What was vietnam like

In , fresh from his success with Magsaysay, Lansdale was sent to South Vietnam by the director of the C.

The Communists in question were, of course, Vietnamese opposed to a government put in place and propped up by foreign powers. As Boot explains, Vietnam was a different level of the game. The Philippines was a former American colony.

Almost all Filipinos were Christians. They liked Americans and had fought with them in the war against Japan. English was the language used by the government. The Vietnamese, by contrast, had had almost no experience with Americans and were proud of their two-thousand-year history of resistance to foreign invaders, from the Chinese and the Mongols to the French and the Japanese.

There were more than a million Vietnamese Catholics, but, in a population of twenty-five million, eighty per cent practiced some form of Buddhism. The South Vietnamese who welcomed the American presence after were mainly urbanites and people who had prospered under French rule.

Eighty per cent of the population lived in the countryside, though, and it was the strategy of the Vietcong to convince them that the United States was just one more foreign invader, no different from the Japanese or the French, or from Kublai Khan.

He was a Communist, but he was a Communist because he was a nationalist. Twice he had appealed to American Presidents to support his independence movement—to Woodrow Wilson after the First World War, and Truman at the end of the Second—and twice he had been ignored.

Only the Communists, he had concluded, were truly committed to the principle of self-determination in Asia. The Geneva Accords called for a national election to be held in Vietnam in ; that election was not held, but many people in the American government thought that Ho would have won. Lansdale knew neither French nor Vietnamese. In the Philippines, he is said to have sometimes communicated by charades, or by drawing pictures in the sand.

Yet, as he had done in the Philippines, he managed to get close to a local political figure and become his consigliere. In the Philippines, Lansdale could choose the politician he wanted to work with; in Vietnam, he had to play the card he was dealt. Diem was the personification of the paradoxes of American designs in Southeast Asia. He was a devout Catholic who hated the Communists.

One of his brothers had been killed in by the Vietminh—the Communist-dominated nationalist party. During the war with France, he had spent two years in the United States, where he impressed a number of American politicians, including the young John F.

In , the year of the French defeat, he was appointed Prime Minister by the Emperor, Bao Dai, a French puppet who lived luxuriously in Europe and did not speak Vietnamese well.

Diem was a workaholic who could hold forth for hours before journalists and other visitors to the Presidential Palace. But Diem did not see himself as a Western puppet. He was a genuine nationalist—on paper, the plausible leader of an independent non-Communist South Vietnam. On the other hand, Diem was no champion of representative democracy. His political philosophy was a not entirely intelligible blend of personalism a quasi-spiritual French school of thought , Confucianism, and authoritarianism.

He aspired to be a benevolent autocrat, but he had little understanding of the condition Vietnamese society was in after seventy years of colonial rule. The French had replaced the Confucian educational system and had tried to manufacture a new national identity: Franco-Vietnamese. They were only partly successful. It was not obvious how Diem and the Americans were supposed to forge a nation from the fractured society the French left behind.

What made it poisonous was nepotism. Diem was deeply loyal to and dependent on his family, and his family were an unloved bunch. One of his brothers was the Catholic bishop of the coastal city of Hue.

Another was the boss—the warlord, really—of central Vietnam. American officials in Saigon prayed that the Nhus would somehow disappear, but they were the only people Diem trusted. Nhu ran the underside of the Diem regime. He created a shadowy political party, the Can Lao, whose members swore loyalty to Diem, and he made membership a prerequisite for career advancement. He also created a series of secret-police and intelligence organizations.

Thousands of Vietnamese suspected of disloyalty were arrested, tortured, and executed by beheading or disembowelment. Political opponents were imprisoned. For nine years, the Ngo family was the wobbling pivot on which we rested our hopes for a non-Communist South Vietnam. After landing in Saigon and setting up a front, the Saigon Military Mission, Lansdale began sending infiltrators into North Vietnam violating a promise that the United States had made about respecting the ceasefire agreed to at Geneva, though the North Vietnamese were violating the accord, too.

The agents were instructed to carry out sabotage and other subversive activities, standard C. People survive in totalitarian regimes by becoming informers, and those regimes were often tipped off by double agents.

The Geneva Accords provided for a three-hundred-day grace period before the partition in order to allow Vietnamese to move from North to South or vice versa, and Lansdale, using American ships and an airline secretly owned by the C. A much smaller number immigrated to the North. The French defeat had left a power vacuum, and groups besides the Vietminh were jockeying for turf. In , three of them united in opposition to Diem: the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, religious sects, and the Binh Xuyen, an organized-crime society with a private army of ten thousand men.

Diem neutralized the religious sects by the expedient of having Lansdale use C. Boot says the amount may have been as high as twelve million dollars, which would be a hundred million dollars today.

Nor was Troyer concerned about being a member of the Black Lions battalion, which was so well known that the Viet Cong had allegedly offered a bounty for every Black Lions soldier killed. Like other twenty-year-olds, both in the service and out, he felt invulnerable. Frustrations Men like Troyer had to deal with several frustrations particular to the war in Vietnam.

Many were brought in piecemeal as replacements within existing units, which made them feel disconnected from the larger group. And with no geographical lines separating friend from foe, the GI in the field couldn't trust anyone.

Villagers might be innocent civilians or Viet Cong sympathizers. Areas temporarily cleared of enemy forces could become dangerous again the next week. What particularly galled Troyer was his feeling that superior officers "wouldn't leave [a soldier] alone to fight the war with the knowledge he learned to fight with.

Then, dog-tired from marching through the jungle all day with pound packs, the soldiers faced the prospect of some general swooping down and declaring that the way they had set up their perimeter did not comport with Army regulations. He cracked down on the smuggling of rice and opium and in its place promoted state-run commerce with Singapore, China and the West through approved Chinese, Vietnamese and European merchants.

The Nguyen organised the large Chinese trading community into congregations so as better to control and tax them. That is not to say that he achieved everything he set out to, but rather to suggest that modernity in Vietnam, or anywhere else for that matter, is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon and it does not necessarily have to come via a western colonial connection.

In the s, as he revolutionised the state, Minh Mang simultaneously expanded the same territorial entity to include all of modern Cambodia and parts of Laos. In the end, the Vietnamese emperor went too far. When he tried to dismantle the Cambodian monarchy, he triggered a massive Cambodian rebellion and invited Thai military intervention. Cambodia regained its independence under a jointly negotiated Thai and Vietnamese peace. In the end, Thai intervention, not that of the French, saved Cambodia from Vietnamese colonisation in the s.

As the French pushed their own imperial power into Vietnam, they built their state on the pre-existing Vietnamese one. Although the 20th-century quest for unity and independence is important to understanding Vietnam, it overlooks the fact that there has never been one Vietnam but several remarkably varied ones. While the Vietnamese suffered at the hands of the French for 80 years, they were not always victims of foreign colonisation.

They were colonisers themselves. It is an attractive narrative for nationalists in Vietnam, who seek to invoke a timeless culture of resistance to foreign invaders, not only during their struggles against the French and the Americans in the midth century but also more recently against the Chinese during a border war in the s and in a tense showdown in the South China Sea today.

Instead, we should recognise that Vietnam, like Korea and even Japan, is in a unique position in that it has previously been a part of, and has always had to deal with, the massive world empire that the Chinese have built since Han times bc—ad Like the Franks and Germans dealing with the Roman Empire at the same time, the Vietnamese borrowed many things from the Chinese. So did the Koreans and the Japanese at one point or another. The difference, however, between, say, the Franks and the Germans on the one hand and Vietnam and Korea on the other is that the Roman Empire crumbled in the fifth century ad whereas its Chinese counterpart is still with us.

The Chinese empire has always been able to reconstitute and even expand itself. The Vietnamese, like the Koreans, found themselves borrowing from the Chinese to build their own countries and cultures on the periphery of Imperial China, while always having to make sure that the Chinese did not force them back into that same imperial order. This meant that the Vietnamese have always had to convince themselves that they are not Chinese, despite their reliance on models from China, all the while presenting themselves as the messengers of a superior civilisation they were pushing southwards via their own colonial expansion.

It was a unique, difficult and fascinating balancing act. The French and the Germans never had to worry about the Romans coming back to crush them or to heap ridicule upon their borrowings of Roman statecraft, myths, language or claims to be the new Caesars in post-Roman Europe Tsars, Czar, Kaiser. The Vietnamese did — constantly.

Vietnamese communists find themselves in a similar situation today. They have borrowed heavily from Chinese communist models and methods, including ones for military operations, building a single-party state, and, since the economic reforms of the s, tailoring capitalist economics to preserve that same communist rule.

But the Vietnamese communist leadership does this despite the fact that Chinese communists are now intent on pushing their empire far beyond its continental limits. The balancing act is especially difficult now that opponents to communist rule in Vietnam are trying to discredit the party for following the Chinese model. They maintain that the US had no business getting involved in Vietnam in the first place.

That may be, but it does not diminish the fact that the Americans were hardly the first to intervene in Vietnam and to attach great importance to its location. It was forever a search for a picture, and you never knew, sometimes for weeks, whether you had that picture or not.

My film had to make it all the way to New York before it could be processed and edited. One morning near the end of the unsuccessful Laos invasion of early an attempt to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail , I wandered into a group of young soldiers who were tasked with fixing tanks and track vehicles which were regularly being rocketed by North Vietnamese troops just down the road.

This soldier and I exchanged pleasantries the way you would in the dusty heat. He went back to work after reading a letter from home, and I moved on to another unit. Catherine Leroy. Catherine Leroy—Dotation Catherine Leroy. There is something both surreal and strikingly sad in this photograph by Catherine Leroy. An empty helmet — is its owner still alive? It is photographed as if forming the center of a broken compass, one without arms, pointing nowhere. The violent spectacle has temporarily receded, and the reader, in this previously unpublished photograph, is given its remains, both the sacred and the partly absurd.

She managed to get accredited by the Associated Press, covered numerous battles, was seriously wounded by shrapnel that would remain in her body, parachuted into combat small and thin, she was weighed down so as not to be blown away , was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese which she used as an opportunity to produce a cover story for LIFE Magazine , and remained obsessed by the war until her death in Consumed by a ferocious anger at the hypocrisies of politics at various levels, in her last years Leroy created a website and then a book, Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam , paying homage to her colleagues 40 years after the war had ended.

Sal Veder. Released prisoner of war Lt. Robert L. Sal Veder—AP. I had photographed POWs returning home time and again, and been in Vietnam on two tours myself, as a photographer. On that day, There were 30 or 40 photographers boarded on a flat-bed, including TV. I was photographing a different family and out of the corner of my eye saw the action and turned.

I was lucky to get a break. It was a great moment for Americans! The joyousness of the reunion and the coming together of the family as a visual is outstanding because it was the end of the war. We were glad to get it over with. The picture is there and it comes back up again. There is no way to avoid it. Nick UT. My older brother Huynh Thanh My, who was killed covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, always told me that an image could stop the war and that was his goal.

I was devastated when he died. I was very young. But there and then, I decided to follow in his footsteps and complete his mission. No one was expecting people to come out of the bombed-out burning buildings, but when they did, I was ready with my Leica camera and I feel my brother guided me to capture that image. The rest is history. Yoichi Okamoto. As tens of thousands of anti-war protestors rioted in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, President Johnson and his family watched from the bedroom at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas.

This is truly an incredibly intimate picture. The caption provides pertinent information about the circumstance: the who, what and where. The first civilian hired as Chief White House Photographer, Okamoto also became the first one to truly document the Presidency for history. Raymond Depardon. Raymond Depardon—Magnum. After I photographed the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which was very turbulent and contested, I wanted to photograph the future President.

I worked for a little cooperative French agency, Gamma, which we had created a few years earlier. I arrived from Miami on the press plane that accompanied the candidate. We were positioned at a little airport in Sioux City. It was the morning. It was windy. Nixon left the plane. I almost did not make the photo — the man with the flag and Nixon on top of the aircraft stairs.