1870

When you watch the Ken Burns series about what we Americans call the War in Vietnam  that begins Sunday on PBS remember that there are some things that preceded what became the defining event in the lives and times of the Boomer Generation, the generation whose excrescence and whose tumult, inconsistency and ignorance has gifted us with Donald Trump. (I’m not a Boomer,having been born during the “good “war)

Everything in history, government, policy and politics connects.

There is a connection between Trump — a Boomer, the ultimate expression of the Boomers — and the War in Vietnam. It is a connection about more than his claim to flat feet that kept him from fighting and dying for  the nation of which he knows nothing, absolutely completely and totally nothing.

But then he was not alone in evading the draft, the fighting and all of that which will be presented  in the PBS series at least in the way of presenting history developed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, his partner in history. Far more young American men evaded the draft than served in the military during the Vietnam war.

Watch the series knowing that the French, during the consummate era of European Imperialism, the one during to which Queen Victoria gave her names — (and whose children or their descendants a generation later either ruled over or had married into all the ruling families that set Europe ablaze in the Great War, that begat the Second World War, that begat American hegemony and global dominance in the American Century – the century that ended last November 8):

Watch it knowing that the French began the War in Vietnam in 1870 when they took possession of what they called Indo-Chine (sounds so mysterious and romantic en Francais; there is an interesting but very disturbing film of that name that starred Catherine Deneuve made back in the 1970s).

They walked in and took it and made Vietnam, once a kingdom and an empire — they made it  their colony. They literally enslaved the people, chose from among them to create an elite they converted in language and religion as part of their selection.

Move on 50 years to post-WWI in Europe, in Paris actually, where a young Vietnamese student finds himself exposed to the ferment of ideas and ideologies sweeping Paris. One is Marxism, an ism that has planted a flag far to the east in Moscow and Petrograd.

The young Vietnamese student is Ho Chi Minh.

He is awakened. He returns home bearing the seeds of a Marxist but also nationalist determination to unchain Vietnam from France, to create a movement for national liberation.

With others he foments a revolution against the colonial power and so begins decades and decades of rebellion, turbulence, terror exacted by the French and war in Indo-Chine.

The Japanese intervene, taking  opportunity from the fall of France to Nazi Germany to seize Vietnam in 1940 even before in 1941 later they  march into the British colonies in Singapore and Malaysia, overrun the American colony in the Philippines and grab the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) as the Japanese Empire extends to the barbarous means, methods and reaches that will in the end deservedly destroy it in the climax of WWII.

The war ends and the U.S.A. dominates the world but recognizes there is a check if not checkmate in the world in the form of the Soviet Union. In the reordering of the world that follows, the redrawing of boundaries, recreation of nations and creation of new nations out of former colonies, the U.S. allows France to reassert itself in Indochina — in Vietnam (they do the same in Algeria and is it any wonder that France yet seethes in the throes  of its brutal Algerian colonization and fruitless struggle to suppress Algeria’s national liberation movement and moment).

We allowed the French to reoccupy Vietnam even though Ho Chi Minh and his forces had from 1940 forward to the end of the way fought the Japanese as they had the French, because their real goal was not a socialist or communist Vietnam but an independent Vietnam.

Ho took his case to the allies after the war and got turned down and then did the only likely thing, resuming the fight against the French in a war of national liberation. It ended badly for the French in 1954 at a place called Dien Bien Phu,  in a valley where a main French force was encircled and defeated by the Vietnamese from the high ground above, resulting in an end to hostilities and a negotiated truce agreement.

The resulting agreement provided for the French to leave, divided Vietnam into two nations, North and South Vietnam and called for a national plebiscite in 1956 on whether to have one or two Vietnams.

But the south and its French-trained and French and U.S. backed  tyrant, Ngo Dinh Diem (the first of many U.S. puppets in Saigon with U.S. backing) refused to conduct the vote.

We knew and Diem knew that a majority of Vietnamese would have voted for one Vietnam. But in the U.S. view that would have been a communist Vietnam because the U.S. did not see Ho Chi Minh as George Washington but as Lenin.

So while the majority would have voted for one country and peace, the Vietnamese got two countries and a war that history says claimed more than 3 million lives in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (including more than 58,000 Americans whose names are on the wall in Washington).

Without the plebiscite Ho resumed  the fight, in the rise of what we came to call the Viet Cong, who our military dubbed “Charlie”,  Ho loyalists in the south. So there came to be two civil wars in Vietnam, one between North and South and one within the south in which one side was abetted by the U.S. fighting against North Vietnam but also against the South Vietnamese.

I have not looked up anything in writing this except some spelling but would add one other fact  dredged from memory. It’s this: When JFK died he died ambivalent about taking the U.S. deeper into Vietnam. History has taught us that JFK was not the man we want to remember but it also  contains signals that he had given serious thought to containing our effort in Vietnam before it consumed us.

And so the fact dredged from memory is that when JFK died our total presence in Vietnam had reached only 1,600 military personnel who were there as advisors to the South Vietnamese army.

At the height of our involvement in about 1967/1968 there were 565,000 American military in Vietnam and only when the U.S. commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, asked to go to more than 700,000 did President Johnson finally say no.

You remember the rest or at least remember the War in Vietnam as you do in your personal remembrance or from reading about it or hearing about it from your parents or grandparents — with the understanding that in this country the War in Vietnam was as much about the war against the war, about the anti-war movement, as about the actual war there.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have an interesting way of presenting history (you will recognize the voice of the narrator – Peter Coyote — who has narrated others of their major series) and this no doubt will be very compelling television in a time when television changes almost every day as does everything else.

I think I read that their first episode Sunday will begin at the end of WWII in 1945 when the fateful decision was made not to reward Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam for fighting the Japanese by granting them  independence but to return them to French subjugation. Really though, it should begin at least when that subjugation began 75 years earlier.

Every time I turn around these days it seems someone is observing that something or other or such and such happened 50 years ago today or this week or is about to next month. History it seems comes in bites of  50 years.

Me? My war ended 50 years ago this just past August when I got discharged from the U.S. Army.

No, I did not go to Vietnam. I went to Ft. Dix for 6 months where they trained me to be an infantryman and then they sent me to Panama where a guy whose job included meeting the incoming troops to pull out those with some education changed my assignment and my luck .

I spent the next 17 months working in an office and came home and so my war, at least, ended then. Three months before I became a soldier I went to an anti-war demonstration and not long after I got out I went to another.I knew why I was against the war and it had nothing to do with getting drafted because I got drafted.

For most it has long seemed to me the anti-war movement was more about “don’t draft me” or “don’t draft my boyfriend” than about the wrongness of the war and the U.S. then For me it was about we were wrong, they were right and we should not have been there killing them and getting ourselves killed.

Now, of course, we do business with them, want to do more and Vietnam in fact is one of the 11 other nations besides the U.S. that were involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership that President Obama had  built as a counterweight to China in trade and finance across Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.

The ignoramus in the White House ripped up that treaty. When he did that he did two things. He lost the War in Vietnam for the second time,  he delivered the future of the world’s economy to China and ended the American Century.

But that will be a subject for another series by other video historians 50 years from now – if there is a 50 years from now, if there is still history then.