Lieutenant Nick Mills (right) with Lt. Marty Katz, both of the 221st Signal Company (Pictorial), aboard an Army river patrol boat near Vung Tau, December 1968.
The original edition of this book was essentially a history, a recounting of events—one of many written about the Vietnam War. Now, fifty years after US Marines landed at Da Nang—the beginning of the all-out US effort to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam—our perceptions of the conflict have been altered by time and by dramatic events elsewhere in the world. The US has fought three more wars, in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and engaged in other conflicts in places like Grenada, Panama, and Mogadishu.
When work began on the project that would become the original edition, just a few years after the last US troops left Saigon, Vietnam was still fairly fresh in the minds of many Americans. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial—the Wall—had been completed just six years earlier and was still controversial to some veterans. Today, the Wall is almost universally hailed as a masterpiece and a fitting tribute to the more than fifty-eight thousand Americans who died in Vietnam or from injuries suffered there.
The world has moved on. The United States now has diplomatic and economic ties with Vietnam. Vietnam was all but inaccessible when this book was first published; today, it hosts millions of tourists every year, including many Americans, returning veterans among them. What they see is a stunningly beautiful and diverse place, with few visible traces of what the Vietnamese call the American War. Virtually everything the half-million-strong US military force built in Vietnam is gone, having been demolished, the materials repurposed and the sites obliterated by Vietnam’s rapid economic development. The Vietnamese population is young; more than 85 percent of the country’s 92.4 million people were born after 1960. Most Vietnamese know about the war only through their history books. The people are industrious and entrepreneurial, and very friendly to American visitors, even—perhaps especially—to the former soldiers who once fought them in bloody and devastating battles and rained so much death and destruction on their cities, towns, and hamlets.
Lieutenant Nick Mills (right) with Lt. Marty Katz, both of the 221st Signal Company (Pictorial), aboard an Army river patrol boat near Vung Tau, December 1968.
The time is right for this new perspective on the Vietnam War; indeed, this reflection. The American Experience in Vietnam: Reflections on an Era is not just another “order of battle” history, though it does recount the major military operations, heroic firebase defenses, and bloody mountaintop battles. We cannot forget those, but reflection must be the operative word for this fiftieth-anniversary edition.
Vietnam suffered much at the hands of the Americans, but it had a much longer history of suffering under the yoke of occupiers. China occupied Vietnam for a thousand years; the French for over sixty. Even Japan occupied Vietnam, though briefly. We can now appreciate Ho Chi Minh’s lifelong struggle to win Vietnam’s independence. He appealed to three US presidents for help but was rebuffed, in part because he carried the label of Communist. But his brand of communism was pragmatic and nationalistic; once the Americans left and Vietnam was united, the Vietnamese fought brief wars with China to the north and Cambodia to the south, laying to rest the so-called domino theory that postulated a solid Red bloc of East Asian states if Vietnam were to fall to the Communists.
Vietnam’s harsh postwar era, during which tens of thousands of Vietnamese were herded into “re-education camps,” slowly gave way to a reopening of the doors to the world. A former South Vietnamese army officer who spent ten years in a re-education camp following the NVA’s final victory traveled back to Vietnam with me in 2003. Khanh Nguyen was apprehensive about how he might be treated on his return, but his fears proved groundless as we traveled by car and domestic airline from deep in the Mekong Delta to Hanoi. Khanh had emotional reunions with many members of his extended family along the way, including a nephew who met us at Da Nang airport in a new SUV, negotiating deals on his cell phone as he drove us around.
When I visited Hanoi during that trip, I found my way from my four-star hotel, the Hanoi Opera Hilton, to the notorious prison that Americans knew as the “Hanoi Hilton.” It didn’t look like a prison. With its plain façade and the words Maison Centrale above the entrance, it might have been a French restaurant. But this was where captured US servicemen, most of them pilots whose planes had been shot down during bombing raids over North Vietnam, were held for years in harsh conditions. The Maison Centrale has shrunk since the end of the war, a good two-thirds of it having been razed to make way for a residential tower. But enough is left, now serving as a museum, to give a visitor some idea of what it might have been like to be imprisoned there. As one might surmise from its French name, the prison predated America’s war in Vietnam by many decades; it was built in the late nineteenth century by the French to imprison, torture, and often execute (the centerpiece of the museum’s exhibits is a guillotine) captured Viet Minh fighters, who warred for decades to drive the French from Indochina. In 1954, just before the French surrendered at Dien Bien Phu, the prison held some two thousand inmates, stuffed into a space built for less than half that number. To be sure, some exhibits recall the years of the American War—Sen. John McCain’s flight suit has been on display—but the focus of the museum is the much longer occupation of Vietnam by the French and their cruel treatment of Viet Minh prisoners.
Just as it is in Vietnam, the war is ancient history to today’s American students. Veterans are in their sixties and seventies. Wounds have healed, families have been raised, and memories have softened. Few Americans today, even Vietnam veterans, think of Vietnam as the enemy. We have too many other enemies to focus on. And Americans have a history of friendship with former enemies—witness our relationships with Japan and Germany, two of our staunchest allies in the world today. Today’s recounting of “the American experience in Vietnam” must be tempered by the events of the intervening years.
It is said that more books have been written about the Vietnam War than about any of America’s other wars—an ever-growing collection of around thirty thousand, by some counts. Some great journalists and photojournalists cut their teeth in Vietnam, and the press played a key role in shaping our perceptions of the conflict. It was the first war in which reporters and photographers had largely unrestricted access to the battlefields, a freedom that the US military has been at pains to limit ever since. Some military minds still blame the media for “losing the war,” but most reporters supported the war in the early years and the coverage was mostly positive until the 1968 Tet Offensive, when many Americans at home began to realize—as reporters such as David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and others had known from the beginning—that their military leaders and the president had been less than truthful about the success of the US military effort.
It was also the first American conflict covered extensively by television, though it was not as extensive as some people think they remember. The Vietnam War was not “live” on TV every night; technology had not yet developed to the point where reporters in the field could do live shots on the evening news, and there was little footage of actual combat. Still, television gave Americans a window into the war that had not been possible in earlier conflicts. (Motion picture footage was shot in World War II, but it didn’t appear on TV the night after it was filmed because there was no TV broadcasting, only newsreels shown in movie theaters.) Film shot in the field in Vietnam could be shown on American television in a matter of hours—after being flown out of Vietnam, processed, and edited—or at most, a couple of days.
Long patrols in the rain-soaked jungles of Vietnam led to “jungle rot” and other foot problems. Powder and dry socks were a grunt’s best friend.
More importantly, though, there was no military or government censoring of the footage. Morley Safer’s 1965 story, aired on the CBS Evening News, of Marines burning a cluster of hamlets at Cam Ne would not have been broadcast had it happened during World War II. After the story aired, the military lashed out at Safer, and President Johnson called CBS president Frank Stanton to complain. This was one of a number of stories from Vietnam, on television and in the newspapers, that may have fueled antiwar sentiment in the United States. As Safer said years later on the PBS series Reporting America at War, Americans at home “saw American troops acting in a way people had never seen American troops act before, and couldn’t imagine.” In the aftermath of the Cam Ne story, the military and the Johnson administration briefly discussed imposing censorship on the press in Vietnam but concluded it would be unworkable.
Robert George, a former Marine Corps pilot who flew many missions in Vietnam and the publisher of the original, groundbreaking twenty-five-volume series The Vietnam Experience (to which I contributed one volume, Combat Photographer), asked me to update the first edition of this book because he wanted the perspective of a veteran who could add personal stories. I also wanted to add the stories of other veterans who had returned to Vietnam years after the war and of veterans who had found ways to give back—to their fellow Vietnam veterans, to the veterans of more recent wars, and to the burgeoning nation of Vietnam, still recovering from the many years of war fought on its soil.
The original text, written by my friends, the historians Clark Dougan and Stephen Weiss, remains the solid foundation of this new edition, and Clark gave generously of his time and expertise to keep me from straying off the historical track. I hope that what I have added does justice to their work and to the many who served and sacrificed in that long and difficult war.
—Nick Mills,
Senior Writer
