A Long Campaign of a Longer War

As context to today and our many global challenges and their evolving threads of continuity through time, in some cases over much longer periods than we realize, the U. S. involvement in Southeast Asia has a fairly long history. In a military sense, U. S. Navy operations in the Philippines in 1898 might be one benchmark of initial national policy application in the region. Isolating and treating the operations in South Viet Nam separately from this already 66 year engagement, regardless the assessment of effectiveness or adequacy of policy and strategy, fails to account for a lengthening connection. As a result, millions of Americans today share heritage with the region...it is very much a part of not only the ancient stories of peoples in play in the region but America as well.

Specific to Viet Nam Nam, U. S. activity was occurring during the World War II period. Afterward, Army advisors were sent by President Truman to then French Indo-China in 1950 as members of a Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG). The mission in what became South Viet Nam was reorganized and enlarged in 1955 as French Forces withdrew and the government in North Viet Nam formed. U. S. Army personnel assigned to the MAAG wore the device shown above as a patch.

As one of several preamble antecedents to the many threads of situation that confront the U.S and the region today and whatever the contemporary popular perception of U. S. involvement in what became Viet Nam may be, it is important to understand that nothing is simple. One must know the competition as well as possible--never an easy task with cultural differences in play never mind competing ideologies.

In the case of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, that interface of peoples, cultures and ideologies far preceded popular current perceptions. What often is lost on the understanding of the larger situation is that 1950 was a watershed of aggressive action by interests identifying as Communist: North Korea invaded South Korea; Mao's forces were in the process of a Chinese civil war with the Nationalist Government; a Greek Civil War was in play with significant communist themes; the Berlin Airlift had occurred; Stalin was making motions that caused the U.S. to deploy two infantry divisions to Germany.

In various forms the global communist pretensions of the times did not fully cease until withdrawal of Soviet Forces from Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall and break up of the Soviet Union. In that context, American internal political confusion is more than a little interesting. Under certain guises and interpretations some sense may be made of the apparent confusions but the larger Cold War context does argue that the many campaigns of the larger war, Viet Nam included, were the hot campaigns of that war--arguably a war of some 45 years duration if counted from Winston Churchill's 1946 "Cold War" speech to the 1991 break up of the Soviet Union.

But of course, nothing neatly fits into such nice sets of parentheses in the human experience. Themes preceding 1946, one being U.S. military introduction to the region of Southeast Asia as early as 1898 and themes that continue, China being one. Again, we may argue ad infinitum the pros and cons of major U. S. military operations in Viet Nam but the currents of history's larger streams seem to argue strongly that the Viet Nam experience was a campaign of the larger war and struggle.

In that sense, those U.S. citizen soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and coast guardsmen called to duty to conduct the campaign, especially the national service soldiers that met the call to duty, deserve the nation's full respect and thanks. The internal political confusion may well have been manipulated by other than American sources making some of the behaviors demonstrated by fellow Americans sad to say the least. And, in light of Mr. Burns' recent documentary, the continued confusion is of interest, especially given current events playing out.

Certainly, communist inspired governmental models and their residual governmental systems do not promote individual liberty under law as is the case in the systems of government that have developed in what we term the West. If "dictated" and greatly constrained rights to the individual and population by a small controlling elite, often using deadly force if there is dissent, was the enemy of liberty and those people's who aspire to it...then the American citizen soldiers who met the difficult call to serve in the case of the Viet Nam Campaign of the Cold War from as early as1950-1973...23 years...are true heroes of the American Republic and perhaps all people who value individual liberty