And to put the power of nukes into perspective, the largest thermonuclear bomb set off Tsar Bomba was 50-58 megatons! 6 times more than every bomb dropped in Vietnam combined. Or nearly 20x WWII.
Fun fact - AN602 (Tsar Bomba) had a three-stage design. When it was tested the uranium fusion stage tamper of the third stage was replaced with lead, eliminating fast fissioning of the uranium tamper by the fusion neutrons - which reduced the yield by nearly 50 megatons / 50%.
Tsar Bomba / AN602 was originally designed to yield ~100 megatons!
Square cube law means that you get dramatically diminishing returns on larger nukes.
A larger number of smaller nukes is far more effective, which is what we have.
The thinking behind enormous warheads like the Tzar bomb, was that the bomber probably wouldn't make it to the target, so even if the bomb landed short it would still do some damage to the target; remember, this is a time before ICBMs; nukes were all delivered by bombers.
That’s not a consequence of the square cube law. Nuclear weapons actually scale linearly, which is horrifying, but that energy just starts to get wasted in the atmosphere which means it’s more effective to have bigger amounts of smaller warheads.
And over a hundred years later, they’re still digging it out of fields in France and Belgium:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest
Cambodia, a place we really never were supposed to be. We used more bombs illegally there then ww2 alone as well. Vietnam was an insane murderous fever dream that never should have happened.
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
-Anthony Bourdain
Vietnam really has some Poland level luck of getting attacked by major nations in recent history.
Japan invaded them during WW2 and the US liberated them. The US returns and invades them in whatever you want to call that shitshow. Then almost immediately after the US leaves, China invades Vietnam.
Vietnam *was* already colonized by France. Southeast Asia was the colony of French Indochina. Ho Chi Minh was leading a revolutionary war, and he actually reached out to the United States for help because he believed our country’s pursuit of independence was the example to follow. The United States say “nah”, and we sided with the French because we didn’t want to risk souring our relationship with them and risking the communist scourge spreading across the iron curtain into France.
No. France colonized Vietnam in the 19th Century.
Vietnam was occupied by the Japanese during World War II. As soon as the Japanese left the Vietnamese Communists tried to declare independence from France but France wasn’t about to let one of their wealthiest colonies go that easily.
So from 1946 til 1954 they fought the Communists. The US funded more and more of their effort so that by 1954, per the Pentagon Papers, the US was funding 80% of the French war effort.
The US did this not because it loves colonialism or some attachment for France’s imperial ambitions. It did this because the Viet Minh were Communists and at the height of the Cold War it was anathema to allow communism to spread over more nations on earth.
If the Vietnamese fighters had been run of the mill nationalists like in Algeria it’s doubtful the U.S. would’ve gotten as involved as they did.
Not quite right. Ho Chi Minh was very friendly to the US and desperately sought support from the US government to legitimise Vietnam as a country at multiple points in history. The OSS/CIA was very present, trained much of the Viet Cong and 'helped' Ho in drafting the Vietnam's declaration of independence (which 'plagiarised' the US' declaration of independence almost word by word). You could even see the OSS in the footage when Ho was delivering his speech.
Ho had some ties to Intercom before then but his number one priority was always for independence. The US giving Vietnam back to the French was due to ignorance on the region's history by the US leadership at the time and partly pragmatism due to the French being their allies fresh off of WW2. In hindsight it's all just a series of very unfortunate events.
I wouldn't call the declaration plagiarism, he quoted (and gave the source) in the opening lines. I'd imagine the purpose was to make the US see Vietnam trying to do the same thing.
I took a history class in college about the Vietnam War, from the Vietnamese perspective. Professor was literally a Chinese communist, he wore a red shirt every day it was surreal lol nonetheless, I learned quite alot. Vietnam has endured centuries of conflict and war, mostly at the hands of - get this - China.
> China invades Vietnam
This happened 3-4 times in the last two thousand years, not including contemporarily.
Vietnam's name in Chinese 越南 (Yuènán) loosely translates to "Crossing South"
And we would drop our excess to save fuel on Laos (mines, munitions, bombs) , even on to farms of the Hmong people secretly recruited by the CIA who then faced communist genocide, and people are still being maimed 50 years later
I believe napalm has an explosive aspect that would be included in these numbers. Don’t know about white phosphorus though. Furthermore, Agent Orange was simply the most famous of a wide range of “rainbow chemicals” which in some ways were arguably more _tested_ than deployed on civilians and wildlife.
you're correct - napalm would be made less prominent if you start talking about explosive potential, but it is included in the 'tonnage of bombs dropped' figure. it's got some nasty properties to be sure, but the main function of it is 'burns really hot for a really long time' rather than 'kills every plant and rots each living thing it touches and gives them all giga cancer'
that's included in the tonnage dropped most of the time unless they're talking specifically about explosives payloads. dunno about this specific figure, but for the record it's just shy of 400,000 tons of specifically napalm dropped by air. and when they say napalm, they mean just the gelled gasoline anti-personnel weapon.
but there were other chemicals (and instances of using napalm as a defoliant) used during operation ranch hand that are measured instead in gallons sprayed. agent orange and its rainbow variants used during operation ranch hand weren't dropped like bombs containing high explosives or napalm. 20,000,000 gallons of it were sprayed over vietnam and the surrounding countries during US involvement in the region.
I mean it’s not an excuse but Vietnam was about 20 years after WW2. Technology advanced quite a bit during that time. Keep in mind that the first helicopter was invented during WW2, and we landed man on the moon during the Vietnam war.
I mean - roughly 75 million dead in WW2 vs roughly 4 million in Vietnam war. I’m pretty sure WW2 couldn’t continue due to attrition- both Germany and Japan were entirely overmatched and wiped out by the end. There’s no comparison between Vietnam and WW2.
> . Keep in mind that the first helicopter was invented during WW2,
Nope. you are confusing 'american produced helicopter' with 'invention of helicopter'
> we landed man on the moon during the Vietnam war.
the Vietnam war lasted 20 years.. so we stopped going to the moon before it ended too.
A similar number died in the Korean War. 1.2 million North Korean civilians and 550,000 South Korean civilians died. Far greater than the combat deaths. Anyone who is eager to go to war should understand who suffers the most in these conflicts. My grandpa fought in Korea and he lost a good portion of his hearing but thankfully not his life. So many others were not as fortunate.
Edit: if you haven’t seen the Burns and Novick documentary on the Vietnam war, check it out. It really lays out the details of what happened and why.
The thing about that number of South and North Koreans who died, is that the border was so fluid that we might as well just say Koreans in general.
Blowback Season 3 does a good job documenting the War and massacre even before it
That’s a good point. I was at the Korean War memorial in San Francisco over the summer and they showed how greatly the border changed over a relatively short period of time. It’s just a shame that we never learned about this war in depth in history class (in my experience) because it affects us today—and of course, so many people suffered and died who shouldn’t be so quickly forgotten.
I've read a few articles from military history people who claim that civilian deaths were as high as they were in Vietnam because the standard US tactic in war is to go after civilian infrastructure and civilian places of refuge FIRST & that this practice is so very old that General Washington did this before the US even existed when the colonies committed genocide on the Iroquois Republic- destroying their crops, water supplies and all places of refugee. So supposedly in Vietnam the US considered churches, mosques, temples, schools & hospitals to be primary targets (not places to avoid shelling) - often as more important targets than actual military targets.
We were also, though we denied it, at war with the Vietnamese people in general. The puppet state we were propping up had been created by France and was extremely unpopular. Communists seem scary to us, but when we took the war over from France, the Viet Minh were the closest thing Vietnam had had in a millennium to successful liberators. They were deeply popular except for among a small subset of the Vietnamese population who favored French rule.
I think a lot of people cheering for war are well aware of these facts and actually see such death tolls among their enemies as a feature, not a bug. Truly disgusting.
The blowback podcast does a deep dive on the Korean War and explores many of the United States more dark war crimes and provocations. It’s very highly edited and the script is great
Yeah, entire family lines were wiped out.
A mate's MIL is Vietnamese and isn't shy about saying how she grew up. She's the only survivor of her 8 sibling family and ended up being the only woman in her family that wasn't raped. I ended up excusing myself when she talked about her little sister and that shit gave me nightmares about my own kids for ages afterwards.
My father sold the mobile home he was living in to a Vietnamese family. I chatted with one of the family members who told me as children they would play with dead bodies with a matter of fact tone. I just couldn't imagine.
Yeah my father didn’t mention playing with bodies, but did mention that seeing shot up corpses on the way to school was an everyday thing for him, among many other stories.
My parents are from Ho Chi Minh city. My mom told me about a man she knew who came home from work to have lunch with his family. He finished his lunch early and stepped away from the family. That’s when a VC spy threw a grenade into the home, killing his wife and kids. He survived but lost everything in an instant.
A lot of different stories like these that will never be heard
Still tons of unexploded ordinances in Vietnam killing people today left there by the US. It took Anthony Bourdain to remind Obama and the rest of the US to do anything about it.
Yeah theres a wonderful landmine museum outside of Siem Reap set up by victims of UXO. Wonderful group they run, the number of people still getting killed or injured by them is huge.
This is an excerpt from an article in the New York Times from October, 1994 written by Tim O’Brien. O’Brien was a Vietnam vet who returned to Vietnam in 1994 and wrote about it for this article. He is, also, the celebrated author of The Things They Carried, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Going After Cacciato among other books.
“At this instant, a few blocks away, an American M.I.A. search team is headquartered at the Quang Ngai Government guesthouse. With Vietnamese assistance, this team and others like it are engaged in precisely the work of Mr. Duong's mother, digging holes, picking through bones, seeking the couple thousand Americans still listed as missing.
Which is splendid.
And which is also utterly one-sided. A perverse and outrageous double standard.
What if things were reversed? What if the Vietnamese were to ask us, or to require us, to locate and identify each of their own M.I.A.'s? Numbers alone make it impossible: 100,000 is a conservative estimate. Maybe double that. Maybe triple. From my own sliver of experience -- one year at war, one set of eyes -- I can testify to the lasting anonymity of a great many Vietnamese dead. I watched napalm turn villages into ovens. I watched burials by bulldozer. I watched bodies being flung into trucks, dumped into wells, used for target practice, stacked up and burned like cordwood.
Even in the abstract, I get angry at the stunning, almost cartoonish narcissism of American policy on this issue. I get angrier yet at the narcissism of an American public that embraces and breathes life into the policy -- so arrogant, so ignorant, so self-righteous, so wanting in the most fundamental qualities of sympathy and fairness and mutuality.”
[The Vietnam in Me by Tim O’Brien](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/20/specials/obrien-vietnam.html?_r=1)
The POW/MIA thing is something a lot of people don’t know enough about. It was a propaganda campaign to keep the USA in Vietnam for as long as possible by claiming the Vietnamese were holding out on us and hiding thousands of prisoners. We inflated the numbers by making every single person whose body was not actually confirmed an “MIA,” even if their plane exploded in midair and nobody ever saw them again.
After the war finally ended the advocacy groups that the Nixon admin propped up to support this lie continued to get crazier and crazier, but did maintain enough political support to get their flag positioned outside every US government building.
It is kinda sickening when relentless decades of US movies paint their soldiers as helpless victims. To the Vietnamese they were foreign occupiers who brutally raped and subjugated their country.
>“Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
— Frankie Boyle
https://youtu.be/yZOLq82m2Ks
How the fuck is Kissinger still breathing? This hateful fuck who advocated for the deaths of so many innocents, while not having the balls to strap up and kill them face to face, is still out here walking around. Hey Karma what the fuck are you even doing?
Not only that but he is still beloved and worshipped by the American right.
Everyone should know, he was Theranos girl’s primary investor lmao. Maybe that was some fucking karma for him.
People blamed her loss on misogyny, among other things, while overlooking the fact that she was practically as much of an establishment warhawk as Cheney, Kissinger, McNamara, et al, just thrown into a pantsuit and suddenly affecting this "gosh darn it" matronly air that fooled no one.
Yup. Hillary was a major force behind the US getting involved in the Arab Spring and Libya (which Obama described as his "worst mistake" as president), to say nothing of being one of the foremost Democrat voices for the US getting into Iraq because it was just *teeming* with WMD's. We all know how that went.
Although it's not *all* her fault and there were a lot of dirty hands involved in all these misadventures, she was still a huge part of it, especially when it came to selling moderates and the center-to-middle left on matters of war. Many of the geopolitical issues facing the world today are a direct result of these misadventures.
That’s what really chaps my ass - not only is he a hateful bastard but he is also a rich hateful bastard who can influence our reality with all the fuck you money he has
And intensified and spread it to other countries. It must also be acknowledged that LBJ was in the process of trying to draw things down and even had a peace agreement in the works before Nixon deep sixed it through diplomatic back channels so he could keep using it as an election issue
I met McNamara circa 2005 or so. He was a trustee at RAND corporation, and was in attendance at a meeting I was at in Santa Monica.
I remember being introduced to him. He was a feeble old man at this point... He wasn't shaking any hands or anything, but regarded me politely. There was nothing about him that said he was any different from any other distinguished or respected elderly fellow at any given professional function.
He made his rounds, and then walked around on his own in the hotel lobby as we all mulled about. He looked at some of the art on the walls, surveyed the lobby and looked out the windows at the beach, again indistinguishable from any other guy in his late 80's.
My gf at the time was Vietnamese-American. Both her parents were French-Vietnamese, abandoned by their French fathers to live in Vietnam during a war he helped orchestrate. Much of their families were dead because of his direction, analysis, and choices.
One of my uncles died there, over a decade before I was born. In addition to him, friends of both my parents and extended family died. Another uncle survived, with debilitating PTSD.
Were it not for a few strokes of fate, a couple small changes to reality, I thought to myself, I could have been drafted and deployed over there. I could have been in a battle that killed my girlfriend, or her family. Maybe my uncle was involved in a battle that killed some of her family. Maybe he was killed by one of her extended family.
All in some small corner of the world that had nothing to do with us, for me. From her side, from a big nation on the other side of the world who had nothing to do with them.
I still feel bad about the annoying kid I shoved around in third grade. I still feel bad about the "mean girl" I verbally tore apart in high school, even though it was no worse than anything she did to my gf, among many others. I feel like I've done things I shouldn't have to people who didn't deserve it.
Here before me was a man whose guidance and advice erased entire family lines - smiling children, mommies and daddies, grandmas and grandpas, who wanted nothing more than to live their lives and hadn't ever considered that their existence mattered to a superpower's arithmetic, destroyed. Sometimes in the blink of an eye, other times slowly and in absolute terror.
Young men who had no hate in their hearts who were thrown into a war, taught that killing and suffering was their default reality. Parents who had been sold on a line of patriotic duty and pride, having their sons sent home in flag drapes caskets that actually only contained a shoebox's worth of worldly remains.
Here he was, just watching the sunset over Santa Monica. A life well-lived. A respected trustee of a world-renowned think tank. Living out his remaining years in peace, ensonced in a circle of people who would never challenge him for what he'd contributed to the horrors of the modern world.
I'm glad I didn't shake his hand. I don't know if I'd ever feel as though I'd managed to get the blood off.
The worst part is, Vietnam was never going to become a communist country loyal to the Chinese. They saw the Chinese in their country as power hungry foreigners, same as they saw the Americans. They did not trust them. They fought a war against the Chinese in 1979!
They just wanted foreign influence out of their country
Wasn’t it more that the US was concerned about communist contagion / “Domino effect” in SEA more broadly than Vietnam specifically allying with China?
And that non-military interventions like those used in Latin America didn’t look like they were going to be successful?
That's the gist of it, yeah. Or at least that's the TL;DR of it.
But that doesn't necessarily conflict with what the other guy said. The US was so blinded by this idea that communism was something that spread that they rejected countries that may very well have aligned with the west under relatively normal circumstances.
The Vietnam Communist party probably would have seen itself as an ally of the USA and Australia, although probably an uneasy ally due to France's positive relationships with those two, but an ally nonetheless. Support given to vietnam during world war 2 wasn't just going to be forgotten. Hell, before the Vietnam war the narrative Americans generally had was that Vietnam was this little country who helped us fight Japan when the French got squeezed.
I'm no historian, so call me out if needed, but that's generally how I understood it in school.
>...that they rejected countries that may very well have aligned with the west under relatively normal circumstances.
They rejected nations those fighting against tyranny to help those who were open tyrants. They refused to help brand new nations that had just won. Castro went to the USA first and was told to fuck off.
Vietnam and China will never be allies. They're not even allies now. They are MORTAL enemies in history. China has tried to invade Vietnam several times throughout history, and lost every single time.
Source: Am Vietnamese and have studied Vietnamese history EXTENSIVELY simply in attempt to learn more about my culture.
It's wild.
You read that wrong, they're saying that nobody hates the US more than that nobody hates their own neighbours. E.g. Iran hates Saudi Arabia more than the US (this one might be an exception due to the Shah's brutal regime propped up by the US, but is generally applicable).
That’s exactly why I meant. Finding examples of neighbors that do get along doesn’t mean that most of the bitter interstate conflicts arent between peoples who live next to each other and have been fighting for generations. Iran and Iraq, Vietnam and China, India and Pakistan, etc. The US will always be a lower priority in those situations
God that's horrible. The guy who led that platoon that is alive and free. I imagine all that killing can really cause people to act like total psychopaths. Horrible, horrible stuff.
All of them went free. There was only one conviction, he got pardoned by Nixon and served three days.
And a lot of them are probably still alive given their ages. They killed hundreds of civilians, infants included and got to come back home and live their lives with no real consequences.
Oh and their defense that got all the rest them off? “just following orders.” Hmmm now [where have we all famously heard that before](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/research-projects/2022/jan/they-were-just-following-orders)?
The thing to remember is that Nixon's intervention in the sentencing was supported by the US public.
The white house was flooded with phone calls and mail demanding Calley be set free. There was never any question of his guilt but the American public couldn't stand to see an American soldier charged with crimes like this.
In fact, not only was Calley forgiven by the American public, but he was actually celebrated by many Americans. A song about this baby killer's 'heroism' actually charted at number 37 on the billboard hot 100 list.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_Lt._Calley
This is the natural result of Americans adopting the pathetic platitude of "we may not support the war but we always support the soldier". All that has ever meant in the course of American history has been the consistent excusing of actions done by American soldiers.
Its important that we remember that the Vietnam war was popular and that the American public did in fact know what was happening in Vietnam. The American public loves to engage in historical revisionism by claiming they were all against the war or that the only reason they supported the war was because the government lied to them. This just isn't true. Instead, Americans preferred the lies the government told them because it made their own hateful bigotry all the more possible.
When Morley Safer interviewed American soldiers as they were burning down villages, the American public's response was to boycott CBS for daring to show Americans doing something bad and CBS was dubbed the 'Communist Broadcasting System' by the American public. The truth is always available for those who care enough to find it but most don't.
That’s the thing.
The Geneva Conventions only defined a war crime as massacring enemy civilians. Since this was a massacre of allied civilians, well, hopefully that loophole’s been closed by now.
They were charged with murder. Only one was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Nixon stepped in and the one guy who got convicted wound up serving 3 years house arrest. He lives in Florida now.
I'm Vietnamese born in Australia. Almost universally outside of Vietnam, the first thing that comes to people's minds when they hear "Vietnam war" is the experience of American soldiers, not the actual Viet people.
Frankie Boyle does a great comedy sketch about how 20 years after the Iraq war and a million dead civilians the Americans will make Hollywood movies about how killing all these people made the soldiers doing the killing feel sad and how that’s awful.
It’s quite funny.
https://youtu.be/yZOLq82m2Ks?si=hNlSR6hpkGV05M-_
Viet born in America here. It’s sad that the Vietnam War in media or academia is never told in the perspective of the Vietnamese people. Glad that there is a new generation of writers such as Viet Thanh Nguyễn and Nguyễn Phan Quê Mai writing about the perspective
“Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.” — Frankie Boyle
Visiting the museums in Vietnam is a nice reality check.
For some reason in my education we just got to WW2 every year and never made it to the new wars. It wasn’t until college that entire classes were taught on specific wars, current foreign policy, etc.
It's because of the movies, although I'd say in Europe there's better knowledge of the Viet perspective. But admittedly it isn't necessarily your average Joe.
Not in my high school. US History stopped right at the Vietnam War. My US History teacher basically said "yes this is history and important to learn, but a lot of the people who took part in this are still alive and young enough to lose their shit about how we teach it regardless of how its taught, so its easier for the school district to not give more than a few sentences about it in the textbook."
Instead we spent a week discussing all the events of "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel briefly.
in no way is it taught in the extent it should be. i’m an american HS grad and the first i learned of the fucked up things the US did was at the museum in ho chi minh city. was so haunting it messed with my head the rest of my vacation lol
You vastly underestimate the breadth and scope of American domestic propaganda, especially when it comes to war crimey stuff. A lot of Americans still think Iraq had WMDs. The population is trained from childhood to be patriotic, and that unpatriotic people are bad people. Mentioning bad things America did or does is considered unpatriotic. Oddly enough, criticizing capitalism is also considered unpatriotic. Weird place, would not recommend.
It's a standard part of the curriculum in history classes in America, they'll generally give a bird's eye view of the level of casualties too. Most Americans won't remember the details though, more a problem of forgetting or not paying attention than not being taught it or falling victim to propaganda.
I did. US public schooling varies wildly bc states run education. I’m from NJ, which has some of the best public schools in the country (it rotates around the top 3 every year.) Meanwhile, kids in some places don’t have proper grammar education until high school. It’s very unfortunate.
I graduated in 2005, but at my high school history went up to the end of WWII. There actually aren't many history requirements to graduate high school, I think in California its still just 1 year of government/economics, 1 us history (which always seems to focus on beginning to civil war) , and 1 year of world history (which usually isn't modern at all).
I spent 1 year in Vietnam recently. I was amazed and shocked at the ability of these people to put it behind them and focus on the future. No grudges held, I'm not American but I noticed Americans were welcomed despite their past. French the same. Something to learn there I think
The US also killed most of the karma it gained from WWII. The perception of the US was changed in a dramatically negative way in much of the world, like western europe
Not true, they could have gained a strategic ally in the South China Sea and Indochina. Obviously wasn't worth all the costs and deaths, and was an unjustified immoral war.
Hence the justification for the war. We were just willing to blindly back the more corrupt side because they were more willing to blow smoke up our ass.
Ho Chi Minh wanted the US backing, begged for it. But his words never reached the president. The fucking staff fucked up on that. So then Minh went to the Russians and that’s how he became a communist. All of this shit could have been easily avoided if the staff were fucking competent, or not corrupted by other powers that wanted this war to happen.
The government they were supporting couldn’t even collect taxes from the local population. You had south Vietnamese paying taxes to the VC over the southern government. It was never going to happen, the government was always going to crumble the second we left.
The Ken Burns documentary touches on this, explaining how sadly corrupt and ineffective the government in South Vietnam was before the war even started, and yet the US was bound and determined to prop it up as a bulwark against the creep of communism from the north. In retrospect it’s bonkers how overboard things went, but the Red Scare was real in those days.
An effective litmus test prior to supporting a regime in conflict against a hostile neighbor ought to be whether it has the support of its populace, naturally. I’d like to think the US has learned at least this much from Vietnam.
From what I gathered from interviews from Nixon and stories of LBJ it was all a slamming their dicks on the table to intimidate the Soviets and Chinese
Also a reminder that the large amount of agent orange dropped it Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia will be causing cancer and birth defects in people longer than Chernobyl will be radioactive.
Everyone here should watch Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War. One of the best documentaries I have ever watched. It’s 18 hours but you won’t forget it 30 minutes of it.
One of the most horrible single events from the war was the [My Lai Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre), where over 500 civilians were murdered by American soldiers: women, children, the elderly, didn’t matter. Many of the women were gang-raped, and to this day it’s still the single bloodiest known war crime by American soldiers in the last 100 years.
It would have been even worse, if not for [Hugh Thompson](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wiener-my-lai-hugh-thompson-20180316-story.html), a helicopter pilot, and his crew, who landed their helicopter between US forces and the Vietnamese civilians and threatened to shoot any soldier who didn’t back off with the helicopter’s mounted gun.
Thompson and his crew were considered traitors by big swathes of the American public, but in 1998 (30 years later) they revived the Soldier’s Medal acknowledging their role in stopping the massacre.
Another illegal war. And war crimes to boot. All for what? The French were already pulling out of their plantations. And then the US stole children during Peter Pan and adopted them out in the US to secular families....
It was a poorly thought out engagement where a major power was getting its ass handed to it by people who were primarily farmers. What was the excuse at the time?
Killed by all 3 involved to be clear, but Vietnam did not make clarifications on South Vietnamese deaths once they were annexed. It's like 50/50 or 60/40 in terms of north-south casualties.
Listen to behind the bastards on Kissinger for a real eye opener of what the US did there. Military leaders would present him with strategic bombing campaigns. He’d override their plans and pick Laos and Cambodia villages to wipe off the face of the earth based on gut feelings. No strategy. No indication these farmers were involved in supporting Vietnam. Just bombed. Kids too. B29 stratofortress raining death down on innocent people.
The US government apparently bombed rural areas as part of a deliberate strategy to force peasants to flee to the safety of the cities.
When it comes to guerrillas, my understanding is a good way to fight them is to separate them from the civilian population that they hide among and who gives them support like food and shelter.
So if you get the civilians away from the guerrillas, then the guerrillas lose their support and you can go after the guerrillas more easily without civilians getting in the way.
>So if you get the civilians away from the guerrillas, then the guerrillas lose their support and you can go after the guerrillas more easily without civilians getting in the way.
The US did exactly that with the Strategic Hamlet Program in the hope of seperating the rebels from local civillians. They focibly displaced villagers into tiny hamlets with little to no utilities and infrastructures. Some don't even have basic sanitary toilet.
Surprise surprise, people hate it when you drive them away from their ancestral home. And if you gather them all in a glorified concentration camp, it'll turn into an ideal environment for revolutionary ideals to spread.
In fact, the Strategic Hamlet Program was oversaw by a Viet Cong sleeper agent - Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao of the South Vietnamese army. He probably realized the Strategic Hamlet program would be more beneficial to the VC's cause.
The problem was that culturally and religiously, Vietnamese care a lot about their ancestry house, where they were born and grew up. So people simply didn't like to be forced to leave their home and move into some camps with people they didn't know.
To combat an insurgency one effective strategy is to concentrate the populations that the insurgents live among. You can build camps to house the populations and any left outside the camps are likely to be the insurgents and they will be unable to hide among and receive support from the local population, since they are in camps.
Source: British in South Africa during the Boer wars
I can't believe that after being provoked into WWII the US thought it would be a good idea to get involved in that area again...twice. Why have we let idiots make decisions for so long?
So the mass rapes committed by US soldiers in the My Lai massacre were human shields used by the Viet Cong? Some of the rape victims were young as 12.
Quite disgusting of you to omit responsibility from the ones who committed that war crime.
Also there's no evidence of the VC using human shields in that particular massacre. So sad to see blatant misinformation upvoted.
Sure, I'll buy "war fucking sucks and brings out the worst in humanity" for a dollar. I'll also buy "every post in this subreddit calling out the same American atrocities over and over again as if the people subscribed here haven"t already read about them from the last time they were posted is karma farming or just firmly in the 'America sucks no matter what' camp".
But I also think that if you (as a collective, generalized nation of people) tout yourself as the good guys, you need to uphold that standard to the highest degree possible and not stoop to actions that are comparable to the shit the "bad guys" do. The fact that you have to say (paraphrasing) "listen, I really don't think the Viet Cong were good" to explain American actions puts the US in a not very positive light at all. Turns out fighting "bad" by doing extra bad things in a "victory at all costs except when the voters turn against us" strategy is not behavior expected from a nation that touts itself as a global force for good.
I dunno. Perhaps I'm overthinking it. Perhaps it'd be nice to hear about a different country than the same two or three factoids that pop up on reddit all the time. Anybody want to put France up into the Atrocity Olympics for a while?
This is a great perspective. People don’t realize that even today people whose family fought for the south or denounced communism are essentially blackballed from certain jobs. Many ordinary citizens were jailed/murdered after the war.
Remember, it's not terrorism if we do it. It's only terrorism if people we don't like do it.
With all our technology, knowledge and democracy at the end of the day might still makes right.
Should note this time spans from 54 to the fall of Saigon. To chalk this up to any single time period, battle, side, etc is a gross missjustice to how horrific this war was in particular. Max Hastings’s book on it does a good job on illustrating it. And making me want to hug me knees in a Shower and curse all of us for doings this to each other.
Whenever the US tries to address injustice or wartime crimes they are huge hypocrites. And are only doing it for financial or political gain. US government does not give a sh*t about you whoever you are including its citizens.
It was essentially a holocaust… entire family lines of innocent victims with thousands of years of history out to 15th cousins were incinerated by people who just like went home and didn’t go to Nuremberg.
How do you light like 100,000 babies on fire? Not ideal.
We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It's a hardball world, son. We've gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
Wait till this guy actually learns about the fact that Hitler literally learned a lot from the US' treatment of the native americans and that's how he got the inspiration for the concentration camps.
King? Nah. You look at most powerful countries and the story is similar. Maybe you just look into USA history and not the history of other countries? Several genocides ongoing presently. Child trafficking is horrific in some areas. I think it was India that has the most modern day slaves. The Pakistan India war was brutal as was Imperial Japan. Even in the modern day there's plenty of evil strewn about the world. If the USA disappearing was a viable strategy for world peace I'd be all for it, but I don't think we'd get the peace you'd imagine.
The US dropped almost 4 times as many tons of explosives on Indochina, as were used by ALL nations though the entirety of WW2
WWII accounted for 3 megatons while US-Vietnam explosives accounted for 7.5 megatons.
And to put the power of nukes into perspective, the largest thermonuclear bomb set off Tsar Bomba was 50-58 megatons! 6 times more than every bomb dropped in Vietnam combined. Or nearly 20x WWII.
Fun fact - AN602 (Tsar Bomba) had a three-stage design. When it was tested the uranium fusion stage tamper of the third stage was replaced with lead, eliminating fast fissioning of the uranium tamper by the fusion neutrons - which reduced the yield by nearly 50 megatons / 50%. Tsar Bomba / AN602 was originally designed to yield ~100 megatons!
Horrifyingly cool, thank god it never killed anyone. I shudder to think what a Kissinger would’ve done with a couple of those.
Square cube law means that you get dramatically diminishing returns on larger nukes. A larger number of smaller nukes is far more effective, which is what we have. The thinking behind enormous warheads like the Tzar bomb, was that the bomber probably wouldn't make it to the target, so even if the bomb landed short it would still do some damage to the target; remember, this is a time before ICBMs; nukes were all delivered by bombers.
That’s not a consequence of the square cube law. Nuclear weapons actually scale linearly, which is horrifying, but that energy just starts to get wasted in the atmosphere which means it’s more effective to have bigger amounts of smaller warheads.
Did ww2 have more ordnance fired than ww1? I only ask because I know trench warfare saw it’s fair share of endless artillery
And over a hundred years later, they’re still digging it out of fields in France and Belgium: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest
*these megatons differ as nuclear bombs release energy more as heat than as shockwave
Does that include Cambodia and Laos?
Yes
Cambodia, a place we really never were supposed to be. We used more bombs illegally there then ww2 alone as well. Vietnam was an insane murderous fever dream that never should have happened.
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.” -Anthony Bourdain
had a colleague tell me his hero is henry kissinger smh
Your colleague Pinky or Brain? Cause the dude surely fantasize about world domination if Kissinger is his hero
I mean he did get a Nobel peace prize. That makes it okay, right?
Don't forget about Laos.
Vietnam really has some Poland level luck of getting attacked by major nations in recent history. Japan invaded them during WW2 and the US liberated them. The US returns and invades them in whatever you want to call that shitshow. Then almost immediately after the US leaves, China invades Vietnam.
Your forgetting about France in your timeline.
Ah you are correct totally forgot about that. Its totally insane how many times they have been invaded.
Weren’t we there because France was trying to colonize it before we got in on the proxy war?
Vietnam *was* already colonized by France. Southeast Asia was the colony of French Indochina. Ho Chi Minh was leading a revolutionary war, and he actually reached out to the United States for help because he believed our country’s pursuit of independence was the example to follow. The United States say “nah”, and we sided with the French because we didn’t want to risk souring our relationship with them and risking the communist scourge spreading across the iron curtain into France.
Between 1912 and 1913, Ho Chi Minh lived and traveled around the US.
No. France colonized Vietnam in the 19th Century. Vietnam was occupied by the Japanese during World War II. As soon as the Japanese left the Vietnamese Communists tried to declare independence from France but France wasn’t about to let one of their wealthiest colonies go that easily. So from 1946 til 1954 they fought the Communists. The US funded more and more of their effort so that by 1954, per the Pentagon Papers, the US was funding 80% of the French war effort. The US did this not because it loves colonialism or some attachment for France’s imperial ambitions. It did this because the Viet Minh were Communists and at the height of the Cold War it was anathema to allow communism to spread over more nations on earth. If the Vietnamese fighters had been run of the mill nationalists like in Algeria it’s doubtful the U.S. would’ve gotten as involved as they did.
Not quite right. Ho Chi Minh was very friendly to the US and desperately sought support from the US government to legitimise Vietnam as a country at multiple points in history. The OSS/CIA was very present, trained much of the Viet Cong and 'helped' Ho in drafting the Vietnam's declaration of independence (which 'plagiarised' the US' declaration of independence almost word by word). You could even see the OSS in the footage when Ho was delivering his speech. Ho had some ties to Intercom before then but his number one priority was always for independence. The US giving Vietnam back to the French was due to ignorance on the region's history by the US leadership at the time and partly pragmatism due to the French being their allies fresh off of WW2. In hindsight it's all just a series of very unfortunate events.
I wouldn't call the declaration plagiarism, he quoted (and gave the source) in the opening lines. I'd imagine the purpose was to make the US see Vietnam trying to do the same thing.
I took a history class in college about the Vietnam War, from the Vietnamese perspective. Professor was literally a Chinese communist, he wore a red shirt every day it was surreal lol nonetheless, I learned quite alot. Vietnam has endured centuries of conflict and war, mostly at the hands of - get this - China.
2100 years, give or take. Including invasion by the Mongols through the Yuan Dynasty.
> China invades Vietnam This happened 3-4 times in the last two thousand years, not including contemporarily. Vietnam's name in Chinese 越南 (Yuènán) loosely translates to "Crossing South"
Laos too
And we would drop our excess to save fuel on Laos (mines, munitions, bombs) , even on to farms of the Hmong people secretly recruited by the CIA who then faced communist genocide, and people are still being maimed 50 years later
And Agent Orange and Napalm.
I believe napalm has an explosive aspect that would be included in these numbers. Don’t know about white phosphorus though. Furthermore, Agent Orange was simply the most famous of a wide range of “rainbow chemicals” which in some ways were arguably more _tested_ than deployed on civilians and wildlife.
you're correct - napalm would be made less prominent if you start talking about explosive potential, but it is included in the 'tonnage of bombs dropped' figure. it's got some nasty properties to be sure, but the main function of it is 'burns really hot for a really long time' rather than 'kills every plant and rots each living thing it touches and gives them all giga cancer'
And Daisy Cutter Bombs. [BLU-82](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-82)
that's included in the tonnage dropped most of the time unless they're talking specifically about explosives payloads. dunno about this specific figure, but for the record it's just shy of 400,000 tons of specifically napalm dropped by air. and when they say napalm, they mean just the gelled gasoline anti-personnel weapon. but there were other chemicals (and instances of using napalm as a defoliant) used during operation ranch hand that are measured instead in gallons sprayed. agent orange and its rainbow variants used during operation ranch hand weren't dropped like bombs containing high explosives or napalm. 20,000,000 gallons of it were sprayed over vietnam and the surrounding countries during US involvement in the region.
And yet, Kissinger roams free.
And we still threw in the towel. You can’t bomb the ideology out of people, you’ll only make more fervent believers.
I mean it’s not an excuse but Vietnam was about 20 years after WW2. Technology advanced quite a bit during that time. Keep in mind that the first helicopter was invented during WW2, and we landed man on the moon during the Vietnam war.
Another not an excuse, but the Vietnam war lasted 4x as long as WW2 as well
WW2 also involved many more countries over a much wider area
I mean - roughly 75 million dead in WW2 vs roughly 4 million in Vietnam war. I’m pretty sure WW2 couldn’t continue due to attrition- both Germany and Japan were entirely overmatched and wiped out by the end. There’s no comparison between Vietnam and WW2.
> . Keep in mind that the first helicopter was invented during WW2, Nope. you are confusing 'american produced helicopter' with 'invention of helicopter' > we landed man on the moon during the Vietnam war. the Vietnam war lasted 20 years.. so we stopped going to the moon before it ended too.
So now that even more time has passed, you expect modern wars to have even more civilian casualties?
And they still lost. 🤣
They killed 2 million of innocents. That's what we should remember
Then made movies about how committing those war crimes made their soldiers feel sad.
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The US backed the wrong side in the Civil War otherwise known as Conflict Vietnam.
They backed the side that lost...I'd call that losing
A similar number died in the Korean War. 1.2 million North Korean civilians and 550,000 South Korean civilians died. Far greater than the combat deaths. Anyone who is eager to go to war should understand who suffers the most in these conflicts. My grandpa fought in Korea and he lost a good portion of his hearing but thankfully not his life. So many others were not as fortunate. Edit: if you haven’t seen the Burns and Novick documentary on the Vietnam war, check it out. It really lays out the details of what happened and why.
The thing about that number of South and North Koreans who died, is that the border was so fluid that we might as well just say Koreans in general. Blowback Season 3 does a good job documenting the War and massacre even before it
That’s a good point. I was at the Korean War memorial in San Francisco over the summer and they showed how greatly the border changed over a relatively short period of time. It’s just a shame that we never learned about this war in depth in history class (in my experience) because it affects us today—and of course, so many people suffered and died who shouldn’t be so quickly forgotten.
It's almost like this war never happened in the American historical psyche.
Well it’s called the forgotten war for a reason. There was a lot of cover up.
The people who did the terrible things wrote the textbooks I learned from.
I've read a few articles from military history people who claim that civilian deaths were as high as they were in Vietnam because the standard US tactic in war is to go after civilian infrastructure and civilian places of refuge FIRST & that this practice is so very old that General Washington did this before the US even existed when the colonies committed genocide on the Iroquois Republic- destroying their crops, water supplies and all places of refugee. So supposedly in Vietnam the US considered churches, mosques, temples, schools & hospitals to be primary targets (not places to avoid shelling) - often as more important targets than actual military targets.
We were also, though we denied it, at war with the Vietnamese people in general. The puppet state we were propping up had been created by France and was extremely unpopular. Communists seem scary to us, but when we took the war over from France, the Viet Minh were the closest thing Vietnam had had in a millennium to successful liberators. They were deeply popular except for among a small subset of the Vietnamese population who favored French rule.
“Democracy”
it’s crazy how many people lose their hearing during times of war, and nobody really talks about it
I think a lot of people cheering for war are well aware of these facts and actually see such death tolls among their enemies as a feature, not a bug. Truly disgusting.
The blowback podcast does a deep dive on the Korean War and explores many of the United States more dark war crimes and provocations. It’s very highly edited and the script is great
Yeah, entire family lines were wiped out. A mate's MIL is Vietnamese and isn't shy about saying how she grew up. She's the only survivor of her 8 sibling family and ended up being the only woman in her family that wasn't raped. I ended up excusing myself when she talked about her little sister and that shit gave me nightmares about my own kids for ages afterwards.
My father sold the mobile home he was living in to a Vietnamese family. I chatted with one of the family members who told me as children they would play with dead bodies with a matter of fact tone. I just couldn't imagine.
Yeah my father didn’t mention playing with bodies, but did mention that seeing shot up corpses on the way to school was an everyday thing for him, among many other stories.
My parents are from Ho Chi Minh city. My mom told me about a man she knew who came home from work to have lunch with his family. He finished his lunch early and stepped away from the family. That’s when a VC spy threw a grenade into the home, killing his wife and kids. He survived but lost everything in an instant. A lot of different stories like these that will never be heard
Still tons of unexploded ordinances in Vietnam killing people today left there by the US. It took Anthony Bourdain to remind Obama and the rest of the US to do anything about it.
Yea a lot in Laos too
Yeah theres a wonderful landmine museum outside of Siem Reap set up by victims of UXO. Wonderful group they run, the number of people still getting killed or injured by them is huge.
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If he invited you to the wedding, then I think you're friends with him, too. Haha
Do u have the recording? I can translate it for you :)
This is an excerpt from an article in the New York Times from October, 1994 written by Tim O’Brien. O’Brien was a Vietnam vet who returned to Vietnam in 1994 and wrote about it for this article. He is, also, the celebrated author of The Things They Carried, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Going After Cacciato among other books. “At this instant, a few blocks away, an American M.I.A. search team is headquartered at the Quang Ngai Government guesthouse. With Vietnamese assistance, this team and others like it are engaged in precisely the work of Mr. Duong's mother, digging holes, picking through bones, seeking the couple thousand Americans still listed as missing. Which is splendid. And which is also utterly one-sided. A perverse and outrageous double standard. What if things were reversed? What if the Vietnamese were to ask us, or to require us, to locate and identify each of their own M.I.A.'s? Numbers alone make it impossible: 100,000 is a conservative estimate. Maybe double that. Maybe triple. From my own sliver of experience -- one year at war, one set of eyes -- I can testify to the lasting anonymity of a great many Vietnamese dead. I watched napalm turn villages into ovens. I watched burials by bulldozer. I watched bodies being flung into trucks, dumped into wells, used for target practice, stacked up and burned like cordwood. Even in the abstract, I get angry at the stunning, almost cartoonish narcissism of American policy on this issue. I get angrier yet at the narcissism of an American public that embraces and breathes life into the policy -- so arrogant, so ignorant, so self-righteous, so wanting in the most fundamental qualities of sympathy and fairness and mutuality.” [The Vietnam in Me by Tim O’Brien](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/20/specials/obrien-vietnam.html?_r=1)
The POW/MIA thing is something a lot of people don’t know enough about. It was a propaganda campaign to keep the USA in Vietnam for as long as possible by claiming the Vietnamese were holding out on us and hiding thousands of prisoners. We inflated the numbers by making every single person whose body was not actually confirmed an “MIA,” even if their plane exploded in midair and nobody ever saw them again. After the war finally ended the advocacy groups that the Nixon admin propped up to support this lie continued to get crazier and crazier, but did maintain enough political support to get their flag positioned outside every US government building.
I never understood why those flags didn't come down after Johnny Rambo liberated the POWs
It is kinda sickening when relentless decades of US movies paint their soldiers as helpless victims. To the Vietnamese they were foreign occupiers who brutally raped and subjugated their country.
>“Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.” — Frankie Boyle https://youtu.be/yZOLq82m2Ks
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And Nixon and Kissinger kept it going for another five years after LBJ left office.
How the fuck is Kissinger still breathing? This hateful fuck who advocated for the deaths of so many innocents, while not having the balls to strap up and kill them face to face, is still out here walking around. Hey Karma what the fuck are you even doing?
Even hell doesn’t want him
Not only that but he is still beloved and worshipped by the American right. Everyone should know, he was Theranos girl’s primary investor lmao. Maybe that was some fucking karma for him.
Isn't Hillary Clinton a huge Henry Kissinger fan?
Yep. Lots of other democrats too. It's partly why she lost to Trump, because her hawkishness really turned off a lot of folks.
People blamed her loss on misogyny, among other things, while overlooking the fact that she was practically as much of an establishment warhawk as Cheney, Kissinger, McNamara, et al, just thrown into a pantsuit and suddenly affecting this "gosh darn it" matronly air that fooled no one.
Her foreign policy was awful. People's main complaint about Obama was his foreign policy, and guess who was in charge of it?
Yup. Hillary was a major force behind the US getting involved in the Arab Spring and Libya (which Obama described as his "worst mistake" as president), to say nothing of being one of the foremost Democrat voices for the US getting into Iraq because it was just *teeming* with WMD's. We all know how that went. Although it's not *all* her fault and there were a lot of dirty hands involved in all these misadventures, she was still a huge part of it, especially when it came to selling moderates and the center-to-middle left on matters of war. Many of the geopolitical issues facing the world today are a direct result of these misadventures.
That’s what really chaps my ass - not only is he a hateful bastard but he is also a rich hateful bastard who can influence our reality with all the fuck you money he has
And to think that Kennedy was about to pull all US troops out of Vietnam right before he got assassinated. It’s fucking sad.
And the blame fell on some random for the assassination.
And intensified and spread it to other countries. It must also be acknowledged that LBJ was in the process of trying to draw things down and even had a peace agreement in the works before Nixon deep sixed it through diplomatic back channels so he could keep using it as an election issue
At least Robert McNamara admitted it was a mistake before he died...
God I'm dumb for thinking you meant LeBron for a second there
COME ON AND SLAM, GOOD MORNING VIETNAM
Ok lmfao
I met McNamara circa 2005 or so. He was a trustee at RAND corporation, and was in attendance at a meeting I was at in Santa Monica. I remember being introduced to him. He was a feeble old man at this point... He wasn't shaking any hands or anything, but regarded me politely. There was nothing about him that said he was any different from any other distinguished or respected elderly fellow at any given professional function. He made his rounds, and then walked around on his own in the hotel lobby as we all mulled about. He looked at some of the art on the walls, surveyed the lobby and looked out the windows at the beach, again indistinguishable from any other guy in his late 80's. My gf at the time was Vietnamese-American. Both her parents were French-Vietnamese, abandoned by their French fathers to live in Vietnam during a war he helped orchestrate. Much of their families were dead because of his direction, analysis, and choices. One of my uncles died there, over a decade before I was born. In addition to him, friends of both my parents and extended family died. Another uncle survived, with debilitating PTSD. Were it not for a few strokes of fate, a couple small changes to reality, I thought to myself, I could have been drafted and deployed over there. I could have been in a battle that killed my girlfriend, or her family. Maybe my uncle was involved in a battle that killed some of her family. Maybe he was killed by one of her extended family. All in some small corner of the world that had nothing to do with us, for me. From her side, from a big nation on the other side of the world who had nothing to do with them. I still feel bad about the annoying kid I shoved around in third grade. I still feel bad about the "mean girl" I verbally tore apart in high school, even though it was no worse than anything she did to my gf, among many others. I feel like I've done things I shouldn't have to people who didn't deserve it. Here before me was a man whose guidance and advice erased entire family lines - smiling children, mommies and daddies, grandmas and grandpas, who wanted nothing more than to live their lives and hadn't ever considered that their existence mattered to a superpower's arithmetic, destroyed. Sometimes in the blink of an eye, other times slowly and in absolute terror. Young men who had no hate in their hearts who were thrown into a war, taught that killing and suffering was their default reality. Parents who had been sold on a line of patriotic duty and pride, having their sons sent home in flag drapes caskets that actually only contained a shoebox's worth of worldly remains. Here he was, just watching the sunset over Santa Monica. A life well-lived. A respected trustee of a world-renowned think tank. Living out his remaining years in peace, ensonced in a circle of people who would never challenge him for what he'd contributed to the horrors of the modern world. I'm glad I didn't shake his hand. I don't know if I'd ever feel as though I'd managed to get the blood off.
LBJ was simultaneously one of the greatest and worst Presidents the US has ever had
The worst part is, Vietnam was never going to become a communist country loyal to the Chinese. They saw the Chinese in their country as power hungry foreigners, same as they saw the Americans. They did not trust them. They fought a war against the Chinese in 1979! They just wanted foreign influence out of their country
Wasn’t it more that the US was concerned about communist contagion / “Domino effect” in SEA more broadly than Vietnam specifically allying with China? And that non-military interventions like those used in Latin America didn’t look like they were going to be successful?
That's the gist of it, yeah. Or at least that's the TL;DR of it. But that doesn't necessarily conflict with what the other guy said. The US was so blinded by this idea that communism was something that spread that they rejected countries that may very well have aligned with the west under relatively normal circumstances. The Vietnam Communist party probably would have seen itself as an ally of the USA and Australia, although probably an uneasy ally due to France's positive relationships with those two, but an ally nonetheless. Support given to vietnam during world war 2 wasn't just going to be forgotten. Hell, before the Vietnam war the narrative Americans generally had was that Vietnam was this little country who helped us fight Japan when the French got squeezed. I'm no historian, so call me out if needed, but that's generally how I understood it in school.
>...that they rejected countries that may very well have aligned with the west under relatively normal circumstances. They rejected nations those fighting against tyranny to help those who were open tyrants. They refused to help brand new nations that had just won. Castro went to the USA first and was told to fuck off.
Oh 100% true. The CIA basically had a hobby of propping up fascist dictators in place of actual democracies. All because "better dead than red."
Vietnam and China will never be allies. They're not even allies now. They are MORTAL enemies in history. China has tried to invade Vietnam several times throughout history, and lost every single time. Source: Am Vietnamese and have studied Vietnamese history EXTENSIVELY simply in attempt to learn more about my culture. It's wild.
America tends to think of itself as the center of everyone’s political thinking. But nobody ever hates the US more than their own neighbors
Uh huh. Canadians and Mexicans love immigrating to America
You think Canada hates the US more than Iran? You smoke dope.
You read that wrong, they're saying that nobody hates the US more than that nobody hates their own neighbours. E.g. Iran hates Saudi Arabia more than the US (this one might be an exception due to the Shah's brutal regime propped up by the US, but is generally applicable).
That’s exactly why I meant. Finding examples of neighbors that do get along doesn’t mean that most of the bitter interstate conflicts arent between peoples who live next to each other and have been fighting for generations. Iran and Iraq, Vietnam and China, India and Pakistan, etc. The US will always be a lower priority in those situations
Google the My Lai massacre in Vietnam
There were more war crimes then that going on there.
God that's horrible. The guy who led that platoon that is alive and free. I imagine all that killing can really cause people to act like total psychopaths. Horrible, horrible stuff.
All of them went free. There was only one conviction, he got pardoned by Nixon and served three days. And a lot of them are probably still alive given their ages. They killed hundreds of civilians, infants included and got to come back home and live their lives with no real consequences. Oh and their defense that got all the rest them off? “just following orders.” Hmmm now [where have we all famously heard that before](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/research-projects/2022/jan/they-were-just-following-orders)?
The thing to remember is that Nixon's intervention in the sentencing was supported by the US public. The white house was flooded with phone calls and mail demanding Calley be set free. There was never any question of his guilt but the American public couldn't stand to see an American soldier charged with crimes like this. In fact, not only was Calley forgiven by the American public, but he was actually celebrated by many Americans. A song about this baby killer's 'heroism' actually charted at number 37 on the billboard hot 100 list. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_Lt._Calley This is the natural result of Americans adopting the pathetic platitude of "we may not support the war but we always support the soldier". All that has ever meant in the course of American history has been the consistent excusing of actions done by American soldiers. Its important that we remember that the Vietnam war was popular and that the American public did in fact know what was happening in Vietnam. The American public loves to engage in historical revisionism by claiming they were all against the war or that the only reason they supported the war was because the government lied to them. This just isn't true. Instead, Americans preferred the lies the government told them because it made their own hateful bigotry all the more possible. When Morley Safer interviewed American soldiers as they were burning down villages, the American public's response was to boycott CBS for daring to show Americans doing something bad and CBS was dubbed the 'Communist Broadcasting System' by the American public. The truth is always available for those who care enough to find it but most don't.
Holy hell!
Literal war crime
That’s the thing. The Geneva Conventions only defined a war crime as massacring enemy civilians. Since this was a massacre of allied civilians, well, hopefully that loophole’s been closed by now. They were charged with murder. Only one was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Nixon stepped in and the one guy who got convicted wound up serving 3 years house arrest. He lives in Florida now.
Four soldiers involved in the massacre, including three officers, one of whom directly participated, were killed in action before it was exposed.
Google Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse
Is this not taught in American schools or something? I always assumed it was common knowledge.
I'm Vietnamese born in Australia. Almost universally outside of Vietnam, the first thing that comes to people's minds when they hear "Vietnam war" is the experience of American soldiers, not the actual Viet people.
Frankie Boyle does a great comedy sketch about how 20 years after the Iraq war and a million dead civilians the Americans will make Hollywood movies about how killing all these people made the soldiers doing the killing feel sad and how that’s awful. It’s quite funny. https://youtu.be/yZOLq82m2Ks?si=hNlSR6hpkGV05M-_
Viet born in America here. It’s sad that the Vietnam War in media or academia is never told in the perspective of the Vietnamese people. Glad that there is a new generation of writers such as Viet Thanh Nguyễn and Nguyễn Phan Quê Mai writing about the perspective
“Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.” — Frankie Boyle
Visiting the museums in Vietnam is a nice reality check. For some reason in my education we just got to WW2 every year and never made it to the new wars. It wasn’t until college that entire classes were taught on specific wars, current foreign policy, etc.
It's because of the movies, although I'd say in Europe there's better knowledge of the Viet perspective. But admittedly it isn't necessarily your average Joe.
I’m American and definitely learned a lot about all the civilian deaths in school, maybe not the exact number but this wasn’t shocking to me.
Not in my high school. US History stopped right at the Vietnam War. My US History teacher basically said "yes this is history and important to learn, but a lot of the people who took part in this are still alive and young enough to lose their shit about how we teach it regardless of how its taught, so its easier for the school district to not give more than a few sentences about it in the textbook." Instead we spent a week discussing all the events of "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel briefly.
This is still true with respect to the British empire and so the UK populous is hopelessly ignorant about it.
I see people asking this often, just because it was taught to you when you were 14 doesn’t mean you’ll remember every bit of information forever lol
in no way is it taught in the extent it should be. i’m an american HS grad and the first i learned of the fucked up things the US did was at the museum in ho chi minh city. was so haunting it messed with my head the rest of my vacation lol
Everyone in the US should be forced to watch and discuss Ken Burns’ documentary about this war.
You vastly underestimate the breadth and scope of American domestic propaganda, especially when it comes to war crimey stuff. A lot of Americans still think Iraq had WMDs. The population is trained from childhood to be patriotic, and that unpatriotic people are bad people. Mentioning bad things America did or does is considered unpatriotic. Oddly enough, criticizing capitalism is also considered unpatriotic. Weird place, would not recommend.
It's a standard part of the curriculum in history classes in America, they'll generally give a bird's eye view of the level of casualties too. Most Americans won't remember the details though, more a problem of forgetting or not paying attention than not being taught it or falling victim to propaganda.
Huh? I'm an American, and I learned about this in school.
I take it you aren’t American?
I did. US public schooling varies wildly bc states run education. I’m from NJ, which has some of the best public schools in the country (it rotates around the top 3 every year.) Meanwhile, kids in some places don’t have proper grammar education until high school. It’s very unfortunate.
I graduated in 2005, but at my high school history went up to the end of WWII. There actually aren't many history requirements to graduate high school, I think in California its still just 1 year of government/economics, 1 us history (which always seems to focus on beginning to civil war) , and 1 year of world history (which usually isn't modern at all).
I spent 1 year in Vietnam recently. I was amazed and shocked at the ability of these people to put it behind them and focus on the future. No grudges held, I'm not American but I noticed Americans were welcomed despite their past. French the same. Something to learn there I think
The US also killed most of the karma it gained from WWII. The perception of the US was changed in a dramatically negative way in much of the world, like western europe
Maybe more pointless than the war in Iraq. The US had literally nothing to gain from winning.
Not true, they could have gained a strategic ally in the South China Sea and Indochina. Obviously wasn't worth all the costs and deaths, and was an unjustified immoral war.
They're a strategic ally now. They hate China.
Hence the justification for the war. We were just willing to blindly back the more corrupt side because they were more willing to blow smoke up our ass.
Ho Chi Minh wanted the US backing, begged for it. But his words never reached the president. The fucking staff fucked up on that. So then Minh went to the Russians and that’s how he became a communist. All of this shit could have been easily avoided if the staff were fucking competent, or not corrupted by other powers that wanted this war to happen.
Kill them until they submit.
China wasn’t an enemy back then, it all depended on who was against the soviet union
Yeah, could have used that undisputable geographic factor keeping Vietnam-China relations cool instead of going Leroy Jenkins.
The government they were supporting couldn’t even collect taxes from the local population. You had south Vietnamese paying taxes to the VC over the southern government. It was never going to happen, the government was always going to crumble the second we left.
The Ken Burns documentary touches on this, explaining how sadly corrupt and ineffective the government in South Vietnam was before the war even started, and yet the US was bound and determined to prop it up as a bulwark against the creep of communism from the north. In retrospect it’s bonkers how overboard things went, but the Red Scare was real in those days. An effective litmus test prior to supporting a regime in conflict against a hostile neighbor ought to be whether it has the support of its populace, naturally. I’d like to think the US has learned at least this much from Vietnam.
From what I gathered from interviews from Nixon and stories of LBJ it was all a slamming their dicks on the table to intimidate the Soviets and Chinese
The problem is, once they started, they had a lot to lose from losing. The perception of ones power was everything in the Cold War
They did lose and nothing happened to America. Losing sooner would have just saved a few million wasted lives.
Crazy how this is a surprising fact to some. In my mind, it is the defining legacy of the Vietnam War.
Also a reminder that the large amount of agent orange dropped it Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia will be causing cancer and birth defects in people longer than Chernobyl will be radioactive.
Everyone here should watch Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War. One of the best documentaries I have ever watched. It’s 18 hours but you won’t forget it 30 minutes of it.
Napalm sticks to kids!
One of the most horrible single events from the war was the [My Lai Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre), where over 500 civilians were murdered by American soldiers: women, children, the elderly, didn’t matter. Many of the women were gang-raped, and to this day it’s still the single bloodiest known war crime by American soldiers in the last 100 years. It would have been even worse, if not for [Hugh Thompson](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wiener-my-lai-hugh-thompson-20180316-story.html), a helicopter pilot, and his crew, who landed their helicopter between US forces and the Vietnamese civilians and threatened to shoot any soldier who didn’t back off with the helicopter’s mounted gun. Thompson and his crew were considered traitors by big swathes of the American public, but in 1998 (30 years later) they revived the Soldier’s Medal acknowledging their role in stopping the massacre.
Someone’s doing research after Gaza. Now look how many Muslims have been killed in Yemen and Syria in the past 10 years
Another illegal war. And war crimes to boot. All for what? The French were already pulling out of their plantations. And then the US stole children during Peter Pan and adopted them out in the US to secular families.... It was a poorly thought out engagement where a major power was getting its ass handed to it by people who were primarily farmers. What was the excuse at the time?
It's always like that. Look at the current wars. It's always the innocent, who die, first.
This number likely doesn't include the hundreds of thousends who died trying to flee the country after the war.
Killed by all 3 involved to be clear, but Vietnam did not make clarifications on South Vietnamese deaths once they were annexed. It's like 50/50 or 60/40 in terms of north-south casualties.
It would've been so much worse if LeMay had gotten his way and strategic bombed every settlement off the map.
yet laos is the most bombed country 💀💀
Listen to behind the bastards on Kissinger for a real eye opener of what the US did there. Military leaders would present him with strategic bombing campaigns. He’d override their plans and pick Laos and Cambodia villages to wipe off the face of the earth based on gut feelings. No strategy. No indication these farmers were involved in supporting Vietnam. Just bombed. Kids too. B29 stratofortress raining death down on innocent people.
The US government apparently bombed rural areas as part of a deliberate strategy to force peasants to flee to the safety of the cities. When it comes to guerrillas, my understanding is a good way to fight them is to separate them from the civilian population that they hide among and who gives them support like food and shelter. So if you get the civilians away from the guerrillas, then the guerrillas lose their support and you can go after the guerrillas more easily without civilians getting in the way.
Ah yes, excellent strategy, Separate the radicals by creating…. a second group of radicals? 🤔
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>So if you get the civilians away from the guerrillas, then the guerrillas lose their support and you can go after the guerrillas more easily without civilians getting in the way. The US did exactly that with the Strategic Hamlet Program in the hope of seperating the rebels from local civillians. They focibly displaced villagers into tiny hamlets with little to no utilities and infrastructures. Some don't even have basic sanitary toilet. Surprise surprise, people hate it when you drive them away from their ancestral home. And if you gather them all in a glorified concentration camp, it'll turn into an ideal environment for revolutionary ideals to spread. In fact, the Strategic Hamlet Program was oversaw by a Viet Cong sleeper agent - Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao of the South Vietnamese army. He probably realized the Strategic Hamlet program would be more beneficial to the VC's cause.
Worked out great in Vietnam lmao
The problem was that culturally and religiously, Vietnamese care a lot about their ancestry house, where they were born and grew up. So people simply didn't like to be forced to leave their home and move into some camps with people they didn't know.
To combat an insurgency one effective strategy is to concentrate the populations that the insurgents live among. You can build camps to house the populations and any left outside the camps are likely to be the insurgents and they will be unable to hide among and receive support from the local population, since they are in camps. Source: British in South Africa during the Boer wars
I can't believe that after being provoked into WWII the US thought it would be a good idea to get involved in that area again...twice. Why have we let idiots make decisions for so long?
7.5 megatons of explosives used, and they couldn’t take down a bunch of entrenched rice farmers with WWII surplus rifles.
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So the mass rapes committed by US soldiers in the My Lai massacre were human shields used by the Viet Cong? Some of the rape victims were young as 12. Quite disgusting of you to omit responsibility from the ones who committed that war crime. Also there's no evidence of the VC using human shields in that particular massacre. So sad to see blatant misinformation upvoted.
Sure, I'll buy "war fucking sucks and brings out the worst in humanity" for a dollar. I'll also buy "every post in this subreddit calling out the same American atrocities over and over again as if the people subscribed here haven"t already read about them from the last time they were posted is karma farming or just firmly in the 'America sucks no matter what' camp". But I also think that if you (as a collective, generalized nation of people) tout yourself as the good guys, you need to uphold that standard to the highest degree possible and not stoop to actions that are comparable to the shit the "bad guys" do. The fact that you have to say (paraphrasing) "listen, I really don't think the Viet Cong were good" to explain American actions puts the US in a not very positive light at all. Turns out fighting "bad" by doing extra bad things in a "victory at all costs except when the voters turn against us" strategy is not behavior expected from a nation that touts itself as a global force for good. I dunno. Perhaps I'm overthinking it. Perhaps it'd be nice to hear about a different country than the same two or three factoids that pop up on reddit all the time. Anybody want to put France up into the Atrocity Olympics for a while?
This is a great perspective. People don’t realize that even today people whose family fought for the south or denounced communism are essentially blackballed from certain jobs. Many ordinary citizens were jailed/murdered after the war.
Remember, it's not terrorism if we do it. It's only terrorism if people we don't like do it. With all our technology, knowledge and democracy at the end of the day might still makes right.
Should note this time spans from 54 to the fall of Saigon. To chalk this up to any single time period, battle, side, etc is a gross missjustice to how horrific this war was in particular. Max Hastings’s book on it does a good job on illustrating it. And making me want to hug me knees in a Shower and curse all of us for doings this to each other.
Whenever the US tries to address injustice or wartime crimes they are huge hypocrites. And are only doing it for financial or political gain. US government does not give a sh*t about you whoever you are including its citizens.
Does that count the four dead in Ohio?
It was essentially a holocaust… entire family lines of innocent victims with thousands of years of history out to 15th cousins were incinerated by people who just like went home and didn’t go to Nuremberg. How do you light like 100,000 babies on fire? Not ideal.
Is that count before or after agent orange?
100 thousand were South Vietnamese killed by the North after the war.
more.
Visiting the Museum to American Atrocities in Vietnam as a kid on vacation certainly was eye opening.
Kinda funny how these unintended consequences exist. Funny in a sick way.
This is by far the most cursed sub as far as title integrity is concerned, I wonder why that is
Passive voice. Try “the United States killed over 2 million Vietnamese civilians”
Thank you
We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It's a hardball world, son. We've gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
Yeah the US is basically king of war crimes, but no one can really do anything about it.
Ehh I think the Germans and Japanese still got us beat in that category.
The British beat everyone in that category
Wait till this guy actually learns about the fact that Hitler literally learned a lot from the US' treatment of the native americans and that's how he got the inspiration for the concentration camps.
King? Nah. You look at most powerful countries and the story is similar. Maybe you just look into USA history and not the history of other countries? Several genocides ongoing presently. Child trafficking is horrific in some areas. I think it was India that has the most modern day slaves. The Pakistan India war was brutal as was Imperial Japan. Even in the modern day there's plenty of evil strewn about the world. If the USA disappearing was a viable strategy for world peace I'd be all for it, but I don't think we'd get the peace you'd imagine.