The Stage as a Classroom

1989 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-15
Author(s):  
Fred Smoller
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Morality Play ◽  
Freshmen Seminar ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Old Men

Orange—In a play that recalled one of the darker moments in U.S. history, an Army Colonel walked across a dimly lighted stage Monday, handed a pistol to a lieutenant and ordered the man to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger.“You can't be serious,” stammered the horrified lieutenant as his superior officer loudly repeated the order.Upset and confused, the lieutenant let an awkward moment of silence pass, then he quietly told the colonel, a prosecutor: “I can't do it.”So went the chilling climax of a morality play at Chapman College's Waltmar Theater on Monday as students from the freshmen seminar program moved the study of war and peace out of the classroom onto the stage….This is how a local paper reported a play my class wrote and performed about the court martial of Lt. William Calley. As you may recall, William Calley was the Army Lieutenant who, during the height of the Vietnam war, led his platoon into MyLai 4, a small village in South Vietnam. Expecting to find heavily fortified North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, Calley and his men instead encountered several hundred South Vietnamese civilians, most of them old men, women, children, and babies. The civilians were herded into groups. They were then shot. Calley was later court martialled in one of the most controversial trials in our nation's history.

Breaker of Armies: Air Power in the Easter Offensive and the Myth of Linebacker I and II in the Vietnam War

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Haun ◽  
Colin Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Control System ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Air Power ◽  
The North ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
Air Control

Most traditional accounts identify the Linebacker I and Linebacker II campaigns as the most effective and consequential uses of U.S. air power in the Vietnam War. They argue that deep interdiction in North Vietnam played a central role in the defeat of the Easter Offensive and that subsequent strategic attacks on Hanoi forced the North Vietnamese to accept the Paris accords. These conclusions are false. The Linebacker campaigns were rather ineffective in either stopping the Communist offensive or compelling concessions. The most effective and consequential use of U.S. air power came in the form of close air support and battlefield air interdiction directly attacking the North Vietnamese Army in South Vietnam. The success of these air strikes hinged on the presence of a U.S.-operated tactical air control system that incorporated small numbers of ground advisers, air liaison officers, and forward air controllers. This system, combined with abundant U.S. aircraft and a reasonably effective allied army, was the key to breaking the Easter Offensive and compelling Hanoi to agree to the Paris accords. The effectiveness of close air support and battlefield air interdiction and the failure of deep interdiction and strategic attack in the Vietnam War have important implications for the use of air power and advisers in contemporary conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.

The Vietnam War and American Military Strategy, 1965–1973

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory A. Daddis
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Military Strategy ◽  
True Nature ◽  
American Military ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War

For nearly a decade, American combat soldiers fought in South Vietnam to help sustain an independent, noncommunist nation in Southeast Asia. After U.S. troops departed in 1973, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 prompted a lasting search to explain the United States’ first lost war. Historians of the conflict and participants alike have since critiqued the ways in which civilian policymakers and uniformed leaders applied—some argued misapplied—military power that led to such an undesirable political outcome. While some claimed U.S. politicians failed to commit their nation’s full military might to a limited war, others contended that most officers fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the war they were fighting. Still others argued “winning” was essentially impossible given the true nature of a struggle over Vietnamese national identity in the postcolonial era. On their own, none of these arguments fully satisfy. Contemporary policymakers clearly understood the difficulties of waging a war in Southeast Asia against an enemy committed to national liberation. Yet the faith of these Americans in their power to resolve deep-seated local and regional sociopolitical problems eclipsed the possibility there might be limits to that power. By asking military strategists to simultaneously fight a war and build a nation, senior U.S. policymakers had asked too much of those crafting military strategy to deliver on overly ambitious political objectives. In the end, the Vietnam War exposed the limits of what American military power could achieve in the Cold War era.

China and the Escalation of the Vietnam War: The First Years of the Johnson Administration

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mao Lin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
The West ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Vietnam War

This article reexamines how concerns about China contributed to the escalation of the Vietnam War during the first years of Lyndon Johnson's administration. Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam to protect America's global credibility as the leader and defender of the non-Communist world in the face of the threat posed by China's “wars of national liberation” strategy in Vietnam. U.S. officials evaluated this threat in the context of the broadening Sino-Soviet split. The concern in Washington was that if Hanoi, a regime openly supported by Beijing as a star in the “wars of national liberation,” were to take over South Vietnam, the Soviet Union might then be forced to discard the “peaceful coexistence” principle and the incipient détente with the West. The escalation in Vietnam was spurred largely by apprehension that a failure to contain China in Vietnam might prompt the Soviet Union to shift back to a hard line toward the West.

Vietnam: Mr. Johnson's War—or Mr. Eisenhower's?

2003 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Cuddy
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
The Real ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Primary Responsibility ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Clean Break

Conventional wisdom pins responsibility for the Vietnam War primarily on Lyndon B. Johnson. This essay presents a revisionist argument, attempting to shift primary responsibility for the war on President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The case rests heavily on John F. Kennedy's challenge to historians: “How the hell” can they evaluate presidential performances unless they know the “real pressures” and the “real alternatives” confronting the occupiers of the Oval Office. In assessing those pressures, this essay concludes that Eisenhower had the unique luxury of a clean break from President Truman's commitments, thanks to the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu, and a clear-cut alternative provided by the Geneva Accords. Unfortunately, Eisenhower chose to ignore the Accords, committed America to South Vietnam, and played a major role, during and after his presidency, in creating the heavy pressures that shaped Johnson's Vietnam decisions.

Long Distance Casualty Transportation and Treatment in the Vietnam War

1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-57
Author(s):  
Arthur B. Tarrow
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Field Hospital ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Combat Aircraft ◽  
The Vietnam War

At the beginning of many of its armed conflicts, the United States has found itself unprepared for large numbers of casualties. The Vietnam War was no exception. In August 1965, Marines landed at Chu Lai, just south of Danang in South Vietnam, for their first major unit combat effort. They suffered more casualties than anticipated. They were cared for by Navy physicians and corpsmen in the combat area and then flown by helicopter to the Danang airbase. There, they were further triaged in a small field hospital, which quickly became saturated with those casualties which could not be moved. Those less seriously wounded and those who could be made transportable were flown directly to Clark Airforce Base in the Philippines by C130 combat aircraft, a flight of approximately 3 hours. They arrived unwashed, in their combat gear, with weapons on the litters. A C130 aircraft carries 72 litter casualties when fully loaded. At Clark AFB, after word had been received of the combat action, all patients, who could be discharged, were sent out. All personnel at the base, including wives and dependents, were mobilized to help at the hospital. They washed and moved the casualties as they arrived.

Refugee Assets

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
Long T. Bui
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Past Wrongs

This chapter explores the challenges of memory work for Vietnamese diasporic subjects in the face of postwar historical amnesia and trauma. It analyzes Aimee Phan’s The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, which tells the story of two families that fled from the Vietnam War still grappling with the messiness of their war-torn past. Offering a powerful analytic for situating gendered practices of remembering and forgetting by mostly women, the term “reeducation” suggests that refugee memory work never simply takes the form of nostalgia or denial of the past but is a constant negotiation of history as interpreted through past wrongs or obligations. As a hermeneutic for critically reading the refugee as a figure of debt, “reeducation” links the programmatic indoctrination of South Vietnamese political prisoners by communists to the Western pedagogical program to civilize refugees from South Vietnam, recognizing the psychic and material debt survivors of war owe to the sacrifices and suffering of others, and the political agency found in that recognition.

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