United States in the Vietnam War
In 1963, Diem was deposed and killed in a military coup tacitly approved by the U.S. North Vietnam began sending detachments of its own army, armed with Soviet and Chinese weapons, to assist the Viet Cong.
Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon, adopted a policy of "Vietnamization", training the South Vietnamese army so it could defend the country and starting a phased withdrawal of American troops.
In addition to the 58,279 soldiers killed, the expenditure of about US$168 billion limited Johnson's Great Society program of domestic reforms and created a large federal budget deficit.
Originally intended for use behind front lines after a conventional invasion of Europe, Kennedy believed that the guerrilla tactics employed by Special Forces would be effective in the "brush fire" war in South Vietnam.
[36] A major factor that led President Lyndon B. Johnson to intervene into Vietnam militarily was the fear of communism due to Cold War tensions with communist countries such as China and the Soviet Union.
Discussing Vietnam with Senator Richard Russell Jr. in May 1964, he expressed serious concerns about countering guerrilla tactics, the likely ineffectiveness and probable domestic political impact of conducting a bombing campaign in the north, and a number of other factors.
Nevertheless, the incident was seen by the administration as the perfect opportunity to present Congress with "a pre-dated declaration of war" in order to strengthen weakening morale in South Vietnam through reprisal attacks by the U.S. on the North.
Johnson ordered attacks on North Vietnamese naval bases almost immediately, and capitalised on the incident by convincing congress to accept intensified military action in Vietnam.
With the U.S. decision to escalate its involvement it had created the Many Flags program to legitimize intervention and ANZUS Pact allies Australia and New Zealand agreed to contribute troops and material to the conflict.
Some officials in Hanoi had favored an immediate invasion of the South, and a plan was developed to use PAVN units to split southern Vietnam in half through the Central Highlands[citation needed].
Westmoreland's public reassurances that "the light at the end of the tunnel" was near were countered when, on January 30, 1968, PAVN and VC forces broke the truce that accompanied the Tết holiday and mounted their largest offensive thus far, in hopes of sparking a general uprising among the South Vietnamese.
The killings ended only when an American helicopter crew, headed by Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, Jr., discovered Calley's unit in the act and threatened to attack them with his aircraft's weapons unless they stopped.
The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group Files made public in 1994 by the "Freedom of Information Act" reveals seven, albeit much smaller, massacres previously unacknowledged by the Pentagon, in which at least 137 civilians had died.
The goal of the American military effort was to buy time, gradually building up the strength of the South Vietnamese armed forces, and re-equipping it with modern weapons so that they could defend their nation on their own.
Nixon's papers show that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by Johnson.
The U.S. was gradually withdrawing from the conflict, and Abrams favored smaller-scale operations aimed at PAVN/VC logistics, more openness with the media, less indiscriminate use of American firepower, elimination of the body count as the key indicator of battlefield success, and more meaningful cooperation with South Vietnamese forces.
For example, they revealed the Johnson administration's obfuscations to Congress concerning the Gulf of Tonkin incidents that had led to direct U.S. intervention; they exposed the clandestine bombing of Laos that had begun in 1964; and they detailed the American government's complicity in the death of Diệm.
Seeing a shift in the prince's position, Nixon ordered the launching of Operation Menu, atop-secret bombing campaign, targeted at the PAVN/VC base areas and sanctuaries along Cambodia's eastern border.
A PAVN force quickly overran large parts of eastern Cambodia reaching to within 15 miles (24 km) of Phnom Penh allowing their allies, the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge to extend their power.
Following the coup, Sihanouk arrived in Beijing, where he established and headed a government in exile, throwing his substantial personal support behind the Khmer Rouge, the North Vietnamese, and the Laotian Pathet Lao.
Backed by U.S. air and artillery support (American troops were forbidden to enter Laos), the ARVN moved across the border along Route 9, utilizing the abandoned Khe Sanh Combat Base as a jumping-off point.
The second new offensive, launched from the tri-border region into the Central Highlands, seized a complex of ARVN outposts near Dak To and then advanced toward Kon Tum, threatening to split South Vietnam in two.
To reassure Thieu of American resolve, Nixon ordered a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam utilizing B-52s and tactical aircraft in Operation Linebacker II, which began on December 18 with large raids against both Hanoi and the port of Haiphong.
"[79] U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in a secret memo to President Gerald Ford that "in terms of military tactics, we cannot help draw the conclusion that our armed forces are not suited to this kind of war.
[82] In the earlier stages of his career as a prominent civil rights activist, Martin Luther King Jr. focused largely on addressing issues pertaining to racial segregation and unfair treatment of black people.
[97] On January 21, 1977, United States president Jimmy Carter, a day after his assuming office, granted a full and unconditional pardon to all Vietnam-era draft dodgers (but not deserters who were on active duty) with Proclamation 4483.
By 1971, a U.S. Army colonel writing in the Armed Forces Journal declared: By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous ....The morale, discipline, and battle-worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
Marine Corps general Victor H. Krulak heavily criticised Westmoreland's attrition strategy, calling it "wasteful of American lives ... with small likelihood of a successful outcome.
[101] Behind the scenes McNamara wrote in a memo to Johnson his doubts about the war: "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.
"[102] Ron Milam has questioned the severity of the "breakdown" of the U.S. armed forces, especially among combat troops, as reflecting the opinions of "angry colonels" who deplored the erosion of traditional military values during the Vietnam War.
