Hillstrom K., Hillstrom L.C. Vietnam war. Almanac

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ple left the rural villages where their families had lived for gen-

erations and became refugees. In fact, as many as four million

Vietnamese (one-fourth of the total population of the South)

fled to the outskirts of cities and towns, where they hoped to

escape the bombing and find a way to make a living.

Some American military leaders believed that destroy-

ing rural villages and grouping the South Vietnamese people

192 Vietnam War: Almanac

Kim Phuc, age 9, after

ripping off her burning

clothes as she and other

terrified Vietnamese

children try to escape

a napalm attack.

Reproduced by permission of

AP/World Wide Photos.

VWAlm 187-294 7/30/03 3:09 PM Page 192

near cities was a good strategy. They claimed that it would

reduce support and supplies for the Viet Cong guerillas in the

countryside. After areas were bombed, U.S. troops were sent

into villages on “search-and-destroy” missions. The soldiers

would question the local people and look for evidence of Viet

Cong activity. But it was often difficult for the Americans to

tell whether villagers were loyal to the South Vietnamese gov-

ernment or whether they supported the Communists. This

uncertainty caused some soldiers to treat the villagers harshly.

Even when the U.S. troops managed to clear a village of enemy

agents, the Viet Cong usually returned within a short time.

Many South Vietnamese villagers were afraid to coop-

erate with either the Americans or the Viet Cong. They worried

that if they did, the other side would punish them. This cre-

ated a feeling of hopelessness among many rural South Viet-

namese. “Most people didn’t even know the difference

between communism and democracy,” recalled John Kerry, a

Vietnam veteran who went on to become a U.S. senator. “They

only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters straf-

ing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and

tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do

with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the

United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and

they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever mil-

itary force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong,

North Vietnamese, or American.”

Stuck in the middle of fights between the Americans

and the Viet Cong, and facing the constant threat of bombing,

large numbers of South Vietnamese villagers fled to the cities.

Before the war, ninety percent of South Vietnam’s population

had lived in rural villages in the countryside. But during the

war, sixty percent of the population lived in urban areas. The

cities were not equipped to handle the huge number of

refugees. In Saigon, many peasants ended up living in

makeshift refugee camps. “There were insufficient housing,

sanitation, transportation, social services, and jobs to accom-

modate the tens of thousands of newcomers who settled in

each month,” Edward Doyle and Stephen Weiss write in A Col-

lision of Cultures: Americans in Vietnam, 1957–1973. “In Saigon

this provoked a state of emergency. Huge shantytowns encir-

cled the city’s prosperous center.”

The War’s Effect on the Vietnamese Land and People 193

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Conditions in the refugee

camps were very poor. There was no

way to dispose of garbage and human

waste, which polluted water supplies

and spread disease. Unable to find jobs,

many people went hungry or resorted

to begging in the streets. Many

refugees survived by collecting and

recycling the things U.S. troops left

behind. For example, some villagers

would collect the brass shell casings

that fell on the ground after American

forces fired on the enemy. They would

use the metal to create brass ashtrays to

sell on the streets of Saigon.

The destruction of villages

also separated families and eliminated

the family structure that was so

important to Vietnamese culture. By

1972—when the United States was

removing its troops from Vietnam—

there were an estimated 800,000

orphaned children roaming the

streets of Saigon and other cities. “The

refugees, uprooted from the devastated land and fearful of

renewed offensives, remained in the cities and towns—their

disrupted, dispirited families aggravating the instability of

South Vietnam’s already fragile society,” Stanley Karnow

writes in Vietnam: A History.

Transformation of Saigon

The influx of refugees and the presence of Americans

brought vast changes to South Vietnamese cities, especially the

capital city of Saigon. The population of Saigon tripled during

the Vietnam War to reach three million in 1970. Most of these

new people were refugees whose homes in the countryside had

been destroyed. But the city also became the central location

for thousands of American military leaders, journalists, aid

workers, missionaries, businessmen, and construction workers

during the war years.

194 Vietnam War: Almanac

A Wall with Two Million

Vietnamese Names

In 1982, the U.S. government

dedicated a memorial to the American

soldiers who died during the Vietnam

War. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in

Washington, D.C., is a black granite wall

nearly 500 feet long. The names of the

58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam are

etched onto its face. There is no similar

memorial to the estimated two million

Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who

were killed during the war. But if the

names of these people were etched onto

a wall, it would have to be 40 times

larger than the American memorial—or

close to four miles long.

VWAlm 187-294 7/30/03 3:09 PM Page 194

The Americans tended to be quite wealthy compared

to the South Vietnamese. They created a new market for lux-

ury goods like cars, motorcycles, televisions, and stereos. The

wealth and comfort of the Americans sometimes provided a

sad contrast to the poverty and desperation of the local people

in Saigon. For example, reporter Stanley Karnow remembers

standing on the terrace of the fancy Continental Palace Hotel,

“where limbless Vietnamese victims of the war would crawl

like crabs across the handsome tile floor to accost [confront

and demand money from] American soldiers, construction

workers, journalists, and visitors as they chatted and sipped

their drinks under the ceiling fans.”

Before long, the American influence began to have

negative effects on the social structure in Saigon. Thousands of

Vietnamese found jobs in service industries that sprang up to

cater to the Americans. Some worked in hotels, restaurants, or

construction sites, but many others became involved in illegal

activities. For example, an estimated 500,000 South Viet-

namese women became prostitutes during the war. Many of

these women were poor peasants who had no other way of

feeding their families. There was also an active drug trade in

Saigon during the war. Drugs like marijuana, opium, and

heroin were readily available in the city. In fact, they were

sometimes sold by children on street corners. Finally, there

was an enormous black market for stolen goods in Saigon.

Many of the items for sale came from U.S. military shipments.

Many South Vietnamese people found it tempting to

become involved in such illegal activities. After all, a young

woman who worked as a prostitute could earn more money in

a week than her peasant family would ordinarily earn in a year.

Some Vietnamese used their newfound wealth to buy luxury

goods such as electric rice cookers, bicycles, and televisions.

These people formed a new, privileged urban class that turned

the structure of Saigon society upside down. Suddenly, con-

struction workers and drug dealers made much more money

than policemen and soldiers in the South Vietnamese army.

Over time, people’s values changed to reflect the new

order in the city. They began to prefer the jobs that would

enable them to purchase luxuries, even if these jobs were ille-

gal or immoral. Many of these changes in people’s behavior

and relationships lasted long after the war ended. Some

The War’s Effect on the Vietnamese Land and People 195

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observers blamed the situation on the

American influence. “Saigon was an

addicted city, and we were the drug,”

James Fenton wrote in Granta. “The cor-

ruption of children, the mutilation of

young men, the prostitution of women,

the humiliation of the old, the division

of the family, the division of the coun-

try—it had all been done in our name.”

Effects on the North

Despite the fact that South Viet-

nam was America’s ally in the Vietnam

War, it suffered severe damage to its

land, people, and culture. The war also

affected North Vietnam, but not as

severely or as permanently as the South.

After all, most of the heavy fighting took

place in the South. The United States

never launched a full-scale invasion of

North Vietnam, because U.S. leaders

worried that such an action might pro-

voke neighboring China into joining

the fight.

Still, the U.S. military dropped

one million tons of bombs on North

Vietnam during the war. The idea

behind the bombing was to break the

will of the Communist government, and

to destroy their ability to fight and send

supplies to the South. For this reason,

most of the bombing targeted urban

areas of North Vietnam. The U.S. bombing campaigns did

severe damage to over 70 percent of the industries in the

North, which cut the amount of goods the country was able to

produce in half. The bombing also destroyed thousands of

buildings, damaged 4,000 villages, and occasionally hit

schools, churches, and hospitals.

Another major target was North Vietnam’s network of

roads and railroad lines. These transportation routes were hit

196 Vietnam War: Almanac

Vietnamese mother carrying

her severely burned child

down Route One, after a

misdirected napalm attack.

Reproduced by permission of

AP/World Wide Photos.

VWAlm 187-294 7/30/03 3:09 PM Page 196

with an average of 24 bombs per kilometer. Author Michael

Maclear traveled one highway in North Vietnam for 250 miles

in 1969. A journey that would have once taken four hours

ended up taking four days. “The awesome bomb craters along

the ‘highway’ interlocked almost end to end, negotiable only

by jeep,” he recalls in The Ten Thousand Day War. “There was

just a very rough route stitched from broken-down rock, thou-

sands of loose planks and nerve-wracking bamboo platforms

bridging the craters and canals. Wrecked vehicles and twisted

rail lines littered the entire route, with rusted metal rising in

grotesque shapes from the adjacent rice-lands.”

The North Vietnamese government took a number of

steps to reduce the impact of the U.S. bombing. For example,

they spread some industries out into the countryside, and they

built networks of tunnels and shelters to protect people in the

cities. Citizens were required to wear camouflage clothing to

avoid attracting the attention of American planes. “I remem-

ber once driving through an area and to my great astonish-

ment the whole field of maize [corn] suddenly got to its feet

and charged across the road,” British reporter Wilfred Burchett

recalled. The bombing did force the Communists to devote

some of their manpower to rebuilding tasks, which reduced

the number of people who were available to fight in the South.

But most of the roads, buildings, and factories were eventually

rebuilt with aid from the Soviet Union and China.

Since most of the bombing in North Vietnam was

aimed at urban areas, it did not destroy as much farmland in

the North as it did in the South. One study estimated that only

5.6 percent of North Vietnamese farmland suffered severe dam-

age during the war. But since many peasant men were recruited

to join the North Vietnamese Army, many of the farming tasks

were performed by women during the war years. Women

worked in the rice paddies and created new, cooperative sys-

tems of growing and irrigation that required fewer people.

Sources

Chanoff, David. Vietnam: A Portrait of Its People at War. New York: Tau-

ris/St. Martin’s, 1996.

Doyle, Edward, and Stephen Weiss. A Collision of Cultures: The Americans

in Vietnam, 1954–1973. Boston: Boston Publishing Company, 1984.

The War’s Effect on the Vietnamese Land and People 197

VWAlm 187-294 7/30/03 3:09 PM Page 197

Fenton, James. “The Fall of Saigon.” Granta, no. 15, 1985.

FitzGerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in

Vietnam. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.

Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose and How

We Did. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.

Hawthorne, Lesleyanne, ed. Refugee: The Vietnamese Experience. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1982.

Herrington, Stuart A. Silence Was a Weapon: The Vietnam War in the Vil-

lages. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking, 1983.

Maclear, Michael. The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam, 1945–1975. New

York: Avon, 1981.

Schell, Jonathan. The Real War: The Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War.

New York: Pantheon, 1987.

Westing, Arthur H., and E. W. Pfeiffer. “The Cratering of Indochina.” Sci-

entific American, May 1972.

Willenson, Kim. The Bad War: An Oral History of the Vietnam War. New

York: New American Library, 1987.

198 Vietnam War: Almanac

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hen Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994; president 1969–

1974) became president of the United States in January

1969, he promised to guide America out of the Vietnam War by

pursuing a policy of “peace with honor.” This meant that the

withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam would have to

take place in a way that avoided any appearance of defeat.

After assuming office, Nixon and his advisors first con-

sidered a strategy of intensified attacks on North Vietnam. But

the president reluctantly decided that escalation [increased

military operations] would probably not bring about a negoti-

ated peace agreement. Instead, the Nixon administration pur-

sued a plan called “Vietnamization,” in which primary respon-

sibility for fighting the North shifted from the U.S. military to

South Vietnamese armed forces. As a result of this strategy,

American troop commitments in Vietnam began to drop for

the first time since 1965.

But events in Indochina continued to produce angry

divisions throughout America. Reports of U.S. war crimes surged

upward, creating serious questions about the conduct of Amer-

ican soldiers in Vietnam. In addition, American involvement in

199

Nixon’s War (1969–70)

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neighboring Cambodia began to increase. This development

sparked widespread fears that the Vietnam War might spread

beyond its borders. America’s domestic turmoil did not peak

until mid-1970, when four college students were shot to death

on the campus of Kent State University during an antiwar rally.

Frustrating negotiations with the North

Upon assuming office, President Nixon repeatedly told

members of his administration that he would not let the Viet-

nam War ruin his presidency. “I’m not going to end up like

200 Vietnam War: Almanac

ARVN The South Vietnamese army, officially

known as the Army of the Republic of

South Vietnam. The ARVN fought on

the same side as U.S. troops during the

Vietnam War.

Cambodia Southeast Asian nation located

on the western border of South Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War, Cambodia

experienced its own civil war between its

pro-U.S. government and Communist

rebels known as the Khmer Rouge.

Communism A political system in which

the government controls all resources

and means of producing wealth. By

eliminating private property, this sys-

tem is designed to create an equal soci-

ety with no social classes. However,

Communist goverments in practice

often limit personal freedom and indi-

vidual rights.

Escalation A policy of increasing the size,

scope, and intensity of military activity.

Indochina The name sometimes given to

the peninsula between India and China

in Southeast Asia. The term narrowly

refers to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam,

which were united under the name

French Indochina during the colonial

period, 1893–1954.

Khmer Rouge Communist-led rebel forces

that fought for control of Cambodia

during the Vietnam War years. The

Khmer Rouge overthrew the U.S.-

backed government of Lon Nol in 1975.

North Vietnam The Geneva Accords of

1954, which ended the First Indochina

War (1946–54), divided the nation of

Vietnam into two sections. The north-

ern section, which was led by a Com-

munist government under Ho Chi

Words to Know

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[President] Lyndon Johnson, holed up in the White House,

afraid to show my face on the street,” said Nixon. “I’m going

to end the war in Vietnam. Fast.” With this in mind, Nixon

indicated that he was willing to end the war if North Vietnam’s

Communist government would agree to what he called a “fair

negotiated settlement that would preserve the independence

of South Vietnam.” At a minimum, Nixon wanted to negotiate

a treaty that would give the South a chance to hold off the

North after American troops left the region.

At first, Nixon tried to convince North Vietnam’s

Communist leaders that the United States might initiate a

Nixon’s War (1969–70) 201

Minh, was officially known as the

Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but

was usually called North Vietnam.

NVA The North Vietnamese Army, which

assisted the Viet Cong guerilla fighters

in trying to conquer South Vietnam.

These forces opposed the United States

in the Vietnam War.

Saigon The capital city of U.S.-supported

South Vietnam. Also an unofficial short-

hand way of referring to the South Viet-

namese government.

Silent Majority A term used by U.S. Presi-

dent Richard Nixon to describe the

large number of American people he

believed quietly supported his Vietnam

War policies. In contrast, Nixon referred

to the antiwar movement in the United

States as a vocal minority.

South Vietnam Created under the Geneva

Accords of 1954, the southern section

of Vietnam was known as the Republic

of South Vietnam. It was led by a U.S.-

supported government.

Tonkin Gulf Resolution Passed by Con-

gress after U.S. Navy ships supposedly

came under attack in the Gulf of

Tonkin, this resolution gave U.S. Presi-

dent Lyndon Johnson the authority to

wage war against North Vietnam.

Viet Cong Vietnamese Communist guerilla

fighters who worked with the North

Vietnamese Army to conquer South

Vietnam.

Vietnamization A policy proposed by U.S.

President Richard Nixon that involved

returning responsibility for the war to

the South Vietnamese. It was intended

to allow the United States to reduce its

military involvement without allowing

the country to fall to communism.

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