The American War in Vietnam. John Marciano
months in active military service as a member of … the Marine Corps.… And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.… I helped make Mexico … safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of a half-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.25
This actual history is, and remains, the essence of U.S. policy abroad—always hidden by the Noble Cause principle. According to the late writer and activist Mike Marqusee, public belief in this principle “obstructs knowledge and understanding of United States history and the pattern of its involvements abroad,” especially the fact that it acts “like any other imperial power, on the basis of self-interest.” U.S. interventions abroad are “presented as an altruistic response to a crisis. Since there is no American empire, no pattern, no habit, or system of extraterritorial domination, the motive for each intervention is assessed at face value,” thus denying the actual record. Marqusee laments the U.S. Noble Cause: “Culturally, emotionally, [belief in this principle] curtails human solidarity. More than ever, ‘America’ is a prison that the U.S. citizenry needs to break out of—in its own interest and in the interests of the victims of U.S. policy.”26
The Noble Cause principle cannot stand up to the endless violence that spans nearly 240 years of United States history—or more than four hundred years if the count begins with Colonial settler wars against Native Americans. This history is the context within which to understand the American war in Vietnam.
2
French Colonialism and the Origins of the American War in Vietnam
In August 1850 “a French naval squadron … attacked the port city of Da Nang.… This started a war of colonial conquest that, aided by the politics of appeasement by the Vietnamese court, resulted in the takeover of the country in stages until its total annexation by the French in 1884.”1 In keeping with their long history of struggle against invasions by the Chinese, Mongols, and Japanese, the Vietnamese resisted French colonialism.
Despite this history of resistance to foreign invaders, French colonialism “totally humbled the Vietnamese state and deeply humiliated the people,” writes historian and former Marine Corps intelligence officer David G. Marr. France’s economic policies put new pressures on the peasantry, who were “exposed as never before to the depredations of money lenders and collaborator landlords.” French exports forced more Vietnamese to deal with the “impersonal fluctuations of the imperialist world market.” Though the profound changes brought by French colonialism led to a great deal of “covert intellectual and political ferment,” this ferment was not organized into a systematic and powerful resistance force until 1941, when the Indochinese Communist party (ICP) under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh (meaning “He Who Enlightens”) met and founded the Vietnamese Independence League (Viet Minh). They would lead the Vietnamese to “victory in the August 1945 Revolution and effective leadership of the anticolonial struggle in Vietnam.”2
French colonial rule was brutal and violent, especially for peasants. It also antagonized the small but influential group of Western-educated (mostly in France) Vietnamese who played an important role in the nationalist movement that emerged after the First World War. But French suppression of anticolonial efforts drove these Vietnamese nationalists underground. After 1930, the Indochinese Communist Party led the underground movement, under the leadership of Ho, who would become the greatest figure in the Vietnamese independence struggle. A nationalist and Communist, he had spent thirty years away from his native Vietnam living in England, where he championed independence for Ireland; in France, where he became a founder of the French Communist Party; in the Soviet Union; and in China. Continually imprisoned for his revolutionary efforts, he helped to build a core of guerrilla fighters led by the former history teacher General Vo Nguyen Giap, who would lead the Vietnamese military until the end of the American war in 1975.
During his stay in France, Ho Chi Minh became the spokesman for Vietnamese independence. In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War, he led a group of Vietnamese who attempted to petition the Allied leaders attending, especially U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. According to historian Mark Lawrence, they wished to have Wilson “honor the principle of self-determination that … [he] had repeatedly avowed during the war.” Wilson and the other powerful officials ignored Ho Chi Minh’s relatively modest appeal, however, “just as they ignored similar demands from groups representing other colonized peoples.”3
Historian Bernard Fall, the eminent and highly influential French military scholar who was killed in Vietnam in 1967 on patrol with U.S. Marines, states that Ho was brushed off by many aides when he tried to see Wilson, and “finally gave up in despair. He realized that his hopes of “a ‘liberal’ solution for his country” were dead, and he saw “what the other unsuccessful petitioners were muttering among themselves—the Irish in the lead—armed revolution was the answer.”4
The Paris experience profoundly affected Ho, and he looked for alternatives to help the anti-colonial struggle. He joined the French Socialist Party, but “quickly grew discouraged by the party’s lack of interest in colonial problems” and was influenced by the Communists in the newly formed Soviet Union. He became a founder of the French Communist Party in 1920 and was invited to live and study in Moscow. Lawrence writes that Ho had a mixed experience in the Soviet Union, commencing “an ambivalent relationship with communist powers” that continued for the rest of his life. He also had to deal with the “pervasive scorn” Soviet leaders felt toward agricultural societies such as Vietnam.5
From the beginning, French colonialism rested on economic exploitation, but justified it with the argument that it helped the Vietnamese materially and morally. Like all other colonial rulers, the French believed that they were civilizing people even while they brutally exploited Vietnamese workers. More than one in four rubber workers died laboring on the harshest plantations and those who ran away faced execution. This colonial rule, therefore, profoundly changed life for the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese, while it enriched the small elite who worked as colonial administrators for the French. The peasants suffered greatly, and the disparity between the wealthy few and the many poor grew. Out of this oppression, however, arose a militant, Communist-led nationalist movement that would eventually defeat French colonialism.6
Brutal prison conditions were a key aspect of this harsh rule, according to historian Peter Zinoman. This brutality backfired for the French, however, as these prisons became places of resistance for a growing and militant Communist Party that organized thousands of jailed activists in political education and action. These inmates “contributed decisively” to the revolutionary movement throughout Vietnam, providing a base for later military struggle against the French after the formation of the Viet Minh. Released, escaped, and amnestied prisoners became the “hardened core of disciplined, experienced, and fiercely loyal cadres skilled in the arts of underground organization.”7
The 1930s brought a “dramatic expansion of anticolonial policies in Indochina. It was reflected in the rise of labor activism, the flowering of the radical press, the growth of the Communist Party, the formation of hundreds of popular Action Committees, and a campaign to establish an Indochinese Congress.” These efforts were led by thousands of former political prisoners, many of whom were released in 1939 as part of a widespread amnesty policy implemented by the new French Popular (Left) Front government.8
During the Second World War, the French administered the country for the Japanese, and the colonial prison “resumed its role as a focal point of anticolonial activism” as thousands of Communist Party members were imprisoned. As during the early 1930s, this led to a resumption of agitation as political prisoners renewed their organizational and political work. Once again, the