Unit 5 - Blog Query (2) - France and the US in Vietnam

Blog (2): Based on your viewing of the film and the Unit 5 online lecture material, how would you compare or contrast the French and American experiences in Vientam?

Absolutely and fundamentally different.

The French were in Indochina to sustain, as the British did, a business venture that seemed quite attractive. It was not a battle against what was considered an “evil” form of social organization or government. The French weren’t there to spread Western Enlightenment (although that argument was made, as an afterthought.)

The US was there for different reasons. It did not commit hundreds of thousands of US troops to the area to save South Vietnam from the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese, it was there because it greatly feared the spread of International Communism, and felt that South Vietnam was the next domino (as in”domino theory,” to fall.) Like the words we hear today – fight terrorism there, today, or fight it tomorrow in our back yard, we were intent upon looking after our own interests over there.

As it turns out the domino theory didn’t become reality, Communism spread and, in effect, petered out. China is still a Communist Nation, the Soviet Union dissolved into a bunch of countries with different forms of government, including Russia. Even Cuba is likely to slowly become something other than a Communist nation over the next decade or two.

In the meantime, the US (and some of its allies) went on to lose almost 60,000 men and women in the war, suffer hundreds of thousands of wounded, killed untold hundreds of thousands of North and South Vietnamese, wasted the North and South with bombing and defoliants and Agent Orange, and it was probably all for nothing.

We may be doing much the same in the Middle East, today, in Iraq. Afghanistan might be a bit different, but that remains to be seen, too. Islamic Fundamentalism may have replaced the Red Menace, but we always seem to have a "World Class" enemy to fight...