Until 1954 the strategically important Central Highlands were primarily inhabited by some twenty indigenous ethnic groups that the French and Americans collectively referred to as Montagnards or Highlanders. From 1960 the communist National Liberation Front sought to recruit Highlanders, leading to a rapid deterioration of the security situation in the Central Highlands, which in 1961 provoked the deployment of US Special Forces to lead Highlander militias. In combination with discriminatory policies of successive South Vietnamese governments, the militarization of the Highlands spurred the emergence in 1964 of a Highlands autonomy movement known as FULRO. As the Central Highlands became one of the main theaters of war, an attack by communist forces on an American airstrip close to Pleiku in the Central Highlands prompted the bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder and the landing of US combat troops near Da Nang in 1965. After a decade of forced resettlement and displacement of Highlanders, it was the silent complicity of FULRO militia and indigenous populations around the Highlands city of Ban Me Thuot that ensured the element of surprise in the attack by regular North Vietnamese cavalry in March 1975, triggering the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam one month later.

This chapter gives an overview of the destruction and transformation of South Vietnam during the war, and especially of the ramifications of the American military presence and its firepower, as well as of the American economic aid that kept the homefront afloat. In the rural areas, the American presence depopulated the countryside and compelled peasants to flee in a “forced draft urbanization and modernization” wave. In the urban areas, it initiated an economic boom, creating a more prosperous middle class, and a more robust entrepreneurial sector dominated by overseas Chinese allied with the military. Overnight, it also created a large service sector that rose to cater to the needs of its military personnel, and the economic rise of this group of formerly underclass people inflicted stress on South Vietnam’s traditional society. This society – and its culture – was further transformed and strained by the introduction of American consumer goods and lifestyle. The American presence also changed the political map, handing the South Vietnamese military unparalleled political power which a fractious political body could not challenge. As the American presence drew to a close, this entire social, military, political, and economic edifice began to crack and eventually collapsed in 1975.

This chapter analyzes what New York Times correspondent David Halberstam called “a war within a war,” the conflict between journalists who reported about the deficiencies of the Saigon government or the US war effort in Vietnam and administration officials in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations who considered those stories myopic or malicious. It argues that news media coverage of the Vietnam War rankled presidents not because it was slanted or sensational but because it showed the hard realities, high costs, and inconvenient truths of a controversial war. As polls revealed declining popular support for the US war effort, it became politically expedient for Johnson and Nixon to blame the news media – and especially the television networks – for public discontent. The “war within the war” has had enduring legacies. The efforts of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to discredit the reporting of television journalists, prominent columnists, and newspaper correspondents established precedents that a later generation of government officials has used in 21st-century battles over “fake news.” Like so much of the US experience in Vietnam, the disputes over the reporting of the war remain part of the present, even as they recede further into the past.

The 1968 Tet Offensive proved to be the turning point of the Vietnam War, and its effects were far-reaching. In late January, the combined forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the People’s Liberation Armed Forces launched a massive offensive in South Vietnam, striking near simultaneously at 5 of 6 autonomous cities, 36 of 44 province capitals, 72 of 245 district towns, and 23 airfields/bases. Despite intelligence indicators that predicted a major enemy buildup, the United States and its South Vietnamese allies were taken by surprise at the scope and ferocity of the communist attacks. The allies recovered quickly; in the bitter fighting that followed into the early fall months, the communists were soundly defeated at the tactical level and failed to achieve any of their battlefield objectives. However, the fact that the enemy had pulled off such a widespread offensive and caught the allies by surprise ultimately contributed to a psychological victory for the communists at the strategic level. The Tet Offensive set into motion the events that would lead to the election of Richard Nixon, the long and bloody US withdrawal from Southeast Asia, and ultimately the fall of South Vietnam.

From the 1950s through 1975, American women served in the Vietnam War through the US armed services, the American Red Cross, and US government agencies. Deficiencies in record-keeping have made it difficult to know exactly how many American women deployed to Vietnam, but estimates suggest that about 8,000 to 10,000 women served military tours, while 25,000 or more went to Vietnam in civilian capacities. Although a few women went to Vietnam before the United States committed combat troops and remained in country until 1975, the majority of American women who served in either military or civilian capacities arrived between 1965, the year of the first deployment of ground troops, and 1973, when the last US combat troops departed. Women were not assigned to infantry or other forward units, but they experienced the trauma of war through their work with US servicemen. In particular, nurses and Red Cross workers saw what combat did to soldiers, yet the nature of their jobs and the expectation that they nurture wounded and traumatized servicemen required them to put aside their own mental and emotional injuries that the war inflicted.

The Vietnamese communist leadership displayed a remarkable degree of ingenuity and resourcefulness in its quest to drive out the Americans, finish off the regime in Saigon, and win the conflict by achieving national reunification under its exclusive aegis. At times, it proved callous to the extreme, making choices it understood might result in massive death and suffering for its people. Increasingly reliant over time upon military and other aid from socialist allies, most notably China and the Soviet Union, it still jealously guarded its autonomy, refusing even to consult those allies about major strategic matters. The audacity and temerity of the Hanoi Politburo were matched only by its impenetrability and staunchness. In the end, it prevailed over its enemies owing less to their shortcomings than to the merits of its masterfully crafted and carefully calibrated strategy of “struggle” on three separate yet closely intertwined fronts.

Few issues from the Vietnam War divided the American public more than the character and nature of the National Liberation Front (NLF). The US government claimed that communist North Vietnam controlled the NLF, and that it wanted to overthrow the government of South Vietnam by force. Antiwar scholars and activists, in sharp contrast, argued that the NLF was born in the tinder-dry rice paddies of South Vietnam in response to President Ngo Dinh Diem’s oppressive policies. The NLF was very skillful at portraying itself as local freedom fighters, organized simply to free South Vietnam from foreign domination and a corrupt Saigon government. This made it difficult for successive US presidential administrations to win support at home and abroad for their counterinsurgency programs. In reality, the NLF was both Southern and communist. The Lao Dong, the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, was a nationwide, unified movement with revolutionaries placed in most villages and hamlets throughout Vietnam. The party leadership in Hanoi included several southerners, like Le Duan – the partys general secretary – who favored armed rebellion to liberate Vietnam south of the 17th parallel and to reunify the country under the socialist banner.

At the prompting of the Nixon White House, President Nguyen Van Thieu sent South Vietnamese forces into Laos in February 1971, seeking to cut North Vietnamese supply lines to the battlefields in the South. Lam Son 719 was a bloody failure, and it shaped the final phase of America’s Vietnam War. Convinced that the South Vietnamese could never withstand a full-scale offensive, the North Vietnamese leadership committed to a nation-wide attack in early 1972, designed to bring a decisive end to the war. The Easter Offensive, as it is remembered in the West, broke on three fronts in late March 1972, initially with a series of victories by the NVA. President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, viewed this offensive as a threat to their political and diplomatic objectives, and ordered a massive deployment of US air and naval forces to reinforce the South Vietnamese. In May 1972, Nixon ordered an air offensive against North Vietnam code-named Linebacker to deny resupply to the North Vietnamese forces. The NVA offensive stagnated in late June, setting the stage for negotiations between the US and Hanoi to end the war. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a settlement in early October, but it was rejected by Thieu, forcing the US to renegotiate the treaty. In the end, Nixon directed the most violent air campaign of the war, sending B-52 heavy bombers over Hanoi to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the minor changes required for a settlement.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

The fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War as well as the most dramatic turning point in the history of the Vietnamese diaspora. From the mid 1970s and the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. Their lives were defined by concurrent and overlapping experiences of national loss, family separation, and difficulties among their loved ones in Vietnam amidst their own survival and adaptation in the new societies. They constructed their exilic identity through a host of media and built exilic communities through internal migration. Starting in the late 1980s, legal migration led tens of thousands of other Vietnamese to Little Saigon communities. In turn, they have enlarged the economic and political prowess of those communities, and helped to shift the collective experience from an exilic identity to a transnational identity.

This chapter introduces readers to the origins, conduct, and termination of the Third Indochina War. Marshaling old and new Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, Soviet, American, and ASEAN sources, as well as the most recent secondary literature, the chapter takes an international history perspective, focusing on the simultaneous decision-making of all sides directly or indirectly involved in the conflict. It adopts a chronological approach following the life-cycle of the conflict by first locating the origins of both wars from the inter-connected perspectives of the three main protagonists – Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Following that, the chapter describes the conduct of both wars and their eventual resolution. This involved, apart from the three main protagonists, the Soviet Union, the United States (and its allies). Although these countries were not directly involved in the fighting, they played a significant role in both prolonging the war and bringing about its end.

The third and final volume of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War examines key domestic, regional, and international developments in the period before and after the war’s end, including its legal, environmental, and memorial legacies. The latter stages of the Vietnam War witnessed its apex as a Cold War crucible. The Sino-Soviet dispute, Sino-American rapprochement, Soviet–American détente, and global counterculturalism served in various ways to elevate the already high profile and importance of the conflict, as did its expansion into Cambodia and Laos. After the “fall” of Saigon to communist-led forces and Vietnam’s formal reunification in 1975–6, Hanoi’s persecution of former enemies, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, and economic mismanagement triggered a massive migratory crisis that redefined international refugee policies. In time, the migration changed the demographic landscape of cities across North America and Europe and continued to impact our world long after the conflict ended.

In the two decades after 1975, over 1 million Vietnamese resettled in the United States. New resettlement programs arose not only in 1975 with the fall of Saigon and in the years immediately thereafter, but also in 1979, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989, and 1996. These initiatives resulted from unilateral US policies, multilateral programs organized under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, bilateral programs negotiated between Washington and Hanoi, and, often, a combination of the three. This chapter explores how the Vietnamese diaspora influenced the American approach to normalization with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). It argues that normalization was a protracted process that unfolded over decades and that negotiating and implementing migration programs was a central part of the that process. The US approach to post-1975 US–SRV relations saw significant input from nonexecutive actors. Nonstate actors provided information and political pressure, and created close relationships with elected officials outside the White House, especially members of Congress. These groups, the actions of first-asylum nations, and other transnational forces combined to make negotiating and implementing migration programs a US priority. The contact, cooperation, and compromise that process required normalized US–Vietnamese relations, despite US assertions to the contrary.