Podcast “We are history”: The Vietnam War as a national trauma of the USA

A fight for the wrong cause
The Vietnam War as a national trauma of the USA

5/7/2022 7:24 am

The Vietnam War is one of the greatest fiascos the United States has ever known. As a new world order emerges after 1945, the US military enters a conflict it cannot win. The new episode “We Are History” is about the bitter aftermath of this decades-long war.

Today’s Vietnam is a very young country. The emerging economic power in Southeast Asia attracts travelers from all over the world, lures with beautiful beaches and a lively culture. Most of the population was born after the war. April 30, 1975 marked the end of a 20-year bloody conflict, the scars of which are still visible despite all positive developments – not only in Vietnam but also in the USA.

One cannot understand the Vietnam War without placing it in the context of the Cold War. When the communists under Mao took over China in 1949, billions of people found themselves in the camp of communism overnight: “A huge defeat for the then Truman administration and a kind of trauma,” analyzes Andreas Etges in the ntv podcast “We are history”. He is a historian at the America Institute of the University of Munich.

Shortly thereafter, the Korean War broke out, which was interpreted in a similar way: “The Americans see all the things that happen on the communist side as a kind of big conspiracy theory. It’s always about world domination. The West is tested again and again. And the West must show strength.”

American soldiers unprepared for Vietnam

A central paradigm of US foreign policy that was new at the time and developed after the Second World War also led to the start of the Vietnam War. Andreas Etges describes it as follows: “National security no longer begins at one’s own national borders, but everywhere. You have to stop the aggressor where he becomes aggressive: in Berlin, in Southeast Asia or in Cuba. The security of the Americans is global to this day defended”. This logic – expanded to include the so-called domino theory, which glorified Vietnam as the crucial piece in the tug-of-war between capitalism and communism – were the decisive arguments that led to the deployment of US soldiers from 1965 onwards.

But the GIs were not prepared for what was to come. They set off for Vietnam with the drive of a positive mission that saw itself in the tradition of liberating Europe from fascism. True to the motto: “If the Americans come, then the problems will be solved anyway.”

The mostly very young soldiers, who weren’t even allowed to vote at home, saw themselves exposed to a kind of war that they didn’t understand. The dense forests and inaccessible terrain favored the guerrilla tactics of the local communist North Vietnamese.

Used napalm and agent orange

After some time, the US military began to send home fantasy figures that told of an only seemingly successful course of the war. Frustration and disillusionment set in. Increasingly desperate, despicable tactics were used: incendiary weapons like napalm, the chemical defoliant Agent Orange, plus the killing of civilians. When the North Vietnamese pushed through to the US embassy in the south of the country during the Tet offensive in early 1968, it was finally clear that this war could not be won.

A question that gets to the heart of the senselessness of this war and which also crops up again and again in letters from the GIs home is: “Why are we actually here?” Gradually, the decision-makers in the USA are realizing that it makes no sense to continue the war. But the peace and student movements in the West also contributed to Richard Nixon initiating a “de-Americanization” of Vietnam in the early 1970s.

The half-hearted hope was that the south of Vietnam would continue fighting the communists in the north. A miscalculation that was to be repeated in a similar way in Afghanistan in 2021.

And so the Vietnam War not only left behind a branded country that would only slowly recover from the horrors that befell it in the decades that followed. Thousands of US soldiers also came home traumatized – to a country that they no longer understood and that no longer understood them. They were doomed to relive the memories over and over again.