Vietnam '67 (Continuación)

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For many in Vietnam, memories of what took place remain vivid. I recently visited Nguyen Thi Do, a former nurse with the National Liberation Front, also known as the Vietcong. After 10 years of wartime service, Ms. Do moved to Qui Nhon, a beachfront city in her home province on Vietnam’s Central Coast, where she helped administer a fishing company until retiring in 1989. She invited me into her living room with its stylish wooden furnishings, poured two cups of green tea, and shared her story.

When I was 17, National Liberation Front recruiters came to my village, Lo Dieu in the Hoai Nhon District of Binh Dinh Province.…  Seguir leyendo »

William Eastlake’s Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) ID Card, 1967.Credit William Eastlake Papers, University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections

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In 2012, the Iraq veteran and author Ben Fountain won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” The novel — Mr. Fountain’s first — was also a finalist for the National Book Award, along with another debut novel, Kevin Powers’s “The Yellow Birds,” which received the 2013 PEN/Hemingway award for first fiction. Both are American novels about the Iraq war. In the half-decade since, literature about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — much, but not all, by veterans of those wars — has done much to shape the cultural commentary on America’s latest military engagements, even as thousands of American service members remain in the regions.…  Seguir leyendo »

A search and destroy operation in South Vietnam in the summer of 1967. H.D.S. Greenway

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They were burning brush, as they always do in the dry season, when my plane came in over the Vietnamese coast at dusk. Descending into Saigon, I could see fires burning below me, and in my naïveté I thought I was seeing the ravages of war.

I had never been to Asia before, never been in a war zone. I was as green as could be, about to become a war correspondent in Time magazine’s Saigon bureau with my nose pressed against the glass. And when I landed into the chaos of Ton Son Nhut airport on that hot, sticky night in March 1967, there were flares, illumination rounds, lighting up the night sky, I knew not why.…  Seguir leyendo »

Soldiers moving through rough terrain searching for Viet Cong near Tuy Hoa, during Operation Harrison in 1966. Credit Robert C. Lafoon/U.S. Army, via National Archives

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With 11,000 men killed and little to show for it, 1967, in retrospect, is remembered as a year of concern for the United States in the Vietnam War. But at the time, optimism reigned. The offensive operations by American military forces throughout 1966 had halted the gains of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (known to its enemies as the Viet Cong). Those gains, combined with mounting efforts to “pacify” the civilian population, seemed to point the way toward victory — if not in 1967, then soon after.

Pacification involved various strategies to remove Communist influence from rural South Vietnam.…  Seguir leyendo »

Abba Eban, center left, was Israel’s main contact with President Lyndon B. Johnson in the tense diplomacy that preceded the 1967 Middle East war. Credit Corbis, via Getty Images

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On May 22, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson received alarming news from the Middle East. The government of Egypt had closed the Straits of Tiran, the narrow waterway linking the Red Sea to Israel, to Israeli shipping. The move dramatically escalated Arab-Israeli tensions and pushed the region to the brink of war.

Johnson’s instinct was to act boldly to defuse the crisis. He proposed assembling an American-led naval force to escort Israeli ships through the straits and push Egypt to back down. But L.B.J. soon discovered problems.

For one, Congress, wary of new military commitments when nearly half a million Americans were fighting in Vietnam, seemed certain to oppose the idea.…  Seguir leyendo »

Nguyen Van Thieu, left, and Nguyen Cao Ky, center, after a successful battle in 1966. Credit Co Rentmeester/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

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Buddhists against Catholics. Northerners against southerners. Civilians against the military. Capital against periphery. Ethnic Vietnamese against ethnic minorities. In 1967, anti-Communist South Vietnam was a caldron of overlapping rivalries, precipitating and reinforcing the political chaos consuming the country after President Ngo Dinh Diem’s 1963 assassination during a military coup.

But in the realm of high politics, it was the showdown between two rival generals, Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, that loomed largest for most political observers. Both men were young and ambitious, and both were shrewd navigators of the internecine schemes and coups plaguing South Vietnam’s ruling military. And after years of jousting and coalition building, they were headed for a confrontation in South Vietnam’s 1967 presidential election.…  Seguir leyendo »

Dan Mouer in Vietnam in 1966. The magazine was sent by his wife, along with a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

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There’s a famous scene about halfway through “Apocalypse Now” in which Martin Sheen’s river boat pulls into a supply base, deep in the jungle. While the crew members are buying diesel fuel, the supply clerk gives them free tickets to a show — “You know,” he says, “the bunnies.” Soon they’re sitting in an improvised amphitheater around a landing pad, watching as three Playboy models hop out of a helicopter and dance to “Suzie Q.”

The scene is entirely fictional; Playboy models almost never toured Vietnam, and certainly not in groups. But if the women were never there themselves in force, the magazine itself certainly was.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Lyndon B. Johnson in Vietnam in 1966. Credit Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Presidential Library

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On the morning of May 27, 1964, a little more than two months before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution sailed through the House and Senate, allowing the White House the military authority to do what was needed in Southeast Asia, President Lyndon B. Johnson made two phone calls.

The first, which phone logs show he made at 10:55, was with Senator Richard B. Russell, the Georgia Democrat who headed the Armed Services Committee. “What do you think about this Vietnam thing?” Johnson asked the senator, a longtime friend and mentor. “I’d like to hear you talk a little.”

“Frankly, Mr. President,” Russell replied, “if you were to tell me that I was authorized to settle it as I saw fit, I would respectfully decline to undertake it.…  Seguir leyendo »

Bernard Fall: The Man Who Knew the War

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Fifty years ago today, on Feb. 21, 1967, the journalist Bernard Fall stepped on a land mine while accompanying Marines on a mission near Hue, in South Vietnam. He died instantly. He was 40 years old.

The literature on the Vietnam War is enormous and growing, but Fall’s work still stands out for its insight and sagacity. He remains our greatest writer on the struggle, despite the fact that he died before the period of heavy American military involvement had reached its halfway point.

Fall wrote six books on the Indochina conflict, along with more than 100 articles in popular publications like The New York Times Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and The New Republic, as well as academic journals.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Grunt’s War

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By 1967, protesters were gathering regularly in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. They’d hold signs, give speeches and chant: “Hey, hey, L.B.J. How many babies did you kill today?”

Implicit in the chant was the instrument of Lyndon B. Johnson’s brutal, inhuman policy: the young men fighting in Vietnam. And it didn’t take much for many Americans, especially war protesters, to decide that the soldiers were themselves brutal and inhuman — leading to an ugly backlash against returning servicemen. In one case, a young man accosted a veteran missing an arm at a Colorado college in 1968.…  Seguir leyendo »

Le Duan, left, general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, with Ho Chi Minh at a rally in Hanoi in 1966. Nihon Denpa News/Associated Press

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As any account of combat in the Vietnam War will tell you, America fought an “elusive enemy”: guerrillas who would strike and then disappear; battalion commanders who refused to engage in open battles. But there’s more to the cliché than most people realize. Even by 1967, America’s military, intelligence and civilian leaders had no real idea who was actually calling the shots in Hanoi.

To some extent, this is what the North wanted — the impression that decisions were made collectively, albeit under the gentle guiding hand of President Ho Chi Minh. But the American confusion also, inadvertently, reflected the messy, factionalized reality of North Vietnamese politics, one that historians are only now coming to grasp.…  Seguir leyendo »

Ho Chi Minh, right, with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, in 1945. Associated Press

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It should go without saying that the Vietnam War is remembered by different people in very different ways. Most Americans remember it as a war fought between 1965 and 1975 that bogged down their military in a struggle to prevent the Communists from marching into Southeast Asia, deeply dividing Americans as it did. The French remember their loss there as a decade-long conflict, fought from 1945 to 1954, when they tried to hold on to the Asian pearl of their colonial empire until losing it in a place called Dien Bien Phu.

The Vietnamese, in contrast, see the war as a national liberation struggle, or as a civil conflict, depending on which side they were on, ending in victory in 1975 for one side and tragedy for the other.…  Seguir leyendo »

Tom, left, and Dick Smothers on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” CBS, via Getty Images

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On Sunday nights at 9, 50 years ago, more than a quarter of American households were watching NBC’s “Bonanza.” That comfortable and comforting western series was so dominant that CBS felt it had nothing to lose by taking a chance and giving that time slot to two brothers, musical satirists who interrupted songs like “Boil That Cabbage Down” and “Dance, Boatman, Dance” with ridiculous bouts of sibling rivalry.

The brothers, Tom and Dick Smothers, had had a successful run of appearances in nightclubs and on television variety shows with subversive takes on folk songs. When “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” made its premiere on Feb.…  Seguir leyendo »

Recent college graduates joined the Red Cross to serve refreshments and present recreational programs to American servicemen in Vietnam. Larry Ray/American Red Cross

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Joyce Denke was 19 years old when her fiancé, Cpl. David Ives, received his orders for Vietnam. It was early 1967, and he had only six months left in the service. The young couple, who lived in Temple, Tex., just south of Waco, decided not to let the war dampen their excitement about their future life together, and they started making plans to get married when he came home in November.

After just seven weeks in Vietnam, Ives was killed in action on April 23, 1967, at the age of 20. Ms. Denke still has the last letter he wrote to her, dated April 19, 1967.…  Seguir leyendo »

Anti-war demonstrators at the Pentagon in October 1967. Associated Press

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In popular memory, America’s war in Vietnam begins sometime in the Kennedy administration. But its roots go much deeper, to the end of World War II and the revolution of Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh against French colonial rule.

As part of its broader — in this case misguided — Cold War policy of containing communism, the United States supported France’s war against the Communist-led Viet Minh, paying close to 80 percent of the cost by 1953. The war ended in 1954, with Vietnam divided at the 17th parallel, pending elections to be held in two years.

After the war, the Eisenhower administration backed the refusal of the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, to hold the elections, sparking a new insurgency by former Viet Minh, later known as the National Liberation Front (and to its enemies, the Viet Cong).…  Seguir leyendo »

Marsh Carter holding an enemy flag in Vietnam, a month before the Quang Nam raid.

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In January 1967, I was a 26-year-old Marine Corps captain commanding a 224-man rifle company — Company C, First Battalion, First Regiment, First Marine Division — near Danang, near the North Vietnamese border. I had been in the field for four months and was getting to be relatively experienced in small-unit combat operations. In a rifle company — clearly the pointed end of the spear of American policy — there isn’t a lot of strategic thinking. Our day-to-day tactical responsibilities, designed to achieve our military objectives, dictated our activities.

Daily life was focused on continuous small patrols of 15 to 45 men with the mission of finding and killing or capturing Vietcong guerrillas.…  Seguir leyendo »

Operation Cedar Falls, viewed from the air, on a U.S. Army helicopter gunship, left, and below ground, where soldiers uncover hidden bags of rice. Dick Swanson/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images

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In January 1967, when the First and 25th Infantry Divisions of the United States Army began Operation Cedar Falls, their all-out offensive against the Communist strongholds of the “Iron Triangle” northwest of Saigon, Vo Thi Mo, 20, was ready.

Born in Cu Chi, in the middle of the Cedar Falls battle zone, Ms. Mo had been in the fight against American troops and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam — the South Vietnamese force, known as ARVN — since the age of 13, when she helped to build the extensive tunnel system that southern Communist forces, known as the National Liberation Front (and to its enemies as the Vietcong), used as barracks, command center and communications network.…  Seguir leyendo »

Bamboo huts in flames in Ben Suc, a Viet Cong-controlled village, in January 1967. Bettmann, via Getty Images

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By the beginning of 1967, there were 490,000 American troops in South Vietnam — along with some 850,000 from South Vietnam, South Korea and other allies — and America’s civilian and military leaders were starting to think big. This, they believed, would be the year to crush both the southerners fighting as the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies, who had infiltrated the south.

Doing so, though, would require enormous multidivisional operations involving all branches of the military. Already by the end of 1966, they had begun planning for the “era of big battles,” and specifically for operations designed to eradicate the enemy from around the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon.…  Seguir leyendo »

American soldiers watching helicopters landing as part of Operation Pershing in South Vietnam in 1967. Credit Patrick Christain/Getty Images

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In the early spring of 1967, I was in the middle of a heated 2 a.m. hallway discussion with fellow students at Yale about the Vietnam War. I was from a small town in Oregon, and I had already joined the Marine Corps Reserve. My friends were mostly from East Coast prep schools. One said that Lyndon B. Johnson was lying to us about the war. I blurted out, “But … but an American president wouldn’t lie to Americans!” They all burst out laughing.

When I told that story to my children, they all burst out laughing, too. Of course presidents lie.…  Seguir leyendo »