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.

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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Long T. Bui
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Heuristic Device ◽  
Critical Refugee Studies ◽  
The Cold War

The introduction presents the book’s main argument, theoretical framework, and primary research questions. It provides a brief summary of the second Indochinese War or the Vietnam War and how the Republic of Vietnam came into being. It then discusses the Nixon strategy to “Vietnamize” the war in 1969, arguing that the term Vietnamization provides a productive term to interrogate the gendered racial logics of U.S. imperialism during the Cold War in Southeast Asia and its relationship with foreign allies. The chapter first begins with how the twenty-first century offers a generational lapse and new historical occasion to reflect upon the Vietnam War. It then offers a theorization of Vietnamization as a heuristic device to elaborate why cultural memory and discourse surrounding the Vietnam War remain conflicted as tied to the collapse of South Vietnam and its inability to protect and save itself. Vietnamization serves as a critical vocabulary for imagining the “arrested future” or delayed moment of freedom/liberation for American allies, shaping postwar ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and emancipation. As a critical refugee studies project, the book is situated and contextualized within larger debates in Asian American cultural studies and criticism over war. Finally, the introduction provides an elaboration of relevant scholarship under way in this field of history and memory. It explains why it is important to conduct research in the United States, Vietnam, and the Vietnamese American community discussing the geopolitical dimensions of refugee culture and consciousness.

Colonial Intimacies and Counterinsurgency

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simeon Man
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Hearts And Minds ◽  
Race War ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Anticolonial Nationalism

This chapter reconsiders the origins of the Vietnam War by foregrounding U.S.-Philippine colonial history. It discusses the U.S. counterinsurgency in South Vietnam in 1954–1956 that mobilized the intimacies of Filipino doctors, nurses, and veterans to help win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. Their military, affective, and ideological labor, I argue, was crucial to the U.S. effort to depict counterinsurgency as a benevolent enterprise, antithetical to a colonial race war. At the same time, these efforts could not contain the rising tide of anticolonial nationalism in the Philippines and South Vietnam that emerged by the end of the 1950s.

Origins of the Vietnam War

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica M. Chapman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Road ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Vietnam War

The origins of the Vietnam War can be traced to France’s colonization of Indochina in the late 1880s. The Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, emerged as the dominant anti-colonial movement by the end of World War II, though Viet Minh leaders encountered difficulties as they tried to consolidate their power on the eve of the First Indochina War against France. While that war was, initially, a war of decolonization, it became a central battleground of the Cold War by 1950. The lines of future conflict were drawn that year when the Peoples Republic of China and the Soviet Union recognized and provided aid to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi, followed almost immediately by Washington’s recognition of the State of Vietnam in Saigon. From that point on, American involvement in Vietnam was most often explained in terms of the Domino Theory, articulated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the eve of the Geneva Conference of 1954. The Franco-Viet Minh ceasefire reached at Geneva divided Vietnam in two at the 17th parallel, with countrywide reunification elections slated for the summer of 1956. However, the United States and its client, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to participate in talks preparatory to those elections, preferring instead to build South Vietnam as a non-communist bastion. While the Vietnamese communist party, known as the Vietnam Worker’s Party in Hanoi, initially hoped to reunify the country by peaceful means, it reached the conclusion by 1959 that violent revolution would be necessary to bring down the “American imperialists and their lackeys.” In 1960, the party formed the National Liberation Front for Vietnam and, following Diem’s assassination in 1963, passed a resolution to wage all-out war in the south in an effort to claim victory before the United States committed combat troops. After President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he responded to deteriorating conditions in South Vietnam by militarizing the American commitment, though he stopped short of introducing dedicated ground troops. After Diem and Kennedy were assassinated in quick succession in November 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson took office determined to avoid defeat in Vietnam, but hoping to prevent the issue from interfering with his domestic political agenda. As the situation in South Vietnam became more dire, LBJ found himself unable to maintain the middle-of-the-road approach that Kennedy had pursued. Forced to choose between escalation and withdrawal, he chose the former in March 1965 by launching a sustained campaign of aerial bombardment, coupled with the introduction of the first officially designated U.S. combat forces to Vietnam.

scholarly journals From Geneva to Geneva: A Discourse on Geo-Political Dimension of Conflict in Laos: 1954–1962

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patit Paban Mishra
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Constant Feature ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
Geneva Conference ◽  
External Actors

During the cold war period, the problem of Laos was exacerbated due to strategic location of Laos and national interest of external actors. The present paper would analyze various ramifications of the conflict in Laos. Beginning from First Indochina War (1946-1954), fate of Laos was linked very closely with that of Vietnam. With the escalation of conflict, a solution to problem of Laos was nowhere in sight. The Geneva Conference of 1954 did not solve the problem. The three major strands in Laos; Pathet Lao, neutralists and the rightists became a constant feature of Lao politics. Both the United States and North Vietnam came into conflict, as they were committed to help their respective allies in Laos, and regarded the other’s action in Laos as harmful to their interest in South Vietnam. An agreement on Laos became contingent upon ending the war in Vietnam. The net result of outside intervention was prolongation of conflict in Laos. A solution to Lao conflict was in sight after the Geneva accords of 1962. However, the gradual linkage of the country with the Vietnam War made the solution of dependent upon the outcome of conflict in Vietnam. Laos was going to be embroiled in the Vietnam War and there was no peace in sight unless a solution was there in Vietnam. Laos became a sideshow in Vietnam War.  

The Vietnam War in Film

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Shin Huey Chong
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
War Film

As a war that was not supposed to be a war—the United States never formally declared it as such—and yet was already the second in a series of wars—the first being the anticolonial war against the French that won Vietnam its independence—the Vietnam War is just as hard to pin down cinematically as it is historically. Although it is now recognized as a major film genre in US cinema, the category of the Vietnam War film can also include representations of Southeast Asia during French colonialism, the brief decades of independence before the entrance of US troops, and the long legacy of the war in terms of refugee crisis, political unrest, genocide, PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), and protest. Not only Vietnamese but all of the peoples formerly grouped under the banner of French Indochina—including Cambodians and Laotians—were dragged into the war as willing or unwitting participants, and their experiences of combat and its aftermath are as integral to the Vietnam War film as those of the American soldiers that typically dominate the genre. The region of Southeast Asia beyond French Indochina—Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong—is also significant, both to the history of the war (as political allies, or hosts of military bases or refugee camps) and to the history of the film genre (as locations for filming, or sources for extras or actors or technical support). Outside of Southeast Asia, other nations such as the former USSR, Canada, Australia, France, and South Korea also played a part in the war, sending soldiers to the war or taking in Vietnamese, Cambodian, or Laotian refugees after the war, and these links also yielded further contributions to the Vietnam War film genre from these national cinema industries. The Vietnam War fueled many protest movements and forms of activism, becoming part of a larger, global post-1968 debate about imperialism, racism, capitalism, and militarism in many countries, and so the vigorous protests against the war also became a visible part of the film genre, especially in documentary filmmaking. As the direct survivors of the Vietnam War era begin to be supplanted by a second and even third generation for whom the war is a historical footnote, the legacy of the Vietnam War genre becomes dispersed into the larger genealogies of national cinemas and cultural memory industries, as the children of war veterans and refugees and protestors return to Southeast Asia armed with cameras and capital. Their attention is directed not only backward in time—excavating family or national histories—but also forward, forging new Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, French, Australian, and American cinemas that are indelibly marked by the Vietnam War but no longer obsessed with representing it as such.

Recent Accounts of the Vietnam War—A Review Article

1985 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-348
Author(s):  
Edwin E. Moise
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Television History ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Public Broadcasting Service ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Vietnam War

AbstractsThe Public Broadcasting Service series Vietnam: A Television History is generally sound, and commendably willing to present opinions and judgments on controversial issues.Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History presents important new information but gives inadequate attention to some fundamental issues; James Harrison's The Endless War contains less original material but deals better with fundamental issues, including the nature and sources of Communist strength in Vietnam.R. B. Smith, Revolution versus Containment, 1955–1961, volume 1 of An International History of the Vietnam War, tries to cover too much in a short book. Some of the conclusions are not adequately proven.Ronald Spector's Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–1960 (the first volume of the United States Army's official history of the Vietnam War) is useful, especially for the periods 1944–1945 and 1956–1960. It slightly exaggerates the speed with which Communist guerrilla warfare developed in South Vietnam between 1957 and 1960.

From Escalation in Vietnam to Sino-American Rapprochement, 1964–72

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
People's Republic Of China ◽  
Coercive Diplomacy ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Vietnam War

This chapter examines how Sino-Soviet tensions served the United States' regional and global interests and facilitated rapprochement between Washington and Beijing during the period 1964–1972. The competition between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China for the loyalties of the Vietnamese communists would begin in earnest following U.S. escalation in the Vietnam War from late 1964 to early 1965. Ho Chi Minh was able to exploit Chinese and Soviet jealousies of one another to gain maximum support for his revolutionary goals in South Vietnam. From 1965 until early 1968 the rivalry between Beijing and Moscow also served to scuttle multiple Soviet-inspired proposals for peace talks between the Vietnamese communists and the United States. The chapter shows how the intensifying disillusionment and competition between the Soviets and the Chinese rendered the containment of communism through coercive diplomacy more difficult for the United States, particularly in Indochina.

Vietnam War in Hollywood Feature Films

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Luhrssen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Box Office ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
North Vietnam ◽  
North And South

Vietnam was the focal point of a larger set of conflicts that broke out in Indo-China in 1945 and resulted by 1975 with Cambodia and Laos as well as Vietnam falling under the rule of various Communist parties. The first Vietnam War (1945–1954) pitted French colonists and their local allies against Vietnamese Communist rebels. It ended with the French withdrawal from Indo-China and the partition of Vietnam into two states, Communist North Vietnam and pro-Western South Vietnam. In the second Vietnam War (1955–1975), North Vietnam and Communist rebels in the south fought against the US-backed South Vietnamese regime. No conflict in American history since the Civil War was as divisive as Vietnam, yet the war was widely supported until US ground forces entered the fray (1965). Mounting casualties and the threat of conscription fueled a growing antiwar movement that forced Washington to find a way out of the war. After the United States withdrew in 1973, Communist forces overran South Vietnam and reunited the country under their rule in 1975. Films about the Vietnam War were produced in both North and South Vietnam, the Soviet Union (which armed the North) and South Korea and Australia (both dispatched troops to support the South). With few exceptions, many were seldom seen outside their lands of origin. With Hollywood’s dominance of movie markets in much of the world, American stories about the war dominated the imagination of moviegoers in the United States and most other countries. Hollywood took only slight interest in Vietnam during the war’s early years. The first major motion picture about American combat in Vietnam, John’s Wayne’s pro-war The Green Berets (1968), was a box-office hit but universally derided by critics. With the war’s increasing unpopularity and unsuccessful conclusion, the subject was deemed “box-office poison” by the studios for several years. By the late 1970s a rising generation of filmmakers embraced Vietnam as material for displaying American heroism, explaining the US defeat or exploring the ethical basis for war. The commercial breakthrough for Vietnam War movies was achieved by director Sidney Furie’s The Boys in Company C (1978), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Each reflected in different ways America’s disillusionment and the physical and psychological toll charged to the men who served in the conflict. The theme continued with Platoon (1986), directed by a Vietnam combat veteran, Oliver Stone. A counter-trend appeared with Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series (1982–2019), which amplified the resurgent nationalism that began under the Reagan administration. Providing a third perspective, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) presented the war unemotionally as a fact of history. In the 21st century, movies on the Vietnam War continue to be made, if in diminished number. Characteristic of recent films, We Were Soldiers (2002) validates the experience of US servicemen while honoring the heroism of the enemy.

Vietnam, the Movie: Part Deux

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (2) ◽  
pp. 371-377
Author(s):  
Sylvia Shin Huey Chong
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Military ◽  
Francis Ford Coppola ◽  
Military Equipment ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Hamlet

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (nguyen, sympathizer 179). and so viet thanh nguyen's The Sympathizer invokes Karl Marx's “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” although the reference is just as likely to be Edward Said's Orientalism, since Marx was concerned with political representation (608), whereas Said was concerned with discursive representation (21). These words frame the important middle act of The Sympathizer, one that focuses on the filming of The Hamlet, a mash-up of Hollywood's sins against not only Vietnamese but also Asians and Asian Americans at large. Reading like a morality play crossed with a backstage musical, this section draws on thinly veiled references to Francis Ford Coppola (the Auteur), Marlon Brando (the hespian), and Martin Sheen (the Idol), who drag the narrator from his newly formed Southern Californian refuge and round up a bunch of stray boat people milling around in the Philippines to put on a movie about the Vietnam War. From the recycling of American military equipment originally sold to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the reuse of Vietnamese bodies recently shot at and now en route to the United States as refugees, every aspect of the making of The Hamlet illustrates the dangers of allowing oneself to be represented by others. More subtly, The Sympathizer shows how difficult it is to intervene in this regime of representation, especially in the name of authenticity, as it is often deployed by protestors against stereotypes in the media. But if we situate the section on The Hamlet within the overall narrative of The Sympathizer and also in Nguyen's larger critique of memory industries as war industries, we must also understand that the content of the ilm is less important than the dynamics of spectatorship. By linking the narrator's quixotic quest to subvert this film with his repression of his complicity in the rape and torture of a communist agent during the narrator's days as a mole in the South Vietnamese police, Nguyen suggests that watching the Vietnam War is potentially as dangerous as ighting in (or misrepresenting) the war.

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