Vietnam War Research Articles

Mark O. Hatfield: Oregon Statesman. By Richard W. Etulain

Richard W. Etulain, a well-known historian of the American West, offers a short, readable, and sympathetic biography of Mark O. Hatfield, long-time U.S. Senator from Oregon. He is best remembered today as a Republican Senator who opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s, supported the nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s, and voted against the Gulf War and the Balanced Budget Amendment in the 1990s. In his thirty plus career in the Senate, he seemed more in line with liberal Democratic Senators, George McGovern (S.D.), Frank Church (Id.), and Edward Kennedy (Mass.). At the same time, Hatfield was a deeply devout Evangelical Christian and good friends with Rev. Billy Graham, who pushed Nixon to put him on the presidential ticket in 1968. The strength of Etulain’s biography is that he captures the frenetic energy Hatfield brought to his rise in state and national politics. Etulian devotes four of the five chapters to Hatfield’s emergence as a political force in Oregon. Hatfield’s followed a natural political trajectory, beginning with his election to the state legislative assembly in 1950, then election to the Secretary of State, followed by two successful terms as governor from 1959–67, before winning election to the U.S. Senate, where he served the next thirty years.

Playing Politics with Natural Disaster: Hurricane Agnes, the 1972 Election, and the Origins of FEMA

Playing Politics with Natural Disaster: Hurricane Agnes, the 1972 Election, and the Origins of FEMA

Western tourism at Cu Chi and the memory of war in Vietnam: Dialogical effects of the carnivalesque

In this article we analyze the social memories of the Vietnam War afforded by tourism at the Cu Chi battlefield. Specifically, we explore the experiences of tourists at the site in order to address the under-theorized relationship between carnivalesque and dialogical discourses. Drawing on field interviews and ethnographic engagement with young adult Western tourists who took tours led by Vietnamese guides, we document how the tourists’ playful engagement with the past at Cu Chi facilitates the development of new dialogical memories of the war. Our interviews reveal a strong concern with the suffering of both occupying forces and the Vietnamese communist forces, a finding that points to the need for scholars to better appreciate the multiplicity of ways that social performances function in shaping social memory. Ultimately, we challenge social performance theories whose explanations reduce shifts in social memory to audience interpretations of authenticity.

Naked Truths as a Credo of Protest in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States was abounded with darkened repercussions represented by waging wars such as the cold war, the Vietnam War, and the appearance of various ideologies as materialism, consumerism, sexual freedom, racial struggles and many other examples and consequently, new trends and movements appeared to rebel against the conventional norms that prevailed during that time. The rebellion took an upward trajectory crystalizing itself in diverse forms namely: the religious, political, social and literary ones. Unruly politics and queer activisms defied the commonplace hetero-normative ways of peaceful demonstrations. The beat movement burst out against what was believed as repressive, dehumanized, corrupt, and unjust in the United States of America. Allen Ginsberg's monumental poem "Howl" seems to be the manifesto of the movement. Most striking quality is the use of naked truth as an expression of the poet's own eccentricity. This quality makes the poem a landmark of eccentricity. "Howl" reflects and connotes a deeply celestial interpretation. A celestial reading of the poem will mend its presupposed deformed image, prove the opposite, and support the basic theme of protest which is at the center of the beat movement.

“For I Am Nothing without You”: Fragmentariness and the Transformability of Archetypal Identity in David Rabe’s The Orphan

In the fi eld of literary refashioning and adaptation studies, ancient Greek drama has constituted an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artistic creation and production. When it comes to drama and theatrical performance, David Rabe’s The Orphan, the third play in his Vietnam-themed tetralogy, falls precisely in this category, as it is a revised and “extensive transposition” (Hutcheon 7) of two classical works: Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, the only surviving Greek trilogy, as well as Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. In adapting these tragedies, the playwright chooses to juxtapose them onstage in order to represent and record the events which mark the generational trauma and the familial war in Agamemnon’s House. Rabe’s turn to classical Greek tragedy and his vision to rely on it and inform it are two inescapably “political acts” (Sanders 97), spurred by personal experience. The playwright had attended a performance of Euripides’s tragedy and had seen in it a link between the Trojan and the Vietnam War—and by extension Iphigenia’s sacrifice and the My Lai massacre—before proceeding, subsequently, to write the play in question. His realization that “the Greeks saw that reason was the flip side or dark side of unreason” and that his novel ideas were actually rooted in the ancient past (Morphos and Rabe 81) is the drive which urges him to base his play essentially upon the parent texts while attaching it to a uniquely different trajectory.

Japan’s Peace Diplomacy on the Vietnam War and the 1968–1969 Shift in the United States’ Asia Policy

ABSTRACT This article investigates the impact of the changing international environment in Asia at the turn of the 1960s on Japanese diplomacy regarding the Vietnam war and Southeast Asia. In 1968–1969, the United States announced important changes in its policy on the Vietnam problem and Asia, particularly the reduction of its military involvement in the region. Taking advantage of a US policy shift, China and the Soviet Union sought to expand their influence in Southeast Asia. Drawing on declassified diplomatic documents, this article shows that the government of Japanese Prime Minister Satō Eisaku, balancing domestic pressures and the need to preserve relations with Washington, adjusted its diplomacy in response to changes in the regional environment. While continuing efforts towards peace in Vietnam, Japan began work to shape a post-Vietnam Southeast Asian order based on peaceful coexistence between communist and non-communist countries. This was Japan’s strategy for countering the expected increase in Beijing and Moscow’s regional influence. Japan gradually acted to engage North Vietnam, a key actor to realize regional peaceful coexistence and a war settlement – which would in turn facilitate the realization of the reversion of Okinawa to Japan. This approach would be formalized in the 1977 Fukuda Doctrine.

“The Lonely Frontier of Reason:” liberalism and its critics at the International Association for Cultural Freedom’s 1968 “confrontation”

ABSTRACT Amid controversy over race relations and the Vietnam War, American liberalism faced enormous criticism in the 1960s. In 1968, ninety of the world’s leading social scientists attended a conference sponsored by the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF) to discuss the Cold War, Vietnam War, Black Power, the New Left, postindustrial society, and America’s relations with the world. The conference, which the IACF billed as a “confrontation,” offered a microcosm of the views of an embattled liberal establishment and its critics. Although the conference was ostensibly held to address America’s political problems, participants focused principally on the role of intellectuals in American society, the emergent counterculture, and growing opposition to technocratic management and rationality. Because liberal intellectuals equated their political views with rationality and discounted dissenting views to the left and right as irrational, they feared not only for the survival of liberalism, but of reason itself.

“A constant surveillance” The New York State Police and the student peace movement, 1965-1973

ABSTRACT Historians recognize that there was an increase in political repression in the United States during the Vietnam War era. While several accounts portray the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the primary driver of repression for many groups and individuals during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly those on the left, historians typically overlook the role played by local and state law enforcement in political intelligence-gathering. This article seeks to advance the study of one aspect of this much larger topic by looking at New York State Police surveillance of the Vietnam-era student peace movement. Drawing extensively on State Police spy files housed at the New York State Archives, this project demonstrates how state and local police contributed to the climate of political repression and surveillance during the Vietnam era. While this article encompasses state police surveillance at all types of institutions, including elite private universities and second-tier state colleges, in doing so it provides the first-ever detailed look at how community college students organized against the war. Since a majority of community college students were from relatively low-income backgrounds, chronicling the history of protest on two-year campuses gives historians another angle from which to counter the persistent myth that antiwar activism failed to penetrate the most working-class sectors of U.S. society.

Profiles in ambiguity: how three 1960s American TV dramas “broached the unbroachable”—Vietnam

ABSTRACT Although American prime-time TV in the 1960s witnessed an “eruption” of comedies and dramas with military or combat settings, series television, like big-screen Hollywood films, virtually never dealt with Vietnam, ostensibly because the topic was “too hot” or “toxic.” Yet three overlooked series of the period did engage the war, with relative levels of explicitness and critique: Route 66 (1960–64), The Lieutenant (1963–64), and I Spy (1965–68). This paper analyzes the ways each of these dramas represented the Vietnam War, probes the implicit and explicit ideological positions each show articulated (or avoided), and offers a more nuanced account of the historical and industrial context that shaped and constrained the treatment of Vietnam in American prime-time television storytelling.

Afro-Asian Intimacies Across Southern Cartographies: Race, Sex, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Home and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dao

Afro-Asian Intimacies Across Southern Cartographies:Race, Sex, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Home and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dao Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) In 1953, following the Korean Armistice Agreement that ostensibly ended direct U.S. intervention in Korea (but, in reality, merely led to a recalibration of the unending Korean War), African American soldier Clarence Adams was one of twenty-one prisoners of war who refused repatriation back to the United States and instead migrated to the People's Republic of China. His decision was influenced by the antiblackness that structured the segregated U.S. South, curtailing his chances of upward mobility, as well as his compassion for the Korean civilians devastated by U.S. military intervention, prompting recognition of the shared oppression of Third World peoples.1 Twelve years later, during the Vietnam War, he broadcast a message to Black soldiers via Radio Hanoi, urging them to return to the United States: "You are fighting the wrong war. Brothers, go home. The Negro people need you back there."2 According to Daniel Y. Kim, "Adams mobilize[d] a historiography of a race war to cast both the Korean and Vietnam Wars as ones waged by a white empire against a colored population," exemplifying what Bill Mullens terms "Afro-Orientalism": a phenomenon in which Black activists turned to idealized Asian subjects for anti-imperialist and antiracist inspiration.3 I begin with Adams' story for three reasons. First, it highlights continuities between Black narratives of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Whereas historians have elucidated the experiences of Black soldiers during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, respectively, few studies have grappled with these two Cold War fronts in relation, noting patterns and [End Page 97] particularities in Black subject formation across the two U.S. imperial conflicts.4 With the signing of Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. military, exemplifying the United States' project of racial liberalism and bolstering the expansion of the liberal empire, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, even as Jim Crow laws continued to delimit the mobility of African Americans on the home front. Whereas the Korean War was the first U.S. experiment in militarized integration, it wasn't until the Vietnam War that the question of Black–white tensions in the military, transposed from the continental United States to the battlefront in Asia, gained widespread visibility. As Martin Luther King, Jr., famously observed in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 1967: "[We watch] Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago."5 Segregation at home was only interrupted by "brutal solidarity" abroad: the uniting of Black and white soldiers in a common project of racialized wartime destruction.6 But continuities between the Korean and Vietnam Wars also led to political mobilization: many civil rights and Black Power leaders active during the Vietnam War era, such as Bobby Seale, James Forman, Ivory Perry, and Robert F. Williams, were radicalized during their experiences as Black soldiers in Cold War Korea.7 Second, Adams' story stitches together three southern spaces that are rarely discussed in relation: the U.S. South, South Korea, and South Vietnam. To focus on the southern-ness of these three sites is to trace the convergence of white supremacy, antiblackness, imperialism, and anticommunism that cohere at the intersection of the U.S. Civil War and Cold War politics.8 Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, amid the structural antiblackness of the segregated U.S. South, Adams joined the U.S. Army to escape incarceration at the hands of white policemen. This military service brought him to South Korea: a decolonizing nation that the United States had taken upon itself to protect in the Cold War struggle against North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Union. These south-south relationalities—the transposition of a Black subject of the U.S. South to the southern warfront of a new...

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

How Did Vinh Moc Village, Located near Vietnam DMZ, Protect Their Villagers from United States Air Force Bombardment during the Vietnam War?

The buried village is Vinh Moc where more than 1200 Vietnamese, including soldiers, who lived underground during the Vietnam War (1965 to 1972) were hand dug into red basalt bedrock. The Vinh Moc Village was strategically located on the border of North Vietnam and South Vietnam approximately 14 km north of the DMZ and along the shoreline of the South China Sea. During the Vietnam War, the US Air Force heavily bombed Vinh Moc. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) had an important military base on nearby Con Co Island. Brave civil volunteers from Vinh Moc would make the 28 km dangerous journey to the island, disguised as fishermen, to deliver supplies to the soldiers stationed there. The people who remained at Vinh Moc dug tunnels into red basalt hills in order to survive this onslaught. The American forces assessed the villagers of Vinh Moc were supplying food and armaments to the NVA garrison on the island of Con Co, which was in turn hindering the American bombers on their way to bomb Hanoi. The US military objective was to force the villagers of Vinh Moc to leave the area. The villagers initially dug the tunnels to a 10 m depth but the American forces designed bombs that burrowed down 10 m before exploding. The soil tunnels were then deepened to 30 m to provide safety for the soldiers and civilians working there during the intense US Air Force bombing. The primary objective of the research study was to determine how the soils and parent material of Vinh Moc Village, protected their villagers from the United States Air Force bombardment during the Vietnam War. In addition, the natural parent material at both the Vinh Moc and Cu Chi were assessed to determine why the tunnels were so resilient. The Cu Chi and Iron Triangle soil tunnels were dug by hand in the Old Alluvium soils and parent material where iron in solution precipitated and became the soil binding material. The Vinh Moc tunnels were hand dug in porous, red basalt (bedrock) hills where the consolidated rock structure itself provided the required binding material. Neither site needed support beams to hold up the ceilings.

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke

Reviewed by: The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist by Donna T. Haverty-Stacke James P. McCartin The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist. By Donna T. Haverty-Stacke. (New York: New York University Press. 2020. Pp. 312. $50.00. ISBN: 9781479802180.) This is a well-researched and nicely written account of a compelling and largely overlooked figure. It was in the 1930s, not long after Dorothy Day entered the Catholic Church, that Grace Holmes Carlson, then about thirty years old, found her way out the door. Where Day discerned a path from radical politics to the Catholic Church, Carlson did the opposite. Still, each continued to labor mightily to reconcile spiritual and political convictions which seemed, at times, to conflict. Ultimately, Carlson’s sojourn from Catholicism, which began before she became a founding member and national leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1938, concluded upon her return to the Church in 1952. Part of what makes Carlson so interesting is that, while her return spelled an end both to her SWP membership and to her second shot at a vice presidential candidacy on the Party’s national ticket, she never so much as hinted at renouncing her erstwhile comrades or her radical political commitments. An enduring vision of human [End Page 219] dignity, whose dual sources Donna T. Haverty-Stacke effectively locates both within the young Carlson’s working-class family and within the parishes and church-affiliated educational institutions of her youth, supplied what Carlson would call the “unified philosophy of life” (p. 35) which undergirded her spiritual and political values—and ultimately imparted a continuity to the long arc of her biographical narrative. It should come as no surprise that Carlson, a key Party leader and a sometime candidate for public office, found it untenable to maintain formal links both to the Church and to the SWP. Given the mutual antagonism between Catholicism and Marxism in this era, the pairing was remarkably difficult to square during the height of her involvement in the 1930s and 1940s—the more so since the very idea of a “radical Catholicism” simply failed to compute for many U.S. Catholics prior to the 1960s. Still, Haverty-Stacke spotlights a vital early twentieth-century network of radical Catholics and their fellow travelers in Carlson’s native City of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Notably, it was women religious who, as schoolteachers and professors, sowed seeds that later grew into Carlson’s full-fledged socialist and feminist critiques. And after her return to the Church, it was religious sisters who provided precious moral support, as well as gainful employment as a college instructor and administrator, that sustained her over the final four decades of her life. In spotlighting these elements of Carlson’s story, Haverty-Stacke highlights how educational institutions sponsored and led by women religious nourished multiple generations of twentieth-century Catholic women in their left-leaning political commitments and feminist consciousness, even if few alumnae (or their instructors) ever reached Carlson’s level of engagement. Haverty-Stacke underscores that, though her return to Catholicism was an act of central importance in her subject’s 85-year life, Carlson’s “story was more complex than just coming full circle” (p. 182). In the early 1960s, she spearheaded the founding of an innovative Catholic women’s junior college geared toward expanding higher education access to members of the working-class. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she focused particularly on mentoring young women, imparting her signature “hybrid Catholic Marxist approach” (p. 193) when it came to feminism and an array of other topics. Predictably, she opposed the War in Vietnam and the rise of the nuclear arms race, but she also critiqued fellow radical Catholics such as Daniel Berrigan for the direct-action protest tactics, which she pegged as sure to turn off the working-class due to their “mistaken, individualistic, petit bourgeois approach to social problems” (p. 191). Thanks to Haverty-Stacke, a new generation now has easy access to Carlson’s important story and to the insights she developed in the crucible of radical Catholicism across the span of the twentieth century. [End Page 220] James...

The Gloss of War: Revisiting the Korean War’s Legacy

In war powers analysis, reliance on the interpretive method of historical practice, also called the “gloss of history,” has made history a technology of the forever war. This approach draws upon the history of U.S. military conflict to interpret the scope of presidential war power and embeds past actions into the separation of powers. There is a crucial flaw in this methodology, however. The understanding of history in historical gloss is not informed by the changing historiography of war. This has led to a divergence between the “history” in legal authority and the revised historical understanding in scholarly works of history. Whereas lessons of history in other contexts often serve as levers for reexamination of government action, in gloss-of-history analysis the past instead serves to legitimate settled practices. The consequence is that presidential overreach is not recognized and corrected, but instead built into the doctrine of expanding unilateral power. This Article is the first to examine how static ideas about history in legal analysis have aggrandized presidential war power. It analyzes the most important example of this: President Harry S. Truman’s unilateral actions in the Korean War and subsequent reliance on his example in executive branch legal opinions. The war is a principal precedent supporting the idea that presidents may use substantial military force without congressional authorization. This has legitimated unilateralism in less massive wars, and since that time all U.S. uses of military force have been in conflicts smaller than Korea, with the exception of the war in Vietnam. Decades of historical scholarship, however, have shown that Truman misunderstood the nature of the conflict and disregarded Congress’s role, and that his advisors failed to seriously consider Congress’s war authorization power until after force was deployed. Historians have also shown the devastating costs of war for Koreans, whose experience is not centered in the U.S. war powers literature. Historical revision did not prompt legal reconsideration, however. Instead, the Korean War is calcified as a significant precedent supporting executive unilateralism, undermining democratic limits, and enabling ongoing war. The Article argues that gloss of history analysis must be dynamic, attentive to the way understandings of the past change over time. An approach to gloss informed by historical revision could reassert history’s role as a critical perspective on law.

The Value and Character of Music as a Tool for Political Mobilization

Music itself has no practical meaning. However, music can be given political meaning by politicians to some extent. This paper will analyze the particularity and value of music in mobilizing political movements from the Iraq War and Vietnam War.

History and Assessment of the War Environment on the Subsequent Health of the Vietnam Veteran

In January 1962, the first Allied combat, combat advisory, and support forces arrived in South Vietnam. By the end of the War, almost 3 million allied personnel had been engaged in this violent Conflict. Six nations provided the Allied Military Forces to support the Republic of South Vietnam from 1965 through March of 1973. The tropical environment posed many challenges to the Allied Military Forces in waging a war against an elusive enemy who had a history of fighting in such an environment. Most Allied combat units spent weeks in the brush enduring the inhospitable environment that included an invisible but deadly enemy. For those soldiers living in outposts or isolated bases or airfields, the constant enemy shelling deprived them of sleep, leaving them exhausted, disoriented, and too often contentious and increasingly depressed. Beyond the possibilities of injury and death during combat, military personnel were exposed to diverse agents and environments that may have affected their health, and thus caused injury and disease while in service or after discharge. Indeed, insect-transmitted diseases and other health related issues accounted for more casualties then did enemy bullets and bombs. Many of those exposures reflected the diverse tasks and functions of military personnel serving in unfamiliar environments associated with combat operations. Fifty health studies of Vietnam veterans by four of the Allied Nations confirmed that with two exceptions, no Vietnam veterans were ever exposed to Agent Orange. What the health studies did confirm was the impact of the “Vietnam Experience” on the long-term health of the men and women who served in the Vietnam War.

Voice Lessons by Alice Embree

Reviewed by: Voice Lessons by Alice Embree Melissa Hield Voice Lessons. By Alice Embree. (Austin: Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, 2022. Pp. 300. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Voice Lessons is the passionate memoir of a lifelong advocate for social justice, in Austin and at the University of Texas, from 1963 to 2020. Embree’s activism began with 1960s civil rights demonstrations and protests against the Vietnam War, continued in the 1970s in the women’s liberation movement, moved through the 1980s and 1990s with her “working eight to five” (a chapter title) and with neighborhood coalitions, then came to rest with her becoming “a retiree activist” (another chapter title) in the 2000s. Significantly, Voice Lessons is the first account of the 1960s and 1970s in the Lone Star State by a Texas woman who was there. Her point of view fills a gap in the movement narrative, and her book preserves the stories of many activists who have been left out by others. It is also a way for Embree to share her transformative experiences, her voice lessons, with a younger generation. Her first lesson occurred early. Embree grew up comfortably middle class in 1950s Austin with parents who supported school desegregation at a time when there were few African American students in the schools she attended. In 1961, on a field trip with the Austin High School drill squad, she sat in a restaurant with the only two Black members of the squad, who were refused service. As a result, Embree insisted on leaving, and the three left, but no one else did. Shocked that none of the other students or supervising adults joined them, Embree later recalled the event as “an early voice lesson,” one about the need for other voices (29). As a student at the University of Texas at Austin, Embree helped launch and wrote for the underground newspaper The Rag, and joined the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose members voiced their opinions about issues through direct public demonstrations. In a 1967 anti-Vietnam War rally in front of the Texas Union, Embree was one of six students who spoke out. Administrators put the students on disciplinary probation, thereby sparking the University Freedom Movement and putting Embree “at the center of the storm” (73). UT Board of Regents Chair Frank Erwin labeled her the “Embree girl” when displeased with her (86). She and her partner moved to New York City later that year, where he launched an underground newspaper that Embree named The Rat and [End Page 392] for which she wrote. She also worked for the North American Congress on Latin America, founded by activists who supported the SDS, and through it she met the feminist poet Marge Piercy, who introduced Embree to the New York women’s liberation movement. By 1969, she said, “women’s liberation got very personal,” and when she heard her partner using “derogatory words for women,” her reaction was “volcanic, molten anger” (112). Embree left him and returned to Austin. There she “embraced women’s liberation, and . . . was transformed by it” (117). In 1971, shortly after being among 7,000 antiwar activists arrested in Washington, D.C., Embree and other women, who considered Lyndon Johnson the architect of the Vietnam War, protested the opening of the LBJ Presidential Library by dressing as witches and putting a hex on the library. They were arrested the next day when they continued their hexing downtown. In 1973, she learned how to use a printing press, became a printer, and joined other women to start the Fly-By-Night Printing Collective, which later became Red River Women’s Press. In 1980, Embree married artist Carlos Lowry, a Chilean expatriate living in Austin, and they had two children. To support the family, she worked in the Child Support Division of the Texas Attorney General’s Office and shifted her activism to neighborhood issues, including the “Move It” campaign to move the Austin airport. In 2008, after retiring, she began collaborating on social justice issues with other retirees and young people. In 2017, she was arrested in Austin at a protest of the U.S. Senate vote to repeal the Affordable...

Use of Agent Purple, Agent Orange and Agent Blue on Royal Thai Air Force Base Perimeters in Thailand during the Vietnam War

Use of Agent Purple, Agent Orange and Agent Blue on Royal Thai Air Force Base Perimeters in Thailand during the Vietnam War

Summer of Soul

Summer of Soul

Saigon River Valley: A Navigation, Trade, Mitigation, Invasion, Liberation, and Unification Pathway

The Saigon River is located in southern Vietnam with headwaters starting in southeastern Cambodia. The river flows southeast for about 225 km to the South China Sea. Most readers of Vietnam’s history know about the American-Vietnam War (1965-1973). However, centuries before that time, Vietnam fought with the Chinese, the Khmers, the Chams and the Mongols. The history of Vietnam begins in the Red River Delta, where farmers first cultivated rice. A millenia of struggle against the Chinese then followed. The Saigon River Valley was the pathway used by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to get from the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia to Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The NVA dug Cu Chi and Iron Triangle soil tunnels near Cu Chi in the Old Alluvium terrace to hide from American Forces and Air Force bombers. In 1962, the Tan Son Nhut Air Force base on the northern edge of Saigon received the first shipments of Agent Blue, the arsenic based herbicide, used to destroy the rice crop. The most dioxin TCDD and arsenic contaminated site in Vietnam was Bien Hoa Air Force base on the Saigon River just 30 km northeast east of Ho Chi Minh City. The adjacent Bien Hoa City has a population of over 800,000. The Port of Ho Chi Minh City is the most significant river port in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The river is navigable by ships which draft up to 9 m. Vietnam only became a united country in the 19th century. Its independence was soon affected by French colonialism and then the destructive American intervention in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War Archive no. 2 in Ho Chi Minh City houses residual correspondence between the Republic of Vietnam (RV) President Diem’s administration and US President Kennedy’s administration related to the Khai Huang program (hamlet strategy). In addition, the archive contains some of the tactical herbicide spray records of the RV military for the Mekong Delta. The primary objective this study is to document the role that the Saigon River Valley played, in modern warfare. The Saigon River Valley was used as a navigation, trade, invasion, liberation and unification pathway. The Vietnamese people have survived centuries of stormy, troubled times and their power of character has served them well.