Long read | Vietnam, 1968 and what lies ahead of us

Fifty years ago the US war on Vietnam came to and end. Over 50,000 United States troops had died, and over 3 million Vietnamese people. Millions joined the fight to stop the war – and that fight led to an explosion of struggle in 1968 which changed the world. Jonathan Neale was part of that movement, and he tells a story still relevant now.

On 30 April 1975, just over fifty years ago, Communist led insurgents took Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and overthrew the American backed regime. Thirty years of war came to an end. 

I’m writing this article because it didn’t happen like they told you it did. 

The hot global war

The Vietnam War was the central event in the long Cold War between capitalist and communist governments from 1945 to 1989. ‘Communist’ here means countries like the Soviet Union under Stalin and those who took over after he died. You’ll understand the Cold War better, though, if you think of it as a long hot global civil war.

During those years there were wars in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya, Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Algeria, Yemen, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, Guinea Bissau, Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.

In addition, there were interventions and occupations by the armed forces of the United States (many times), Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Libya, Tanzania, Egypt, India, South Korea, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Australia and apartheid South Africa. Most of these wars were very bloody. Most were anti-colonial wars, and the liberation forces almost always won in the end. The most important of these wars was Vietnam. 

The war against the French

What the Vietnamese call the American War lasted from 1960 to 1975. Before that was the French War, from 1945 to 1954. Vietnam had been a French colony since the nineteenth century. During World War Two, Japan occupied Vietnam. At the tail end of the war, the Japanese army created a famine in northern Vietnam by diverting food to help their war effort. A million people starved to death that year. A few small bands of communist led guerillas, the Viet Minh, had been hiding in the forests. As the famine began, they moved on the northern city of Hanoi and led people in attacks on the grain silos. They could not stop the famine. But the Viet Minh became the leaders of a national uprising against the returning French colonial power.

The war began in the cities, but the Viet Minh were almost immediately driven out. It became a peasant war, even more a land war than an independence struggle. French colonialism had transformed farming. Some of the land was taken for settler plantations. In the other villages, there was a massive increase in inequality, with a small number of rich Vietnamese landlords. The communists built organised support, village by village, relying on the middle and poorer peasants. The promise was land. If the communists won, the land would be shared out, and the income of most of the peasants would double. Workers or small farmers anywhere in the world today would be willing to fight for a movement that would double their income. But for really poor people, worrying about hunger, frightened that their children will die of disease, a doubling of income is the difference between life and death.

It was also a proxy war in the global civil war. The capitalist United States backed France and communist Russia and China backed the Viet Minh guerillas. People often get confused about proxy wars these days. The thing to remember is that every proxy war is simultaneously a bloodbath between the actual combatants. And the people on the ground are not necessarily fighting and dying for the same things their sponsors value. 

Russian and Chinese arms had been essential to the Viet Minh victory. But once the peace negotiations started, the balance shifted. The negotiations were rolled into the negotiations in Geneva between the United States, Russia and China that ended the Korean War. The big powers agreed that Korea and Vietnam would each be partitioned between two states. North Vietnam would be a communist dictatorship, backed by Russia and China, with a great deal of popular support. South Vietnam would be a capitalist dictatorship backed by the United States, with some popular support but not a great deal. 

The killing in the South

Vietnam was partitioned in 1954. Some of the communists in the south went north, but most of them stayed in their home villages. The US backed dictatorship began arresting, torturing and often executing them. This was unspeakably cruel, but there was a logic. The regime was supported by the landlords, and supported them in return. During the war against the French the peasants had won control of the villages. Even under a right wing regime, the landlords had to scramble to keep control of their land. The regime’s terror was brutal because the memory of hope was strong.

The surviving communist cadre in the south begged the communist leadership in the north to authorise a new uprising and a new land war. Ho Chi Minh and the leadership in the north stuck to the Russian and Chinese line and forbade a new uprising. The southern communists, deeply disciplined, did as they were told.

By 1960 at least 90 per cent of the communist activists in the south had been arrested. Many had been tortured, most remained in detention, and a substantial proportion had been killed. Then, finally, against instructions from the north, the communists in the villages in the south launched a new land war. The ultimate aim was to overthrow the southern regime. The immediate tactic was to drive the landlords out of the villages.

This was an uprising from below. It worked. Between 1960 and 1965 the communist led guerillas took over village after village. The leadership under Ho Chi Minh in the north hated the peace agreement forced on them. They began to support their southern comrades and then began to lead them. By 1965 the guerillas were on the brink of victory. Then the United States intervened with massive force.

The American invasion

When the rising began in 1960 President Eisenhower sent 15,000 troops to back the Southern regime. As the war ground on, President Kennedy and then President Johnson sent more, until there were 50,000 American troops in the country. In 1965 there was a long debate between the US military and foreign policy leaders over several weeks in the White House. All but one of Jack Kennedy’s appointees argued for a massive intervention in Vietnam. Two men held out – MacGeorge Bundy and President Lyndon Johnson. (We know what was said because Johnson, like Nixon, secretly recorded the meetings in his office.)

Kennedy’s men (everybody was a man back then) argued the ‘domino theory’. This referred to what happens if one domino falls over in a line of standing dominos, and the others fall over one by one. The idea was that a communist, peasant led, uprising that transformed the economic lives of Vietnamese people would encourage similar regime overthrows in other countries, and the US would begin to lose the global civil war. Other countries would follow. Or as Che Guevara had said in a conference in Havana: ‘One, Two, Three, Many Vietnams.’

American historians since have rubbished the domino theory and claimed that the Vietnamese rising was only an anti-colonial movement, and the US could live with that. By the end of the war, in 1975, there would be no falling dominos. But that was after fifteen years of war and two to three million dead. In 1965, though, there was still a communist movement of millions in neighbouring Indonesia. And Indonesia, a far larger country, mattered in a way Vietnam did not. Some Marxists try to explain the US intervention (invasion, really) as a grab for oil or mineral resources. But south Vietnam was a small and economically unimportant country. The only export of any importance was rice. 

There is a kind of Marxism which always looks for explanations of conflict in terms of economic competition between imperial powers. Such competitions matter, sure. But at the heart of my kind of Marxism is the idea that all history is the history of class. And that is what was happening here. The government of the richest and most powerful country on earth invaded to prevent a victory by poor country people who worked with their hands over their landlords and a military dictatorship.

A cruel air war

In the spring of 1965 Johnson gave in and sent half a million American troops to a country of twenty million. The communists based their strategy on guerilla units who hid among the people, or in the forests near the villages. The people fed the guerillas. It was a ‘people’s war’. The US military did not have popular support in Vietnam. They did have overwhelming firepower from the skies. The problem for the US army was how to get at the hidden guerillas. The solution was to use the American soldiers and marines as bait. The American troops went out on patrol through the villages, the fields and the forests in small units, sometimes a platoon, sometimes a few platoons. They waited for the guerillas to attack from ambush. When the guerillas started to fire, the Americans scrambled for shelter and dug in. Then they called in on their radios for support from helicopters and planes. Machine guns, napalm – a burning gel that keeps burning after it sticks to a person’s skin – and bombs rained down.

For the American soldiers, this was terrifying, but also a demeaning new kind of war. That would be important, later, as we shall see. For the Vietnamese people in the country, it was terrifying, and endless. The deep truth of what happened in the land was that the people of that place, men, women and children, fought on for ten years, under endless assault. They were a people and a class at war. Their courage, and their belief in another world, was a wonderful thing, and their suffering was terrible.

The second part of the Pentagon’s strategy was the body count. Every unit, every day, counted up the bodies they had killed, and the totals were averaged together on the ground, and then sent to headquarters and added together, and added again at the US embassy in Saigon, and the grand daily total on the desk of the Secretary of Defence in Washington every morning. The body count was the idea that endless grief would break resistance made flesh. Many US units made up the numbers, as people do everywhere with quotas. In several different places there are reports of officers insisting that soldiers verify their kill by bringing in severed ears, and the ears being counted on the table.

The third arm of the strategy was the bombing from the air of the neighbouring countries of Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. There were civil wars between communist guerillas in Laos and Cambodia too. The Americans bombed only the southern part of North Vietnam. North of the Red River there were many Chinese soldiers. Estimates at the time were about 200,000. More recent estimates are 300,000. They stood there to protect North Vietnam from American invasion, a clear warning that the reply would be war with China, and the Americans would lose that war. 

The US government knew they were there but said nothing in public. But there was relentless bombing south of the Red River. Much of it was directed at schools and hospitals, for the simple reason that these were the only buildings of any size in the countryside, and the pilots could not bear only to burn and kill grass thatched huts. Estimates vary, but between two and three million people would die in the war in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. A solid majority died by being bombed from the air.

This was a class war. Air wars between great industrial powers and poor peasants are always class wars. One side owns and controls great industrial might which enables bombing from the air. The other side has rifles, sharpened stakes, small homemade bombs and cheap sandals. A war between the planes and the people is always a class war. So it was in Vietnam, so it was in Afghanistan, and so it is in Gaza. Behind all the rhetoric and the talk of God and Lenin, freedom and secularism, behind all the political confusion, stands the simple fact that the rich are burning the poor alive once more. 

Anti-war Americans

In retrospect, it’s astonishing how quickly the majority of Americans turned against the war. Half a million troops flew into Vietnam in the summer of 1965. By the autumn of 1967, the opinion polls said that a majority of Americans were against continuing the war. It should not have been surprising. There is a persisting myth that Americans are warlike patriots. But the US joined World War One almost at the end. The reason was that most Americans opposed joining the war, and Woodrow Wilson had won re-election as president by promising not to take the US into the European war.

The US joined the next World War two years later, because Franklin Roosevelt had won re-election by promising not to take the US into that war either. The Korean War was fought during the height of the Red Scare, and no one in the US dared to oppose that war publicly. Within two years, though, the opinion polls showed a majority against the war. General Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952 in part by promising to end the war in Korea, which he then did. 

The teach-ins

In March 1965, three weeks before Johnson sent half a million troops to Vietnam, thirty teachers at Michigan, a public university in a union state, met. They decided to stop all classes for a day and make the university ‘a massive classroom against the war.’ The university administration got heavy, and the teachers wanted to back down. Marshall Sahlins, a young anthropology instructor suggested a compromise – something called a teach-in. The teachers invited students to come to a discussion after class. Three thousand students showed up and debated the war until 8 am the next morning. 

There were teach-ins on more than a hundred campuses that spring. At Berkeley in California the teach-in lasted three days and 36,000 attended at one point or another. Students for a Democratic Society organised a national demonstration in Washington and 25,000 protestors came. The organisers were ecstatic. The numbers were beyond their wildest dreams. 

Now 25,000 seems tiny. But it meant the dam had broken. During the Korean War there had been no protests. The civil rights movement had changed America in two ways. First, those marchers had broken the hold of anti-communism. Secondly, all the protesters could see that Vietnam was, among other things, a racist war. 

From 1965 to 1967 the anti-war movement was concentrated in the universities and colleges for a simple reason. Young men were the people who would have to fight. And colleges were full of young people. But it was also possible for students to imagine their activism because black students had been so central to the civil rights movement. Now, many people assume that students wanted to avoid fighting in Vietnam because they might die. Sure, some felt that way. But for most of us, we just felt the war was wrong.

The Tet Offensive

Then came the global explosion of 1968. It began in Vietnam with the Tet offensive in January. Tet was the traditional Vietnamese New Year holiday. This year the communist led movement, the National Liberation Front (NLF), launched an armed uprising in the cities. This was concentrated in Saigon and in Hue, South Vietnam’s second city. 

Up until that moment the struggle had all been in the countryside. In the cities American soldiers and civilians were able to wander through the streets, whooping it up in bars. This is hard to imagine now, because it was impossible for the American occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it’s also a sign that there was some support for the South Vietnamese dictatorship. Over the years from 1960 to 1975, 250,000 people died fighting in the army of the South Vietnamese regime. Admittedly, it was a conscript army. But still, this was a civil war in Vietnam as well as a struggle against the Americans.

The American and South Vietnamese military crushed the uprising. The NLF was driven out of Saigon almost immediately. In Hue they held on for more than two weeks with desperate bravery, but were defeated. The military consequence was a catastrophe for the guerillas. Bao Ninh was a North Vietnamese soldier in the Tet offensive. Years later, he wrote The Sorrow of War, one of the great war novels of the last century. There he describes in hallucinatory detail the terror of the retreats that followed the offensive. Tet was a military defeat. It was a political victory for the communists. 

Public opinion had already turned against the war in the US. The student-led protests were growing. And the American war reporters for the TV networks and the newspapers had turned against the war. Those reporters had all arrived in Vietnam as supporters of the war. As one of them wrote later, neither their employers nor the Pentagon would have allowed them in if they had been against the war. But the reporters spent much of their time talking to the GIs, the American troops. And the GIs educated the reporters. The villagers don’t want us here, the GIs told the reporters. They support the Viet Cong guerillas. Even the kids hate us. What the GIS were saying was mixed in with racism, bitterness, fear and grief. But they were also saying – They don’t want us. This war is morally wrong.

When Tet came the reporters, furious at the betrayal of their faith in the US, told their audiences that this was evidence the Vietnamese did not want the American troops there. And audiences saw the courage of the guerillas. The web of lies that had justified the invasion in the US unravelled. And from that moment 1968, just a year, became the word for a global explosion. 

1968

In February, the month after Tet, Lyndon Johnson lost the first Democratic primary of the 1968 election to an anti-war candidate. Several wise old men of the Democratic Party visited the White House to tell Johnson that the centre of the American ruling class believed the war was unwinnable. Johnson should declare he would not run for president again, and begin negotiating with the Vietnamese. He did both things.

In April, a professional hitman shot Martin Luther King dead. Probably he was hired by some part of the FBI, maybe by the Memphis Police Department, possibly by someone else. We’ll never know. But the millions who loved Doctor King knew it was the work of The Man, and they honoured the memory of that great pacifist in the only way that made sense, with riots in more than a hundred American cities.

In Paris in May it kicked off with a protest at Nanterre, the university for the social sciences in the suburbs, demanding the right for male students to stay overnight in the women’s dorms. Back then this seemed an odd beginning for a general strike. Now we understand better how central movements over gender and sexual liberation can be. The police in Paris attacked the student protestors. The next night fighting shifted to the campus in the centre of the city. The students raised barricades, an enormously powerful historical symbol in Paris. The workers watched, and began to organise in the factories. 

From that came the General Strike, not a poxy one day token shitshow but the real thing, with no end planned until victory. They won union recognition in the factories, something the workers had not had since the thirties. A general election followed, and the Conservatives defeated the Communists. The possibility of revolution was over in France. But no one had expected the barricades and a general strike in Western Europe.

In August Russian (Soviet) tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to prevent the growing opening for democracy in that country. There was no bloodbath, but the resistance was obvious.

In Chicago that month police and protestors fought in the streets outside the Democratic convention, protesting the continuing war. The protestors chanted ‘The Whole Word is Watching’ as they were beaten and gassed. And the whole world was watching. 

And in the background, all through that year, was the Cultural Revolution in China. We did not understand what was really happening there, and even the young Chinese revolutionaries were pretty confused. But all over the world people did see that in the largest country in the world tens of millions of students and workers were rising up for a fairer and more equal world. 

In short, there were uprisings against the system in Western Europe, in the United States, in the Soviet empire, the American empire and in China. All things seemed possible. Resistance exploded around the world in many forms. And women’s liberation was born in 1968, and gay liberation in 1969, and they are still with us, around the world. None of that would have happened without Tet. And that would not have happened without 23 years of courage amid war in the villages of Vietnam. Nor would it have happened if the peasants of the South had not had the courage and vision to launch the land war again in 1960. But Tet would not have meant what it did to the world without the anti-war movement in the US, and without what the GIs had learned and taught the reporters. 

The GIs revolt

From 1968 on American veterans of the war began to organise their own actions and protests. There were open protests and underground newspapers by soldiers, sailors, marines and air force staff on American bases and ships all over the world. Except in Vietnam. It was not safe to demonstrate there. But in 1968 the GIs in Vietnam began ‘fragging’. This was a new word. It meant killing your sergeant or commissioned officer with a fragmentation bomb, a kind of hand grenade. The scenario usually went like this. Remember, the troops were largely used as bait to lure out the guerillas who would then be bombed from the air. This was no job for a warrior. It was dangerous, increasingly they thought the war was wrong, and they did not want to die.

So the men in a combat unit would single out an officer who was gung-ho and regularly led them out on dangerous patrols. Usually they would first give a warning, leaving a fragmentation in his tent. If that did not work, they sometimes give a second warning. The third time the bomb would be primed to explode.

From 1968 on the number of fraggings grew year by year. According to the US Army there were 563 fraggings in 1969 and 1970. From 1970 to 1972 there were 363 army court martials for fragging. These figures do not include the marines. They do not include shootings in camp, or officers shot by their men on patrol. Nor do they include all the times when the officers said nothing and heeded the warning. Fragging worked. The American troops stopped fighting. Resistance was fiercest among the marines, and they were all evacuated in 1971. By 1972 the soldiers had largely ceased fighting, and by the spring of 1973 the last of them were evacuated too.

The threatening and killing of officers was not much reported at the time. It remained dangerous for the men involved to talk about it. And they were not proud. It is a difficult thing to kill one of your own in combat. It was not a story men wanted to tell their children. The army brass absolutely did not want to talk about it. And the anti-war back home knew what would happen if they praised killing officers. But the evidence is extensive now, even if it is not part of the official narratives. We also need to understand – there was no other way to refuse to fight and to stop the war once you were in combat. 

The refusal to fight was also part of a class struggle among Americans. In theory all able bodied American young men were eligible for the draft. But a variety of mechanisms ensured that almost all the enlisted combat troops came from working class families, and mostly from manual workers. The fact they had come to sweat and die and be used as bait in a bad war was their punishment for their place in the American class system. And their resistance was their way of defending themselves in the class struggle.

The students’ strike

In 1968 Hubert Humphry ran for president on the Democratic ticket, promising to continue the war. Richard Nixon, the Republican, promised to end the war but did not say how. Nixon won and continued the war. There were peace negotiations in Paris, endless talking, no progress. More people died after the negotiations began than before.

The American students waited, and waited. Then, in November of 1970, 500,000 protesters marched in Washington. There have been many bigger demos since. But in 1970 it was the largest protest in American history, twice the size of Martin Luther King’s great March on Washington. Crisis was in the air. In April 1971 Nixon reacted by extending the war. He announced on TV that American troops had invaded Cambodia. Student strikes and protests began. At Kent State University in Ohio, the National Guard shot four protesters dead.

I was living in Knoxville, Tennessee that year. I was part of a gaggle of perhaps a hundred long hairs in that town. We saw each other at gigs, at some films and at protests. That week we called a protest at the University. I got there early, and waited, nervous that hardly anyone would come. And then they began to flow into the plaza, in endless waves. Thousands and thousands. It seemed like all the boys had short hair and all the girls had sorority hair. Dick Nixon had told us he had the support of the silent majority. Now we did. 

Roughly 4,350,000 students marched and protested at 1,350 colleges, and 536 colleges went on all-out strikes. In California, Governor Ronald Reagan closed down the whole university system to keep order. The protesters at the university of Tennessee were almost all white. I was teaching at the Black college across town, Knoxville College. Our students were almost all working class. They held back for a few days, saying that the strikes were a white people’s thing. And then they couldn’t stand it any longer. They met in the gym, about 800 out of a student body of 810. They voted to join the national strike, 800 to none. The next morning almost all of them were on the picket lines.

They let the teachers through the picket line if we promised to go to a meeting of our local chapter of the American Association of University Professors. There we voted two-thirds to one-third to join the strike. The college president supported the strike. The board, who turned out to be twelve white Methodist ministers, met and unanimously supported the strike. Nixon withdrew the troops from Cambodia. By the next year all the troops had been withdrawn. By 1975 the southern guerillas and the North Vietnamese army had stormed Saigon, and the country was united.

People change

I was raised mostly in the US. My father was a Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman sort of Democrat. In favour of equality at home and a supporter of American foreign policy. I grew up to be the same. In 1968 I was a student in London. Three of my friends came to my door in Broadway Market in the East End. They asked me to come with them to the Vietnam demo at the American Embassy. They were surprised when I told them no, that demo was not just for peace, it was for the communists, and I would not go. One year later I cried in the dark one night by a pond in Surrey, because I knew I too supported the Vietnamese, and that hurt because I had always loved my country. One year later I was running from the gas in the streets of Washington. Ten months later I won conscientious objector status so I did not have to go to prison for refusing the draft.

The point is – people change. I know because I changed. But also the American soldiers and marines who refused to fight – they changed. The students at the University of Tennessee and the students at Knoxville College changed. None of this would have happened without the endless courage of the Vietnamese people. They changed the world.

I want you to remember this because we are embarked now, helter-skelter, willy-nilly, on a great global struggle. For many reasons, but above all because of the growing reality of climate change, that will be a struggle for the future of our species. That struggle will be global, it will last decades, and there will be great suffering, famines, wars and genocides, terrible defeats and unimaginable victories and terrible defeats again. Many millions of Vietnamese and Americans will be part of that struggle. But remember always, great movements change the world because people change. The way you change the world is not to unfriend the people who disagree with you. It is to change the minds and hearts of the people who do not agree with you, so that together we can change the world.

Jonathan Neale’s latest book is Why Men, a Human History of Violence and Inequality, written with Nancy Lindisfarne.

You can download Cape Care, his memoir of his mother, here.