In Country

The complicated history of the Vietnam War is an essential context for any reading of In Country. Long before US soldiers arrived, Vietnam had experienced long-term conflict. French missionaries first came to Vietnam in the 17th century; by 1887, Vietnam was a French colony, along with present-day Cambodia and Laos. By 1930, Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh was at the head of the Indochinese Communist Party and devoted to winning independence from French colonial rule. However, during World War II, after Germany was conquered by France and Japan entered the war on the side of the Germans, Ho Chi Minh and his compatriots agreed to resist the Japanese occupation of their country. After the defeat of Germany and Japan, the French renewed their colonial powers over Indochina, despite the help Vietnamese nationalists had given them. Ho Chi Minh declared independence and appealed to the United States for support, which was rejected. Instead, the US aligned itself with the French. A guerilla war ensued between the nationalist Viet Minh army and the French. In 1959, the Viet Minh delivered a fatal blow to the French army at the Dien Bien Phu.

The United States, however, continued the fight against the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) which had embraced the communism of Ho Chi Minh. In 1961, John F. Kennedy sent 400 Green Berets to fight against the Viet Cong, an arm of the NLF. “Viet Cong” is a pejorative term created to describe the armed communist forces in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. As early as 1962, the US began spraying Agent Orange, a potent chemical herbicide, over large swaths of South Vietnam to deny the Viet Cong the cover of forests. Throughout the 1960s, the United States supported the South Vietnamese government, and US intervention in the war grew to include the bombing of North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and the presence of over 500,000 US troops in Vietnam.

At home, the war grew increasingly unpopular as a large number of young men were drafted to serve in the military. College students and anti-war activists staged protests across the country, creating intergenerational and cross-class divisions that remained tense throughout the wartime era. The Tet Offensive of 1968, one of the largest and most violent campaigns of the war, further soured the US population’s opinion, and the 1970 killing of college students who were protesting the draft at Kent State University in Ohio horrified the nation.

In 1973, the United States signed the Peace Accords that ended their military involvement in Vietnam. By 1975, with the fall of Saigon, the North Vietnamese conquered South Vietnam and reunified the nation. Throughout the long involvement in Vietnam, some 59,000 US troops met their deaths. More than 2 million Vietnamese people died.

As soldiers returned to the United States, rumors spread that anti-war protestors were confronting the soldiers, calling them baby killers, and spitting on them. It is generally agreed that these stories are apocryphal; there is no evidence that any soldiers were ever greeted in such a manner. Indeed, many of the troops were against the war themselves and expressed guilt about their participation in it. This was particularly prevalent after it was discovered that some US troops, such as those under the command of William Calley, committed war crimes, including the mass murder of unarmed civilians in the 1968 My Lai massacre.

The high incidence of PTSD among Vietnam veterans, the failure of the United States government to fully support soldiers dealing with Agent Orange exposure, and the political and intergenerational divisiveness caused by the war led to a cultural push to ignore or repress memories of the country’s involvement in Vietnam. Many feel that the nation seemed to forget its veterans, too, who were ignored as a result.

In 1982, however, the United States erected the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC: a 200-foot black, granite wall partially dug into the ground, carrying a chronological listing of over 58,000 names of US soldiers killed during the conflict. In addition, by 1985, poetry, memoirs, and novels by Vietnam War veterans led to a cultural reawakening and remembering of the war and the many tragedies it caused.