Though their experience was in no way typical of American service in the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war have dominated American perceptions of the conflict. A small, strikingly homogenous group, the POWs were important because of, not despite, their unusual character. As most were pilots captured while waging air war against North Vietnam, they were subjected to harsh treatment by Vietnamese authorities, who sought to make them confess and repent their aggression against the Vietnamese people. But because aviators tended to be older, well-educated, white, career officers who identified deeply with the United States and its mission in Vietnam, American POWs were determined to resist Vietnamese coercion. In enduring torture rather than admit guilt, they inverted the wars moral framework, representing themselves as victims of Vietnamese aggression. Because they so neatly embodied the nation as its white majority wished to imagine it, their suffering and sacrifice worked to redeem the American cause in Vietnam and restore national honor. This chapter explains this phenomenon through close attention to the POW experience in North Vietnams prisons.

More than 2.7 million men and approximately 65,000 women served in Vietnam or in the Southeast Asian theater between 1963 and 1975. Yet much of the literature on the American side of the Vietnam War discusses the role of decision-making by presidents and their civilian advisors, along with military strategy developed and directed by general-grade officers. This chapter instead deals with the combat soldiers and marines who actually did the fighting in the jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam. These “grunts” had to first be selected, then trained, then sent to “repo-depots” where they became replacements for those who had been killed or wounded by the National Liberation Front or People’s Army of Vietnam soldiers. They were then sent to the field with their new units and would serve one year before “coming home.” Society would then have to deal with thousands of returning veterans, many with PTS(D) and some with a newly identified condition – moral injury.

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.

This chapter explores the history of Americans’ opposition to their country’s military involvement in Vietnam. Energized by the escalation of the conflict, and the emergence of the wider student New Left, the relatively modest protests that had taken place in the early 1960s soon burgeoned into a genuine mass movement: by the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973 some 6 million Americans had taken to the streets or engaged in other forms of dissent. Highlighting the diversity of activists and the range and creativity of their tactics, the movement’s vital – if sometimes prickly – relations with contemporaneous social movements, and its wide geographical reach, the chapter concludes by evaluating the legacy and impact of American opposition to the war. While the protests certainly helped to shape the nation’s political culture – not least by inspiring subsequent social activism on both the left (gay liberation) and right (the early anti-abortion movement) – it remains far from clear what role, if any, domestic opposition to the Vietnam War had on the eventual outcome on the conflict in southeast Asia.

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.

From the outset, US military intervention in Vietnam provoked popular campaigns and mass rallies in support of the United States global anticommunist agenda. While these early initiatives were often orchestrated by rightwing activists long versed in the practices of populist anticommunism, the burgeoning of domestic opposition to the war intensified and greatly diversified prowar activism. Appealing to patriotism, conservative leaders rallied popular support in favor of total victory but later endorsed Richard Nixon’s call for “peace with honor.” As the war dragged on, internal divisions eroded the confidence of prowar conservatives in achieving their aims and forced them to reevaluate the political viability of their hardline Cold War rhetoric. Rightwing activists still managed to make use of grassroots patriotic campaigns to marshal support for the war, particularly among white ethnic workers opposed to the antiwar movement and wider social changes. In so doing, conservatives altered the nature and direction of their agenda, and furthered a new majoritarian political coalition. This chapter explores the origins and nature of these grassroots campaigns in support of the Vietnam War and demonstrates that the groundwork for a decades-long resurgence in populist rightwing patriotism was born amidst domestic strife over American purpose in Vietnam.

This chapter seeks to discern the nature of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and military contribution it made to the wider Vietnam War. Often written off as a mere stooge of the West or a puppet of imperialism, the ARVN needs to be understood as a Vietnamese institution. Though it grew from the shattered wreckage of French colonialism and served a flawed American war effort, the ARVN was indeed Vietnamese. And although it failed in the end that failure needs to be seen from within a Vietnamese context. The ARVN for years commanded the loyalty and sacrifice of millions and fought much more effectively than its American sponsors were willing to admit or its North Vietnamese foes ever expected. Understanding ARVN as an institution is critical to understanding the Vietnam War. And understanding both its military successes and critical failures are key to understanding why the American war in Vietnam failed. That the ARVN perhaps had a real chance to succeed brings the larger failings of the American war in Vietnam into focus.

Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on the Global 1960s, this chapter argues that the Vietnam War was a key historic event that internationalized radical social movements. The war did so in three main ways. First, through the conflict, activists in different parts of the world formed a global public sphere. Opposition to the war helped to transcend Cold War and colonial divisions, but the political movements that emerged resonated differently through various parts of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Second, resistance against the Vietnam War fostered internationalism by foregrounding the agency of the marginalized. The war featured a David versus Goliath competition between a presumably backward, peasant society against the mightiest military in the world. Third, the wars in Southeast Asia helped to internationalize antiwar resistance by illuminating the interconnectedness of various systems of inequality. Imperialism and colonization became part of the activist lexicon, utilized to interpret cultural, racial, class, gender, and other forms of exploitation. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the agency of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in consciously cultivating these antiwar internationalist affiliates.

The fighting stopped in 1975 with Hanois victory. But the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people continued and was propelled by politicians manipulating the mythical cause of POWs/MIAs. Postwar movies filled out the scenario of a war lost because of poor leadership in Washington combined with the baleful influence of the anti-war movement. Presidents wrestled with the legacy of Vietnam, including the controversy over the national Vietnam Memorial. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both attempted to move the nation beyond the grasp of the Vietnam Specter. Both failed. Ronald Reagan used it to help him win the presidency in 1980, after the debacle that followed the occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran, which only seemed to emphasize the nations lost claims to world leadership after Vietnam. George H. W. Bush claimed that it had been buried in the sands of Iraq after the rapid victory in Gulf War I. Bill Clinton succeeded in establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam. But it re-emerged with renewed force during the Second Gulf War and the never-ending war in Afghanistan. Even today it shapes much thinking about military interventionism.

Nineteen sixty-eight was an exceptional year in which people across the world mobilized in protest against imperialism, authoritarianism, and Cold War hegemony. The “Global 1968” has come to represent an era of social and political transformation, and its meaning has been debated into the twenty-first century. This chapter provides an overview of two major events that challenged the bipolar world order in 1968 – the Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring – and explores how the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people influenced protest movements around the world in this historic year. The Vietnamese communist revolution became a global symbol of anti-imperialism and Third World self determination, while South Vietnamese dissidents carried out protests for freedom and democracy that mirrored uprisings in other parts of the world.

This chapter offers an overview of developments in postwar Vietnam until the 2010s. After the war, the communist government sought to impose a socialist system in the South in the same way they had done in the North since 1954. This utopian march to socialism was draconian and produced an economic collapse and a looming famine in the mid 1980s. With leadership change and support from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Vietnamese leaders embarked on market reform but refused political reform. For more than three decades, the communist party has overseen rapid economic growth that lifted millions out of poverty and raised national income many times. Despite impressive economic achievements, Vietnam’s political system is undergoing severe decay, with an aging leadership still pledging loyalty to communism while party and state bureaucracies are thoroughly penetrated by corrupt patronage networks that peddle offices and influences to serve officials and their cronies. The perverse outcome of a communist revolution that produced an oppressive and corrupt regime in Vietnam today has lately brought about the moment of reckoning for many Vietnamese about the true meaning of the Vietnam War.

Chapter 5 recounts the 2nd Texas’ first battle experience at Shiloh and the subsequent allegations of cowardice. It explains efforts by the men to defend themselves, as well as their supporters. Their Col. John C. Moore filed multiple reports to explain his unit’s actions the second day of the fight; their Lt. Col. William P. Rogers vowed to prove his men’s valor.

The Conclusion returns to the need for historians to recognize the topic of cowardice in combat in order to gain a fuller understanding of war. Recovering the complicated histories of the Fire Zouaves and the 2nd Texas further helps to disassemble the glorification of war-making.