then you have the My Lai Massacre,
which just disgusts the public, and makes
people realize that we're involved in a war
that it's not even clear who are the good guys anymore, not even
clear what the real goals are.
Make matters worse, you fast forward to 1971.
The Pentagon Papers get leaked to the New York Times.
And these pretty much articulate--
it's a classified document that articulates
that the leadership, the military and non-military
leadership of the Vietnam War, was, to some degree,
lying to Congress and the American people.
It was lying about how the war was going.
It was lying about what activities it was doing.
It did not tell the American people and Congress
that it was actually engaged in war in Laos and Cambodia.
And a lot of the reason why we were engaged
in Laos and Cambodia is because that's
where the supply routes were between the North
and the South-- they ran through Laos and Cambodia.
And the most famous of them, and you might have heard of it,
is the Ho Chi Minh trail.
And it wasn't just one trail, it was actually
a network of trails.
And so a lot of the activity that
was going on in Laos and Cambodia
was, kind of, carpet bombing of what the US thought were
some of these supply routes.
And we never really got a good-- well,
that's a whole other debate.
But it wasn't just one trail the was easily bombed.
It was all of these little foot paths
and all of these other things, where
arms were able to be transported from the North to the South.
But the Pentagon Papers, rightfully,
made the American people even more suspicious.
And then now we're entering into Nixon's administration,
and he was still doing the carpet bombing, still
atrocities going on, but he, his whole goal
was to kind of wind down the war,
bring the troops out on a timetable without, kind of,
an unofficial defeat.
So you fast forward to 1973, you have the Paris Peace Accords,
where officially there is peace between the North, the South,
the North, and the Americans.
You can imagine it from the North's point of view,
they're like, sure, we'll sign some peace accords.
It'll just make the Americans go away,
once the Americans go away they won't
be able to come back, since this was such
a hugely unpopular war.
It was such a waste for America on so many dimensions.
Especially, America's prestige as a global actor.
We'll just wait for them to leave,
and then we can overrun the South after that.
And that's essentially what happens.
In 1975, the North just overruns the South,
and then later that year, you have
Saigon falling to the North.
And then it becomes Ho Chi Minh City.
And just this whole period, you have
President Thieu is in power, and just to show
where his priorities are-- near the end,
right when the North is falling to South Vietnam--
and you can kind of see the writing
on the wall-- he gives a speech to the Vietnamese people saying
that he'll never desert them.
But then when it becomes pretty clear
that Saigon is going to fall to the North Vietnamese,
he gets on a big US transport plane
with, literally, 15 tons of luggage.
I'll let you think about how much luggage that is.
And $15 million worth of gold, and this is $15 million
worth of gold in 1975.
So you can imagine how much he really
cared about the Vietnamese people.
And he eventually ends up settling in Massachusetts.
And he died there about 10 years ago.
So you could imagine, this was an ugly incident for the world.
A super ugly incident for the Vietnamese people.
A super ugly chapter in American history.
It was the first war that one, America lost,
but more, it hurts prestige, it hurts America's ability
to influence what was going on in other parts of the world.
You had the containment theory, that we
have to stop communism from spreading.
And the domino theory, that if one country
would fall to communism then the other ones were.
That didn't happen.
The South did fall, but we didn't
have the rest of Southeast Asia falling to communism.
So it kind of disproved the domino theory,
especially because after the Vietnam War
the United States would not be able to enter
another war like it for some time,
because the American people wouldn't let it happen.
So to some degree, it would have been easier for communism
to spread, because people would have
known that the US couldn't engage it.
But despite that, the domino theory didn't happen.
But it was just all-around ugly.
I mean, besides the massacres, and the raping,
and the pillaging of innocence that happened on, really,
on all sides of this, you have 1 to 3 million Vietnamese--
and no one will really know the actual count--
but that's a huge number.
1 to 3 million Vietnamese were killed.
You have 58,000 American troops being killed.
And you have hundreds of thousands
of Cambodians and Laotions who are never really formally
involved in the war, they were killed.
Especially, due to a lot of this carpet bombing campaign.
So these are just atrocious numbers, and really one
of the worst and ugliest chapters in US history.