Vietnamese War Midterm

Directions: Select one of the following questions and answer as fully as possible. The paper should be no more than five, double-spaced pages of text excluding notes and bibliography.  Additional questions will be added weekly.

1. Lawrence Stone, a noted British Historian, developed a model in order to explain civil wars, revolutions, and all forms of armed conflict. His paradigm is tailor made for the understanding the Vietnam War. Stones’ prototype involves “preconditions,” those long-term tensions that serve as the issues that made the Vietnam War likely. The second component entails “precipitants,” those shorter-term tensions that made the Vietnam War highly probable. The final category in Stone’s representation was the “trigger,” the specific event or events that assured that war would occur in Southeast Asia. How would you use Stone’s model in order to explain the complexities of the Second Indochinese War?

2. For years a debate ensued among historians and supporters of John F. Kennedy, who rigorously contend in various publications and professional journals had JFK lived, the United States would not have been engaged in Vietnam. In other words, Vietnam was really Lyndon Johnson’s War, and Lyndon Johnson is solely responsible for what had happened following the assassination. Is such an assumption true or is merely wishful thinking? Where do you stand involving this historical argument? Would Kennedy have walked away from Vietnam following the assassination of Ngo Dinh Deim?

3. Obviously Americans did not understand Vietnam or the Vietnamese. What did policymakers really know about Vietnam? Did Americans fully comprehend Vietnamese history and Vietnamese nationalism? If they did, what reasons explain why Washington was willing to risk American youth and  American prestige in the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia?

4. The following are famous adages about war and Vietnam. Write an essay on how they apply to the American experience in Southeast Asia.

a. "War is too important to be left to generals.” – Clemenceau.

b. “You cannot crush a sect with cannonballs.” – Napoleon.

c. “War is a continuation of politics by other means.” – Clausewitz.

d. “God is on the side of the big battalions.” – Voltaire.

e. “Morale is to the physical in war as three to one.” – Napoleon.

f. “They [the VC] are well aware that we place a higher value on human life than they do.” – Maxwell Taylor.

g. “The guerrilla is a fish and the people are the sea in which he swims.”—Mao.

h. “We are always prepared to fight the last war.” – Historian Russell Weiglely.

i. “I gave the Army a good boy and they turned him into a murderer.” – Mrs. Meadlo, the mother of Paul Meadlo, a veteran of My Lai.

j. "We had to destroy the town in order to save it." - A unidentified U.S. Major during the TET Offensive as reported by Peter Arnett.