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of the war reveal Vietnamese determination. This war lasted from late 1945 to 1954. When
it ended, 50,000 French lives were lost and an additional 100,000 wounded. More than $2
billion was spent on the war. When the final battle at Dien Bien Phu was lost, France did
not concede defeat but insisted on a division of Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel lon-
gitude—Ho's regime in the North and a republican regime in the South. The southern Re-
public was headed by a President who had been educated by the French. Even at the outset,
the new southern Republic was in difficulty. Its President was a Catholic in an overwhelm-
ingly Buddhist country. And the division of Vietnam was to be only temporary. A referen-
dum was promised; the entire country was to vote and thus choose its form of government.
But there was a shadow over the future. This shadow was the refusal of the Republic of the
South, with its American backers, to permit a referendum. They knew that a referendum
would bring the entire country under Communist control.
THE AMERICAN WAR
Americans came to Vietnam in the context of the Cold War and with a conviction (“the
domino theory”) that if Vietnam succumbed to communism, all of Southeast Asia would
follow inexorably. Initially, under President John Kennedy, only supplies and American ad-
visors came to assist the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). As the ARVN faltered,
more Americans were posted to the Republic of Vietnam. Under President Lyndon John-
son, an alleged and unproven shooting incident in 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin produced a
Congressional Resolution granting war powers to the President, that is, to do what was ne-
cessary to win the war.
From that point, there was no turning back. The domino theory stood as one pillar of
the American war. The other was a widespread conviction that if the United States failed
to crush the Communists of the Hanoi regime, America would forfeit the respect and the
allegiance of democratic societies worldwide.
As the war proceeded, opposition grew, especially among draft-age American youth.
As the war continued, the presence of American troops in Vietnam escalated. And as the
war went forward, American strategy now tried to inflict damage on the North (through
bombs, defoliation of forests, and resettlement of villages) sufficient to bring the enemy to
the bargaining table. In the end, all such strategy failed. This policy failure is still being de-
bated in America today. Some argue that the war was lost because of domestic opposition.
Others suggest that the war was lost because the battlefront had no fixed lines of engage-
ment—the same village had to be recaptured over and over again. Others argue that the loss
came from America's failure to understand the culture of Vietnam. One such example was
the ill-fated policy to remove villagers to a new location, which disrupted the centuries-
long connection between families and their ancestors.
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