Vietnam

 I'm making slow progress on the current book I'm reading, Vietnam, by Max Hastings. It's important for me to finish this book, despite the large amount of detail in diplomatic and political spheres over a long period. I am getting the gist of it. I'm feeling compelled to write briefly about it. 

As I was about finish primary school, President Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy had been mindful that his government's decisions on policy in Vietnam would have great significance at the election to follow in November 1964. Early November '63 Kennedy was shot dead and shortly after, President Diem in South Vietnam was murdered in a coup by military generals and a new President installed. The new guy didn't last all that long and in turn was murdered and there was another murder and change over, and maybe yet another before '64 was out.

My mate Graeme Forster and I started secondary school at Malvern Grammar that year. I met my great mate Rickyralph that year. Our focus was certainly not on Indochina as 12-year-olds, as we each grappled with the newness and the idiosyncrasies of our particular family circumstances. As Graeme and I played on the beach at Lorne in the summer of '64/5, Lyndon Johnson basked in glory following a huge landslide victory in the US election in November.

Skirmishes between Communist and South Vietnamese forces escalated during '64: a mini sea battle in the Gulf of Tonkin when a US destroyer fired upon North Vietnamese patrol boats after "imagined" torpedo attack, later resolved as turbulence (by sudden change of direction by the destroyer) picked up on radar, precipitated a bombing raid by the US on targets in the North. A show of might and power meant to deter and cower.

It was an extraordinary aspect of the war, that the American people and their legislature acquiesced with little remark in a vast military commitment to a faraway country, heedless of the fact that the rest of the world including Britain, France, Japan, Canada - almost every developed democracy except Australia - thought US policy foolhardy in the extreme.

Prior to 1965, most of the direct American assistance to South Vietnam was advisory and in training ground forces and pilots. American helicopters ferried South Vietnamese to conflict zones and covert US operatives were parachuted into remote areas to gather data on the strength and movements of communist forces. There were as many as 26,000 US personnel advising the regime government and the military. The South Vietnamese seemed to lack the will to fight with desperation and urgency. Many defected to the Vietcong. The American involvement was seen by the North as Imperialism, similar or worse than the colonialism they had suffered for many decades. American planes and helicopters were shot down, pilots captured. The bombing of the North steeled the iron will of the communists.

It seems the ego of the new President and those around him entwined with the nation's global prestige. Coordinated assaults by the Vietcong culminated in an attack on the Brink Hotel in Saigon on Christmas Eve, leaving two Americans dead and 58 wounded. Late in December VC regiments mauled a Vietnamese Marine battalion leaving 60% casualties and most of the officers killed. Four American helicopters were shot down. Patriotism helped stifle debate when American boys were dying.

A dramatic expansion of America's war in Vietnam had become inevitable.