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Cultural Differences, East and West:  Silent Lessons From U.S. Involvement in East Asia

Lieutenant Commander Thomas D. Nolan, Jr., USN

CSC 1996

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Title:  Cultural Differences, East and West: Silent Lessons for Future U. S. Involvement in East Asia

Author: LCDR Thomas D. Nolen, Jr., USN

Research Question: To what degree was the war in Vietnam influenced by differences in culture and time? Is there an effective model to study these differences to improve any future interactions?

Discussion:  The war in Vietnam was influenced by cultural differences that paralleled; in general, the larger differences between East and West. One method of studying these differences and their impact is to use Ernst Cassirer's Circle of Humanity and its six categories-- art, language, history, science, religion, and myth -- to describe the essential elements of human culture. This paper will discuss religion, history, and science from Cassirer's Model to show that neither the United Sates nor North Vietnam really understood the other. The other components of the model -- art, language, and myth -- will not be examined as art was not a significant player in the conflict; language, while different for both sides, failed to alter the outcome of the conflict; and myth is too closely allied with religion; and accordingly, Cassirer treats them very similarly. Using only three categories also enhances the focus of the paper. Differing views of time, East and West, will also be discussed, highlighting their impact on the Vietnam conflict.

Religion was in part responsible for the US entree into Vietnam. Once there, religious differences, East and West, highlighted the division between the South Vietnamese rural peasants who practiced the traditional Vietnamese religions, and the urban dwellers who followed the tenets of Christianity. History is significant because none of the senior US policymakers understood the Vietnamese heritage -- especially McNamara. Cultural differences in Science caused the U.S. to rely heavily on superior technology, while the Vietnamese failed to realize that the U.S. would in fact use the technology. Differing time perceptions ultimately led to the turning point in Vietnam, as the U. S. and North Vietnam both failed to predict the outcome of the Tet offensive.

Conclusion:  Future U.S. interaction with a significantly different cultures, especially interaction which may lead to armed conflict, will benefit from an analysis of the differences in culture and time. Cassirer's "Circle of Humanity" is one such tool with which to conduct cultural analysis.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES, EAST AND WEST:  SILENT LESSONS FOR FUTURE U. S. INVOLVEMENT IN EAST ASIA

Oh, East is East, and West is West,

And never the twain shall meet...

Till Earth and sky stand presently at

God's great judgment seat...

- Rudyard Kipling

Chapter 1: Background

Introduction

The United States' experience during the Vietnam War highlighted differences in culture and time, East and West, which significantly impacted the war. The Commander, Military Armed Forces Command Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, summarized the cultural differences best when he spoke of a typical soldier's tour in Vietnam:

You've got to get in so much in a relatively short time, you've only got the men for two years. How do you allocate that time? You've got a soldier, seventeen or eighteen years old. You put him in a lecture hall and try to teach him the culture of Vietnam. The chances are it goes through one ear and out the other. He doesn't give it much priority.¹

The thoughts of Sergeant Richard Grefath reflected the sentiments of the common soldier. "The training was to teach you how to fight a war," he observed. "I really don't remember a lot of details about lessons on the Vietnamese language and culture. At the time I was distracted from really learning. I was thinking more about staying alive."² The lack of cultural understanding was not limited to only U.S. personnel. Many Vietnamese also maintained a narrow assessment, viewing Americans as barbarians. For example, Bruce Lawlor, a CIA case officer in Vietnam during the conflict said, "...they [Vietnamese] thought we [U. S. personnel] were animals. A lot of little things that we took for granted offended them fiercely, such as putting your hand on a head. Sitting with your feet crossed, with your foot facing another person, is a high insult.”³

General Charles Timmes, Deputy and then Chief of Staff of the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam from 1960 to 1964 and special advisor to the U. S. Embassy from 1967 to 1975, summed up the United States' military view of the cultural gap during the Vietnam War when he stated that few American soldiers "knew the first thing about the Vietnamese language, the country's nationalism or its policies, and its culture."⁴ This lack of knowledge extended to the top U. S. leaders who were directing the U. S. involvement in Vietnam.

Loren Baritz, writing in Backfire: A History Of How American Culture Into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did, notes that the Americans who were most responsible for our Vietnam policies often complained about how little they knew about the Vietnamese. For example, General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1962-64 and America's ambassador to Saigon during 1964-65, admitted, "We knew very little about the Hanoi leaders… and virtually nothing about their individual or collective intentions."⁵

General Taylor sent a cable to President Lyndon B, Johnson that included the Western clich6 that the Vietnamese were "well aware we place a higher value on human life that they do."⁶ General Westmoreland also believed that "life is cheap in the Orient."⁷ This misconception was a result of the American ability to use technology to protect its own troops while the North Vietnamese, too poor to match our equipment, were forced to rely on people, their only resource. This did not mean that a Vietnamese did not value human life. According to Taylor, it meant two other things: nations fight with whatever they have; and what we had was not enough to compensate for our cultural ignorance.⁸

Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, confirms this shortfall in cultural understanding. In Retrospect, he writes, "When John F. Kennedy [in 1961] became president, we faced a complex and growing crisis in Southeast Asia with sparse knowledge, scant experience, and simplistic assumptions."⁹ McNamara cites the administration's significant lack of experience:

I had never visited Indochina, nor did I understand or appreciate its history, language, culture, or values. The same must be said, to varying degrees, about President Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, military adviser Maxwell Taylor, and many others. When it came to Vietnam, we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita. Worse, our government lacked experts for us to consult to compensate for our ignorance.¹⁰

The perception of U. S. - Vietnamese cultural differences, like all perceptions, was anchored in reality. In order to study how these differences in culture and time affected the Vietnam War, this paper will first make the case for the significance of the cultural differences, East and West, using the categories of human culture as expressed in Ernst Cassirer's An Essay On Man: An Introduction To The Human Philosophy Of Culture.  The paper will then study the differences in time -- East and West -- to support the main theme of the paper.

The Model

A comprehensive model of culture is necessary to study the differences, East and West. Ernst Cassirer recognized the need for totality when describing the culture of Man. In his Essay On Man, Cassirer writes:

A philosophy of culture begins with the assumption that the world of human culture is not a mere aggregate of loose and detached facts. It seeks to understand these facts as a system, as an organic whole. For an empirical or historical view, it would seem to be enough to collect the data of human culture. Here we are interested in the breadth of human life. We are engrossed in a study of the particular phenoma in their richness and variety; we enjoy the polychromy and the polyphony of man's nature. But a philosophical analysis sets itself to a different task. Its starting point and its working hypothesis are embodied in the conviction that the varied and seemingly dispersed rays may be gathered together and brought into a common focus.¹¹

Cassirer further develops his model by stating that Man's distinguishing characteristic is not his metaphysical or physical nature, but his work; Cassirer's model may be called a "Circle of Humanity" because it captures the essential elements of human activities. Language, myth, religion, art, science, and history are included, comprising the sectors of a circle, which when considered together, yield a working model for the culture of Man.¹²

Cassirer's "Circle of Humanity" is a philosophical treatment of man in relation to self-knowledge as the highest aim.¹³ However, at a less speculative level, Cassirer’s "Circle" offers itself as a convenient model to which applications may be made. In this paper, three of the six categories -- religion, history, and science -- will be used as pillars to create a plane of understanding, by which the differences, East and West, and their contribution to the U. S. defeat in Vietnam will be examined. The other three components of the model -- art, language, and myth -- will not be examined for varying reasons: art was not a significant player in the conflict; language, while different for both sides, failed to impact the outcome of the conflict; and myth, closely allied with religion, when analyzed, produces the same results. Using only these three pieces of Cassirer's model will not nullify its utility, rather it will enhance the focus of the paper.

Chapter 2: Religion

Writing in Essay on Man, Cassirer notes, "The articles of faith, the dogmatic creeds, the theological systems are engaged in an interminable struggle. Even the ethical ideals of different religions are widely divergent and scarcely reconcilable with each other."¹⁴ This was the case for the United States and Vietnam. The U. S., with its primarily Judeo-Christian heritage, is significantly different from the complementary tenets of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism as practiced by most Vietnamese. The War in Vietnam brought each country's religious ideals into direct contact. Two key points emerged from this contact: first, America's well intentioned desire to help the South Vietnamese repel Communism led ultimately to military intervention; and second, South Vietnamese religious differences helped to identify a growing rift between the city-based Catholic government and the rural peasants, who held traditional Vietnamese religious beliefs, causing the latter to embrace the North Vietnamese.

The missionary nature of America's Judeo-Christian heritage was re-ignited after World War II, with missionaries again going to Vietnam with the goal of converting the Vietnamese to Christianity. This drive for religious conversion spilled over into the political realm, where the United States felt compelled to try and save South Vietnam from the evil Communists of the North. Unfortunately, this drive also included an economic aspect which corrupted the largely Catholic South Vietnamese government. Religious differences underscored the division between the U. S. and her South Vietnamese ally, causing the rural peasants to resent the Saigon government, which was closely associated with the U. S., and to embrace the Vietcong, with whom they shared the same religion. Thus would the U.S. lose one of many battles in the war for the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people.

Religion in America

The religious character of the American is epitomized in Herman Melville's novel, White Jacket, in which he writes, "... we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people -- the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world."¹⁵ This image of the "chosen people" is one Americans have held of themselves from the beginning of American history:

More than 350 years ago, while in mid-passage between England and the American wilderness, John Winthrop told the band of Puritans he was leading to a new and dangerous life that they were engaged in a voyage that God himself not only approved, but in which He participated. The precise way that Brother Winthrop expressed himself echoes throughout the history of American life. He explained to his fellow travelers, "We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations [settlements]: the Lord make it like that of New England, for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”¹⁶

While Winthrop painted an image of the "city on the hill" in part to assuage his fellow travelers' concerns on their perilous journey, this image persisted, and ultimately became part of American culture. Cassirer affirms religion as functioning in this calming role when he observed, "... it seems as if even in the earliest and lowest stages of civilization man had found a new force by which he could resist and banish the fear of death."¹⁷ Winthrop's "city on the hill" portrayed an image of warmth and light against the dark wilderness of a new and dangerous land. Winthrop suggested that other people would be drawn to this image as one is drawn to a Hemmingway-esque "clean, well-lighted place."

Although the Puritans were initially too busy trying to establish their settlement and survive against the elements to welcome newcomers to their "city", when their settlement was securely established, their Judeo-Christian heritage, combined with their frontier, expeditionary American character, compelled them to shine their light on others, as protection from the darkness. This parallels Cassirer's view of religion as he contends that religion forms a link between men, man to man, a sort of moral obligation or moral force.¹⁸

By the time of the Vietnam War, America's moral obligation, to support the South Vietnam government against the spread of Communism from North Vietnam, was a key ingredient in the decision to enter the Vietnam War. Indeed, President Eisenhower initially articulated the view that U. S. intervention in Vietnam had the moral goal of protecting Southeast Asia from Communism. Eisenhower argued countries would presumably "topple like a row of dominoes" if the Communist-backed North Vietnamese succeeded in uniting with South Vietnam.¹⁹ The moral overtones of intervention dovetailed neatly with the emerging doctrine of the containment of Communism.

Religion in Vietnam

Religion plays a different role in Asia than in the United States. Jean Herbert succinctly captures that contrast between Eastern and Western religions in An Introduction to Asia:

[I]n China and in Viet-nam, religion above all aims at setting up a perfectly harmonious social organization and is inclined to ignore the individual whom it leaves to build up for himself his own individual harmony, within the framework supplied by society. . . . Asians believe their religiousness to be much deeper than ours; they are inclined to think that we [the West] have only a "second-hand" religion, the object of which is the intellectual acceptance of doctrinal orthodoxy, rather than spiritual experience.²⁰

As previously stated, the Vietnamese religion consists chiefly of a blend of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism²¹; it is summarized by Herbert in An Introduction to Asia.²² Herbert confirms that these religions exist simultaneously, both within the country and the individual, "Where we [the West] are tempted to see doctrinal conflicts which would provoke religious wars for people like us, those concerned mostly see complementary concepts that throw light on each other."²³ Georges Condominas explains the interwoven nature of Vietnamese religion, "Prior to 1975 [when Communist North Vietnam overran the South], when asked his religion, an educated Vietnamese generally would have answered that he was a Buddhist. On the civic or family level, however, he followed Confucian precepts; on the affective level or in the face of destiny, he turned to Taoist conceptions."²⁴ The consonant nature of the Vietnamese religion served the Vietnamese people well until the West renewed its effort to inject its standard. However misapplied, American efforts to project economic well-being and Christianity had their origins in the image of Winthrop's "city on a hill."

Impact of Religious Differences

Economic Salvation. As the U. S. embarked on a program of economic assistance to support the South Vietnamese government, the religious ideals of each respective culture clashed. Unfortunately, the U. S. program had the undesired effect of corrupting South Vietnamese government officials. For example, the U. S. established the commercial import program, which was designed to put consumer imports into the hands of the average Vietnamese. The program was abused by the Saigon government who misused the funds to import luxury items that were beyond the capability of the average person to buy -- especially rural peasants. When seen by the rural peasants, who were struggling to earn a living in a labor intensive agrarian-based economy, the luxury items incited friction -- further widening the gap between the urban and rural populace.²⁵

The increasing American program of economic support occurred as U. S. churches intensified their missionary effort in South Vietnam. The missionaries had trouble convincing the country's non-Christian majority that the God Christians worshipped was not "white, western and capitalist".²⁶ This was especially difficult when missionaries used U.S. Army helicopters to ferry supplies. The Vietcong, who wanted no part of Christianity, used this cultural difference to their advantage, associating Christianity with the political ideology of the U. S. and the South Vietnamese government. This was, in part, the result of the South Vietnamese government's ardent Catholicism and the use of Catholic refugees from North Vietnam as a base for political support. Fundamentally, the North Vietnamese opposed Christianity because they believed Christian values and practices clashed with Marxist doctrine.²⁷

It was difficult for young Americans, sent to Vietnam to save the South Vietnamese from themselves (through conversion to Christianity) and from the Communist North Vietnamese, to encounter the rural peasants who did not want to be saved. In fact, rural peasants were not overly enthusiastic about a new religion, and they were too displaced from the cities to care about an improved, i.e., Democratic vice Communist, government. Americans failed to realize that peasants were more focused on practical needs. "Government is not important," a rural villager commented, "rice is important." The United States corrupted the urban elite of South Vietnam by dangling riches in front of them, but other city dwellers, especially Buddhists, struggled hardest against the other corruption -- the cultural pride and myopia of the Americans.²⁸

Buddhist Revolts. The Buddhist revolts of 1963 stand out as an illustrative example of religions in conflict. The revolts began when Buddhists, assembled in Hue to celebrate the birthday of Buddha, flew their multicolored flag. A local province official, a Catholic like most of South Vietnamese government officials, chose to enforce an old decree which prohibited Buddhists from flying their flag. The Buddhists quickly massed near the local radio station to hear a speech by one of their leaders. The station manager canceled the speech and the government sent in troops to control the crowd. In the melee, a woman and eight children were either crushed or shot. Other protest marches followed, climaxed by the memorable image of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire in protest. The South Vietnamese government insisted the protests were incited by the Vietcong when, in reality, they reflected the growing rift between Catholics and Buddhists, and between an oppressive government and its people.²⁹

Religious Conclusions

In summary, while religious disparity was not the origin of the Vietnam War, it did helped to magnify it cultural differences. The American missionaries sought to bring both religious and economic well being to the South Vietnamese. The result however was the corruption of the government officials, driving a wedge between them and the rural peasants. The Vietcong effectively exploited the disparity of religions, turning the rural population against the government and the Americans.

Chapter 3: History

Another category in Cassirer's model, history, also provides insights into cultural differences East and West, Cassirer' s view is that history does not aim to disclose a former state of the physical world but instead it discloses a former stage of human life and human culture.³⁰ In order to understand a people it is not enough to examine the culture as it is; one must also discover how it has arrived at what it is, learn its sources and its traditions.³¹ Cassirer amplifies the value of history:

History cannot predict the events to come; it can only interpret the past. But human life is an organism in which all elements imply and explain each other. Consequently a new understanding of the past gives us at the same time a new prospect of the future, which in turn becomes an impulse to intellectual and social life.³²

Unfortunately, both U. S. and North Vietnamese leaders failed to understand the historical aspect of Vietnamese culture.

Vietnamese History

Indochina, as its name implies, became the hub for competition between Asia's two great civilizations, India and China. Merchants and missionaries from both countries converged on the peninsula, promoting commerce, religion, language, art and customs. India had the biggest influence on Laos, Cambodia, and even as far east as Champa, a kingdom that flourished in central Vietnam until its destruction by the Vietnamese; China imposed its imprint on Vietnam, insulated from India's influence by topography.³³

War and rebellion intertwined to shape the major chapters of Vietnam's history since the first mention of the Vietnamese in the writings of Chinese historians over two thousand years ago. It is a history of expansion by the Vietnamese, a tough and supple race. They moved south from the cradle of the Red River Delta, where Hanoi now stands, to the steamy mangrove swamps of the country's tip 1,800 miles to the south. From the Thai, Cambodian and Cahm people who were displaced in this expansion, the Vietnamese earned a reputation for bellicosity that was confirmed by later events. Chinese emperors, French colonists and American generals and diplomats would all ultimately be expelled as the Vietnamese repeated a cycle of resistance, rebellion and overthrow of foreign control.³⁴

Paradoxically, the Chinese, as the first to meet Vietnamese resistance, contributed to their own expulsion as well as those who followed, by causing the Vietnamese to develop a sense of collective spirit. When the original Vietnamese migrated from China, they brought with them their basic economy, built around wet rice farming. Rice cultivation, which is dependent on both the vagaries of weather and complex irrigation systems, requires cooperative labor. Consequently, Vietnamese communities developed a strong collective spirit and, though autonomous, villagers could be mobilized as a united chain of separate links to fight against foreign intruders.³⁵ This mindset played an important role in the Vietnam War allowing the Vietcong to move supplies covertly through seemingly impassable jungle terrain.

European attempts at colonizing Vietnam in the 1600's also met with collective resistance. Despite regional differences, all Vietnamese appeared to hate foreigners, and employed their sophisticated Chinese-style, administrative structure to effectively mobilize resistance against intruders.³⁶ This pattern of resistance to foreign invaders continued well into the twentieth century, During World War II, under Japanese occupation in alliance with Germany, the Vichy government administered the former French colony. In March, 1945, the Japanese overthrew their French partners, and took over Vietnam.³⁷ Subsequently, Ho Chi Minh, an ardent nationalist who had spent some thirty years living as an expatriate in the United States, Britain, and France, organized the Vietnamese resistance against foreign control into a nationalistic political and military body called the Vietminh.³⁸ It is important to understand Ho Chi Minh as an historical figure, as well as his role during the Vietnam War, because despite his worldly exposure, he was slow to correctly assess Vietnam's main enemy in the pending conflict, the United States.

Ho Chi Minh

Although the Japanese were hated as simply another intruding foreign power, Ho Chi Minh took careful note that when the Japanese defeated the French, Asians had once again defeated the Europeans, just as the Japanese had beaten the Russians earlier in the century. Almost as soon as the Japanese installed themselves in Vietnam, the Vietminh, with Ho Chi Minh leading, mounted a guerrilla war against them as the new invaders. The Vietminh did this with the help of Major Archimedes L. A. Patti, an American intelligence officer attached to the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. Major Patti was convinced Ho Chi Minh's ultimate goal was to attain American support for the cause of a free Vietnam; a goal which did not conflict with American policy, as understood by Major Patti. He dutifully passed the information to the American embassy in Chungking with the comment that the Vietnamese leader was more of a nationalist than a Communist.³⁹

After the fall of the Japanese Empire, the Vietnamese viewed Ho Chi Mimi as the liberator of his people. In an affront to historical alliances, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initially opposed a return of the French saying that the Vietnamese were entitled to something better.⁴⁰ However his objections went unheeded among the allied powers and, in September, 1945, the French returned to Saigon aboard British warships.

The victorious allied powers carved up Vietnam, much as they did with the other countries from the fallen Axis Alliance. As arranged at the Potsdam conference, the Chinese Nationalists were awarded North Vietnam and sent 150,000 troops under Chiang Kai-shek to Hanoi to liberate the North from the Japanese, while the British delivered the French troops to Saigon. The overall goal was to disarm the Japanese and to ensure a peaceful transition after World War II. However, the Chinese troops engaged primarily in plundering the country, and the Chinese Nationalist government had trouble getting its troops home, most stayed about a year. The North Vietnamese never forgave the Nationalists. Ultimately, the Chinese Nationalist government turned control of North Vietnam over to the Vietminh, while in the South, the British, as agreed to at Potsdam, formally relinquished control to the French, not, as many Vietnamese expected to the Vietminh.⁴¹ While North Vietnam was returned to local rule as the Chinese Nationalists went home, South Vietnam still maintained a foreign presence, but more importantly, neither Ho Chi Minh nor the French, could accept the result of a divided Vietnamese peninsula, and the ensuing conflict that resulted was inevitable.

With the Communist overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek's forces in China, Ho Chi Minh gained an ally which would aid the Vietminh against the French; it was a successful alliance, culminating in the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.⁴² The French subsequently withdrew from Vietnam, only to be replaced by a strong U. S. presence. In the same year, the negotiations in Geneva formally divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel.⁴³ Failing to fully understand the United States' heritage, Ho Chi Minh did not foresee the U. S. continued support of their World War II and Revolutionary War ally, the French. In fact, it will later be argued in this paper that U. S. support of the French was based on the fear of spreading Communism, not Neo-Colonialism. Had Ho Chi Minh adopted entirely an Asian view of time, he would have recognized from the outset that, ultimately, the U.S. would tire of its involvement in Vietnam and go home; consequently, he could have sought a coalition government in the South from the beginning, instead of waiting until North Vietnam was fully engaged in a military conflict with the United States. Also, Ho Chi Minh failed to understand the parallel of the decline of the British empire at the end of World War II, and project a similar outcome for the French.

Role of U. S. Leaders

Presidential Administrations. After the French withdrawal, the U. S. accelerated a program of economic aid and military assistance in response to the perceived growth of Communism, from North Vietnam. The U.S. policy of opposition to Communism had its origins at the denouement of World War II when George F. Kennan, then charge d’affaires at the American embassy in Moscow, wrote in Foreign Affairs, recommending a U. S. policy for containing the growth of Communism. His idea evolved into the United States National Security Council Resolution 68. This concept dovetailed nicely with the "domino theory," which held that Communism was spreading into the countries contiguous to the Soviet Union and China. This composite became a model to counter the growth of Communism. It was used by every U. S. president from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson to justify American participation in Vietnam.⁴⁴

Unfortunately, each Presidential administration failed to understand the historical Vietnamese bias against any foreign powers. Ho Chi Mimi was perceived as representing the spread of Communism, not struggling Vietnamese nationalism. For example, just after the celebration of Vietnamese independence in August 1945, Ho Chi Minh wrote eight letters to President Truman or to the Secretary of State, asking for assistance in Vietnam's new struggle against the French.⁴⁵ The request fell on deaf ears as the U. S. allowed the French with their democratic ideology, to return. As the French effort to maintain control of South Vietnam weakened militarily, and talk arose of a compromise with Ho Chi Minh, both President Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, and the American military considered compromise to be an appeasement to Communist aggression. Dulles, therefore, countered the French appeasement offer with discussions of additional aid and a possible escalation to bombing intervention.⁴⁶ McNamara later reflected that Eisenhower, a Republican, did not know what to do in Southeast Asia and was glad to leave it to the Democrats. However, McNamara, who also knew little about Vietnam, did not fault Eisenhower for arriving at no solution. The Indochina problem was intractable, as framed by both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, as the United States learned from years of protracted conflict.⁴⁷

McNamara helped transition the "domino theory" of opposition to the spread of Communism from the Kennedy to the Johnson administration. He was helped in part, by Lyndon Johnson, who had acquired the U.S. view of opposing the monolithic enemy of Communism while serving as John F. Kennedy's Vice President. In failing to realize that Ho Chi Minh was using Communist backing only in an attempt to achieve Vietnamese unification, Johnson adopted the myopic view of continued opposition to the North Vietnamese. He also failed to realize that both North and South were searching for the same historical mandate (i.e., a unified Vietnamese peninsula), using competing ideologies as a power base. Vice President Johnson, addressing the governing South Vietnamese Assembly in 1961, stated, "We have a strong bond of purpose with you. We share deeply your concern that your program is threatened by the tactics of Communist terrorists." Johnson highly praised the Vietnamese people's "valor and fortitude" and added, "In the highest sense we will stand with you because of our profound sense of responsibility to the cause of universal freedom."⁴⁸ Johnson felt that if the spread of Communism was not stopped in Vietnam, it could spread into the United States. When he returned home, Johnson stated, "The battle against Communism must be joined in the Southeast Asia with strength and determination ... or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores."⁴⁹

An Alternate Vietnam Policy. The U. S. Presidential administrations from the late 1940's, into the 1960's, failed to consider significant alternatives to the policy of containing the growth of Communism in Vietnam. In fact, America's attempt to "contain" China by checking the North Vietnamese was misguided from the beginning. As an alternative to the "domino theory," the United States might have taken advantage of Vietnam's atavistic hostility toward the Chinese to drive a wedge between them, or at least have explored that option --just as, during the late 1940's, the U. S. encouraged Yugoslavia s resistance to Soviet domination.⁵⁰

The key problem was that the policymakers for the United States were ignorant of Vietnamese history! Truman followed the simplistic assumption that Ho Chi Minh was a Chinese pawn. What he failed to recognize, however, was that Vietnam and China had been foes for over two thousand years, and their traditional animosities could have been exploited. Instead, American intervention in Vietnam united two historic enemies in a temporary marriage of convenience that only began to fall apart in early 1972, when President Nixon's dramatic journey to Beijing paved the way for a reconciliation between the United States and China leaving the Vietnamese out in the cold.⁵¹

McNamara offered a possible explanation for why the Yugoslavian model for opposing Communism was not followed for Vietnam. He opined that Yugoslavia was seen as a separate Communist nation independent of the Soviet Union, in part, because Tito had a falling out with Stalin; however, the Communist rhetoric from China and North Vietnam led the U. S. policymakers to assume they wanted regional hegemony. In contrast to the Yugoslavian model, North Vietnam was evaluated as being more similar to Cuba, an independent nation moving suddenly towards Communism. Consequently, Ho Chi Minh was not equated with Marshal Tito but rather with Fidel Castro.⁵²

Robert S. McNamara. McNamara supported the theory of containment as the preferred technique to combat the spread of Communism writing:

I considered this a sensible basis for decisions about national security and the application of Western military force. Like most Americans, I saw Communism as monolithic. I believed the Soviets and Chinese were cooperating in trying to extend their hegemony. In hind sight, of course, it is clear that they had no unified strategy after the late 1950s.⁵³

Unfortunately, McNamara's shallow, surface familiarity with Vietnamese history propelled the continued misinterpretation of Ho Chi Minh's ultimate goal of reunification of the peninsula, writing in In Retrospect:

I knew that Ho Chi Minh had declared Vietnam's independence after Japan's surrender but that the United States had acquiesced to France's return to Indochina for fear that a Franco-American split would make it harder to contain Soviet expansion in Europe. In fact, during the decade just past, we had subsidized French military action against Ho's forces, which were in turn supported by the Chinese. And I knew that the United States viewed Indochina as a necessary part of our containment policy -- an important bulwark in the Cold War. It seemed obvious that the Communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to guerrilla insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, and the Philippines during the 1950s. We viewed these conflicts not as nationalistic movements -- as they largely appear in hindsight -- but as signs of a unified Communist drive for hegemony in Asia.⁵⁴

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee for his 1964 review of U. S. defense issues, McNamara stated that no region was more vulnerable and exposed to Communist subversion than Southeast Asia. In South Vietnam, he opined that U. S. assistance was needed and the country was deeply engaged in supporting South Vietnam against the Communist Vietcong.⁵⁵ McNamara, however, also failed to understand the historical Vietnamese bias against foreign invaders. He admitted that he had badly misread China's objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric as a drive for regional hegemony. The nationalist quality of Ho Chi Mimi's movement was grossly underestimated. He was seen first as a Communist, and only second as a Vietnamese nationalist.⁵⁶

History Conclusions

Thus, the key leaders in presidential administrations from Truman to Johnson misinterpreted the goal of Ho Chi Minh. By failing to thoroughly examine history, the U. S. failed to see that Ho was, in fact, carrying out a Vietnamese legacy to reunite the Vietnamese peninsula and repel an invading power. Ho Chi Minh also failed to correctly predict the outcome of U. S. involvement in Vietnam. Had he done so, he could have sought a coalition government with the U. S. in South Vietnam, knowing that when the Americans tired and returned home, his influence would ultimately prevail.

Chapter 4: Science

"Science is the last step in mans mental development and it may be regarded as the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture."⁵⁷ While Cassirer sees science as a unique and distinct characteristic of man, he notes that its development is a relatively recent matter motivated by special events which could not develop except under special conditions. Its general function seems to be unquestionable, in that, it is science that gives us the assurance of a constant world. The motivation for searching and learning is a scientific curiosity that appears to be greater in the West than in the East; however, this relatively lesser degree of motivation towards scientific development has roots in the Eastern perspective of its role in relation to the universe.⁵⁸

East versus West... Qualitative versus Quantitative

Carl Jung documented the contrast between East and West by seeing intuitive grasp of the total situation as a characteristic of the East. While studying the I Ching (Book of Changes), Jung observed, "Unlike the Greek-trained Western mind, the Chinese mind does not aim at grasping details for their own sake, but at a view which sees the detail as part of a whole."⁵⁹ Jean Herbert echoes this underlying distinction:

The [Eastern] assimilation of the macrocosm and the microcosm means that quantitative concepts are perceived in a perspective completely different from the one we [meaning Western people] are used to and are both less important and less real than qualitative concepts.⁶⁰

The distinction between quantitative (Western) and qualitative (Eastern) thought definitely impeded the development of scientific thought in the East. For while the East had all the raw materials of science at hand, for one reason or another they simply failed to connect them together. Perhaps they did not realize how important it would be to quantify all of nature, to be aware of the power inherent in stripping the material world of its aesthetic qualities. The followers of Eastern religions were not materialistic enough to develop the Western predisposition for quantitative thought.⁶¹

Albert Einstein observed that the development of Western Science was based on two great achievements: the invention of a formal logical system, as in Euclidean geometry; and the discovery of the ability to determine causal relationships by systemic experiment. Einstein reflected that one should not to be astonished to see that the ancient Chinese sages did not make these steps, the astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.⁶²

Impact on the Vietnam War

Robert S. McNamara. In the Vietnam War, the Western preference for science and quantitative thought manifested itself in the American tendency to place faith in technology. McNamara epitomized the Western quantitative approach. His university studies were in economics, philosophy and mathematics. In his book, In Retrospect, McNamara offered an assessment of his education:

The ethics courses forced me to begin to shape my values; studying logic exposed me to rigor and precision in thinking. And my mathematics professors taught me to see math as a process of thought -- a language in which to express much, but certainly not all, of human activity.⁶³

He matriculated to Harvard's Graduate School of Business, and subsequently to the U.S. Army Air Corps' statistical control section, where during World War II, he received a Chief of Staff awarded Legion of Merit, positively reinforcing his quantitative expertise.⁶⁴ McNamara later transformed his talent for quantitative management into a  successful executive career at Ford motor company.

McNamara's Western, quantitative approach was applied to waging war against an Eastern, qualitative foe. McNamara was a brilliant corporate executive capable of scanning a balance sheet with unerring speed and skill. When he made the first of his many trips to Vietnam in May 1962, he looked at the figures and concluded optimistically after only forty-eight hours in the country that "every quantitative measurement... shows that we are winning the war."⁶⁵

The Vietnam War was studied like no other conflict. The U. S. government hired private think tanks, universities, and consultants to research the most effective way to wage war which caused an explosion in the research and development of the technology of war, to show that the use of new technology in combat could save American lives, and cause the enemy to suffer terrible losses. McNamara, as was his penchant while concerned with profits and losses as a civilian corporate manger, sought to measure the war's progress in the same way. However, the numbers failed to capture all aspects of the conflict, especially the intangible qualities of the battlefield.:

For the missing element in the "quantitative measurement" that guided McNamara and other U. S. policymakers was the qualitative dimension that could not easily be recorded. There was no way to calibrate the motivation of the Vietcong guerrillas. Nor could computers be programmed to described the hopes and fears of Vietnamese peasants.⁶⁶

McNamara tells his side of the story in In Retrospect:

I always pressed our commanders very hard for estimates of progress -- or lack of it. The monitoring of progress -- which I still consider a bedrock principle of good management -- was very poorly handled in Vietnam. Both the chiefs and I bear responsibility for that failure. Uncertain how to evaluate results in a war without battle lines, the military tried to gauge its progress with quantitative measurements such as enemy casualties (which became infamous as body counts), weapons seized, prisoners taken, sorties flown, and so on. We later learned that many of these measures were misleading or erroneous. I tempered the military's optimism about progress in the war in my public comments, but not nearly enough.⁶⁷

McNamara's admission contributed to growing American public opinion that the U. S. was winning the war in Vietnam, based, in part, on the unquestioned belief in the supremacy of U.S. technology. Americans shared a belief that technological supremacy made The nation militarily invincible.⁶⁸ This, in fact, was not true.

This belief in technology is characteristic of the U. S. culture. President Johnson, for example, sought to bolster American public opinion by using U. S. technology to provide an expeditious victory in Vietnam by winning quickly and powerfully, using American industrial might instead of American lives.

The Tet Offensive. A useful vignette in which to view the manifestation of the quantitative approach is the Tet Offensive of January, 1968. One journalist of that era described the opening scene:

On the evening of January 31, seventy thousand Communist soldiers launched a surprise offensive of extraordinary intensity and astonishing scope. In a carefully coordinated series of attacks, the Communists struck at Hoi An, Da Nang, Qui Nhon, and other seaside enclaves presumed to have been beyond their reach. They also rocketed the huge American Naval complex at Cam Ranh Bay, assaulted the United States' embassy in Saigon, and simultaneously invaded thirteen of sixteen provincial capitals in South Vietnam.⁶⁹

Initiated to coincide with the Asian celebration of the lunar New Year, the Tet Offensive caught the U. S. and South Vietnamese forces by surprise and because of its impact, arguably marked the turning point of the war.⁷⁰ The North Vietnamese goal was to incite uprisings in the South, and remove support from the government, driving a wedge between the U. S. - South Vietnamese alliance. While Tet didn't achieve its ultimate goal of downfall of the South Vietnamese government, the success of the masterfully coordinated North Vietnamese offensive shook American confidence in the technological superiority of the U. S. military.

A specific example of reliance on technology occurred as the U.S. Marines defended the besieged base at Khe Sanh in January, 1968, on the eve of the Tet offensive. As the numerically superior North Vietnamese force assaulted the Marine base, the U. S. responded with overwhelming firepower in support of the six thousand men under assault from the estimated twenty to forty thousand North Vietnamese. The U. S. - South Vietnamese combined arms force consisted of more than two thousand strategic and tactical aircraft, supported with artillery and armor.⁷¹ Through the effective use of combined firepower, especially artillery and aircraft, the Marines at Khe Sanh were able to hold off the numerically superior foe. General Westmoreland stated, "Khe Sanh will stand in history, I am convinced as a classic example of how to defeat a numerically superior besieging force by coordinated application of firepower."⁷²

Just as the U.S. incorrectly estimated the North Vietnamese combat capability in 1968, the North Vietnamese leadership also failed to understand the killing ability of the U.S. technological advantage. General Tran Van Tra, a senior Communist general in South Vietnam at the time of the campaign, candidly admitted in a military history published in Hanoi in 1982 that the offensive had been misconceived from the start. "During Tet of 1968," he wrote, "we did not correctly evaluate the specific balance of forces between ourselves and the enemy. We did not fully realize that the enemy still had considerable capabilities and that our capabilities were limited."⁷³ This shortfall manifested itself by the U. S. and South Vietnamese forces killing five North Vietnamese or Vietcong for every one killed in return.⁷⁴

Science Conclusions

This American predisposition toward science and technology altered the U. S. approach to Vietnam. The U. S. searched for a technology to win in Vietnam based on the belief that machinery allows a clean war, using tools instead of men. Optimistically, the U. S. wanted to bomb the North Vietnamese to their senses with only limited human costs to themselves.

The North Vietnamese leaders failed to project the impact of the U.S. technology-based killing power on their most precious resource -- manpower. Squandering those lives required the North Vietnamese to take several more years to finish the conflict. They also failed to correctly assess the strength of will of their opponents. The goal of attacking the will of the South Vietnamese people, driving a wedge between the U. S. - South Vietnamese alliance was well founded; however, had the North Vietnamese leadership recognized the fickle nature of U. S. public opinion, they could have attacked the U. S. will directly, instead of inadvertently, expediting their victory.

Chapter 5: A Matter of Time

In his An Essay on Man Cassirer writes, "Space and time are the framework in which all reality is concerned. We cannot conceive any real thing except under the conditions of space and time. "⁷⁵ He continues, ". . .to describe and analyze the specific character which space and time assume in human experience is one of the most appealing and important tasks of an anthropological philosophy."⁷⁶ While this paper does not attempt to examine specific differences in Eastern and Western spatial perceptions, it will demonstrate the differences in time and their impact on the Vietnam War.

Cyclic versus Linear

The distinction between the East and West, between qualitative and quantitative thought, also manifests itself in the perception of time. Jean Herbert writes:

It has often been affirmed that for the West time is linear and irreversible, while for the East it is cyclic. It would be more correct to say that for us [Westerners] it is shown by a straight line while Oriental man would represent it in the form of a sinusoidal line.⁷⁷

Mathematically, a sinusoidal line, captures the essential elements of a cycle. More importantly, however, is the point that time, in the oriental view, is more qualitative-- it has another dimension.

In Time Wars, Jeremy Rifkin writes:

Cultures differ markedly in the way they establish durations for various activities. Our Western concept of time, which is abstract, external, linear, and quantitative, makes little sense to members of other cultures where durations are measured not by the ticking of the clock, but by the unfolding of environmental events of the ordering of sacred rituals. As one scholar aptly put it, in many non-Western cultures they don't tell you what time it is; they tell you what kind of time it is.⁷⁸

In many traditional societies, duration is measured by references to specific tasks, rather than by abstract numbers, as in the modern Western approach. For example, in Madagascar, when someone asks how long something takes, they might be told that it takes the same time as "rice cooking" (about a half an hour) or the time it takes to "fry a locust" (a moment).⁷⁹ This event driven view of time extends into East Asia where, in China, time is also expressed using everyday acts as examples vice quantitative units such as hours and minutes. For instance, the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, the time it takes to eat a bowl of rice, or the time it takes for a stick of incense to burn, are all germane.⁸⁰

Marie-Lousie von Franz writing in Time Rhythm and Repose, discusses the development of time in the Western perspective:

Only in modern western physics has time become part of a mathematical framework, which we use with our conscious mind to describe physical events. The mind of primitive man made less distinction than ours between outer and inner, material and psychic, events. Primitive man lived in a stream of inner and outer experience which brought along a different cluster of coexisting events at every moment, and thus, constantly changed, quantitatively and qualitatively.⁸¹

The idea of saving and compressing time is stamped into the psyche of Western civilization and now much of the world. Time is perceived as a premium, a rare resource, used to shape and mold the social life of the West in ever more sophisticated ways. Modern man has come to view time as a tool to enhance and advance the collective well-being of the culture. The phrase "Time is money," best expresses the temporal spirit of the Western view.⁸²

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Carl Jung, discusses the differences of West and East in terms of quantity and quality, or the outer and inner view:

The mythic needs of the Occidental call for an evolutionary cosmogony with a beginning and a goal. The Occidental rebels against a cosmogony with a beginning and mere end, just as he cannot accept the idea of a static, self-contained, eternal cycle of events. The Oriental, on the other hand, seems unable to come about the nature of the world, any more than there is general agreement among contemporary astronomers on this question. To Western man, the meaninglessness of a merely static universe is unbearable. He must assume that is has meaning. The Oriental does not need to make this assumption; rather, he himself embodies it. Whereas the Occidental feels the need to complete the meaning of the world, the Oriental strives for the fulfillment of meaning in man, stripping the world and existence from himself (Buddha).⁸³

Jung goes on to say that both views of time are correct, albeit each is from a different  perspective. While Western man is mostly extroverted, Eastern man is mostly introverted. The former projects meaning and considers that it is extent in objects, while the latter feels the meaning within himself.⁸⁴

This view helps to explain in part why the North Vietnamese were willing to die in such great numbers as they opposed the combat firepower of U. S. technology. As members of a greater whole, the Vietnamese were not as concerned with the "here and now" as were the Americans. Consider a modern sports analogy: the individual Vietnamese were content to serve as the offense linemen for their football team; these inglorious, albeit important members of the team, seldom receive front page press coverage; while Americans fit neatly into the role of a star running backs, receiving credit for scoring the winning touchdowns. To think of it another way, Americans want to play the lead in a Broadway production, while the individual Vietnamese is content serving in a supporting role in the community theater, knowing that his role is important to the overall success of the group.

Time and Religion. This linkage of Asian perspective of the universe and time is further developed by Jean Herbert.

This feeling of unlimited continuity which, by it very nature, is more qualitative than quantitative, reappears particularly in the Asian's concept of time. For him the very essence of time lies in this continuity and not, as for us, in succession; time is not a way of classifying. For the Buddhists, for instance, time is made up of a continuous flux, a real continuum, samtana.⁸⁵

Here, Herbert notes the interrelationship between the Eastern view of man's place in the universe, perception of time, and religion. Other thinkers also note the impact of religion on the Eastern view of time. For example, Rifkin sees the Chinese view of time as cyclical rather than linear, as seen in the great Chinese religions of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, which teach that time and history endlessly repeat themselves in strict obedience to planetary movements.⁸⁶

The Western view of time has also been influenced by religion as seen in the Judeo-Christian tradition belief in a primarily linear model, resting on the intervention of God and His Providence, His plan to lead mankind to the intervention of God and His plan to lead mankind step by step to perfection and finally, to the destruction of the world.⁸⁷ The Romanian anthropologist and historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, sees Christianity as breaking the previous Western mind set of time as cyclic. In Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade writes:

Christian thought tended to transcend, once and for all, the old themes of eternal repetition. Through the Christian belief in the birth and death of Christ and the Crucifixion as unique events, unrepeatable, Western civilisation came to regard time as a linear path that stretches between past and future. Before the advent of Christianity only the Hebrews and the Zoroastrian Persinas preferred this progressive view of time.⁸⁸

Time and Science. Along with religion establishing linear Western time perceptions, science further refined the view. Sir Isaac Newton provided the modern Western scientific impetus through his equations on a moving body's position at a specific time. While his equations are not time dependent, in that they predict a body's position at any time, past or future, they conform to the Western concept of linear time, but do not suggest that time moves in a single direction. ⁸⁹

Newton saw time as absolute in nature, believing it was possible to measure the interval between two events, and that the measurement would be the same no matter who measured it, provided they all used an accurate clock.⁹⁰ Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity changed Newton's view of the absolute nature of time. Einstein's Theory of Relativity builds on speed of light experiments conducted in the late 1800's, concluding that each individual person measuring an event must carry an accurate clock for his specific frame of reference. This implies that the Western view of time is relative in addition to linear.⁹¹

Science also further modified the Western image to include an arrow. The allusive term 'the arrow of time' was first used by the astrophysicist Arthur Eddingtion in 1927,⁹² who linked the arrow of time with the study of thermodynamics. The arrow is the amount of a characteristic quality, called entropy, which monotonically increases (i.e., does not decrease) for a given substance.⁹³ Thermodynamics sets out to describe the relationship between heat and work, describing how heat can be converted into or exchanged with other forms of energy; unfortunately, Classical Mechanics, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics do not support the idea of Time's Arrow, but thermodynamics provides the needed reference. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that heat can only flow from a hotter body to a colder body:

The effect of including the finding of thermodynamics is to modify the theory of the t-coordinate [a measurement of position used by Newtonian mechanics] and to bring the concept of 'time' a little closer to what we [Westerners] have from our own experience. For this science shows that the order of events, as read off along the one direction of the coordinate, is objectively distinguishable from the order as read off along the reverse direction, There is a gradient of monotonically changing entropy states, and this gradient appears to correlate completely with our own judgment of the temporal order of events, as based on our sense of earlier than' and 'later than'.⁹⁴

Denbigh concludes, "For although thermodynamics finds the two directions of time to be distinguishable, it does not display the one direction as being in any sense 'more real' than the reverse direction."⁹⁵

In summary, Western time was initially cyclic in nature, then modified by religion and science. Western time has evolved to be linear, relative and have direction. Western time stands in stark contrast to the cyclic, or sinusoidal, time of the East. These differing views collided in the Vietnam War with significant effects.

Time and Vietnam

Patience as a Virtue. Americans wanted to end the Vietnam War and return home in contrast to the North Vietnamese who ultimately concluded that if they waged unceasing war, the American public would ultimately grow tired, withdraw their support, and once again the historical cycle of the invading foreigners would be complete. This view reflects the Chinese view of political cycles, a dominant influence in Vietnamese thought, "...Chinese history proceeds in cycles of five hundred years as follows; the possession of the country by a foreign conqueror; the absorption of this conqueror by Chinese culture; a period of confusion; and a period of national government."⁹⁶

Clark Dougan, writing for the Boston Publishing Group in The Vietnam Experience:  Nineteen Sixty-Eight cites this North Vietnamese strategy: 

Driving the Americans out of South Vietnam had been the chief tactical goal of Communist military strategists since 1965, and as recently as September 1967 General Giap [the chief North Vietnamese military strategist] had reaffirmed that objective in his annual review of the war, a tract entitled "Big Victory, Great Task." Acknowledging that the Americans had proved a far tougher foe than the French, that the superiority of U.S. firepower and mobility posed serious problems for his own troops, and that Communist tactics were in need of revision, Giap in effect conceded that the Communists were not winning the war. But neither, in his view were they losing it. For all their failings, they had succeeded in depriving the Americans of the one thing the U. S. wanted, and needed, most: a quick victory. They had forced the Americans to commit themselves to a protracted war, and in so doing they had tipped the odds in their favor. The war might last "five, ten, twenty or more years," he wrote, but as long as the Communists kept on fighting, eventually the Americans would leave.⁹⁷

General Giap's own long term strategy was to bleed the U. S. until it agreed to a settlement that satisfied The North Vietnamese, which explains, in part, why the Communists were willing to endure enormous casualties, as in the Tet Offensive of 1968 which was not intended to be a decisive operation, but one episode in a protracted war that might last "five, ten, or twenty years." Essentially, Giap was repeating to the United States what Ho Chi Minh had warned the French a generation before: "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win."⁹⁸ General Giap had developed a strategy to combat the American technological advantage -- patience.

Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, when asked in a 1995 interview, "How did Hanoi intend to defeat the Americans?", responded, "By fighting a long war which would break their [the American] will to help South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh said, "We don't need to win military victories, we only need to hit them until they give up and get out."⁹⁹ His thoughts were prescient, as Colonel Tin received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam forces in April, 1975.

Time for the Attack. Another major difference in the perception of Time involves selecting the right time for a specific activity:

The Asian differs from us [Westerners] not only by his abstract and passive conception of time but also in his practical and active attitude. While our concern is to 'use' the time at our disposal in order to 'fit in' all the activities we think desirable, the Oriental is much more anxious to choose the most auspicious moment for each one of his activities, if necessary foregoing without regret those that do not fit in.¹⁰⁰

The choice of when to attack formed a key element of North Vietnamese strategy.

For example, the success of the Tet Offensive was due in a large part to the significant surprise achieved. The North Vietnamese and Vietcong guerrilla forces mounted a coordinated offensive which found the South Vietnamese troops on leave or furlough, and the U. S. forces in a relaxed state of readiness. Although North Vietnamese forces suffered heavy casualties, the timing of their attack was superb, greatly influencing American public opinion. Karnow talked in 1990 about the Tet Offensive with General Giap, North Vietnam's chief military strategist, who stated, "Tet was an overall political and diplomatic victory. We chose Tet because, in war, you must seize the propitious moment, when time and space are propitious."¹⁰¹ Giap's choice of terms is key and reflects the Asian view of time. Propitious means the right time, not only in rational time (i.e., days and hours), but in the sense of an intuitive moment as well. In a sense, when all the forces of time, cosmic and clockwork, are aligned. The moment will be brief and must be acted upon when these factors simultaneously occur. This is best exemplified by the Chinese word for time, 'che', which means a circumstance favorable or unfavorable for action.¹⁰² Americans by contrast, possess a clock-driven mentality. In both daily routine and military operations, accomplishing objectives by a given time receives top priority. Military operations routinely begin with clockwork precision, rarely do attacks begin "when the time is propitious," in an event-driven setting.

General Giap has written extensively on choosing the timing for attack. In How We Won The War, co-authored with his aide General Van Tien Dung, Giap writes:

To chose the right time to deliver the decisive blow is a major problem of the art of insurrection as well as the art of war. It is also a very important question in the conduct of military campaigns. A vital point of the enemy may be exposed at one time but not at another time, or may be weak at one time but strong at another time. That is why one must attack when the enemy is weak and exposed. This is the art of handling the time factor in war.¹⁰³

Giap's philosophy amplifies Herbert's earlier comments about Asians choosing the most auspicious moment for an event. Giap wrote of the final offensive against South Vietnam which delivered the knockout blow, "The latest general offensive proved without a shadow of a doubt that if we strike at the right time even a small force can generate a big strength, and a big force will create a still greater strength. It can be said that the favorable moment is in itself a force and strength."¹⁰⁴

Time Conclusions

By the mid 1960's, the North Vietnamese adopted a strategy of patient opposition to the U. S. presence in Vietnam. Knowing if they waited long enough, the Western-minded U.S., like the French before them, would ultimately get tired and return home. While the North Vietnamese successfully executed their patient approach, their policy makers initially failed to contrast their own philosophy of time against their Western opponent and recognize that they could more easily attack U. S. will and weaken the opposing alliance. Inadvertently influencing the U.S. will, vice attacking it consciously, was a shortfall because the North Vietnamese leadership failed to understand U.S. culture. The U. S. policymakers also fell prey to their own shortsightedness, and impatience. Their Western view of time, requiring immediate satisfaction, combined with the requirements of the American electoral process, required the U. S. to ultimately withdraw from Vietnam without a military victory.

The Vietnamese successfully executed a surprise offensive in January, 1968, but failed to realize the impact casualties would take on their resources. So while Tet marked the turning point of the conflict, it took the military weakened North Vietnam another seven years to rid themselves of the U. S. presence.

Chapter 6: Conclusions

Ernst Cassirer's "Circle Of Humanity" provides a useful model for examining human culture. The Joint Chiefs of Staff now recognize its analytical value, citing Cassirer's model in the Joint Task Force Commander's Handbook for Peace Operations (1995), which stresses that the categories of language, myth, religion, art, science, and history as critical to gaining insight into problems of local populations in peace operations.¹⁰⁵ This insight also applies to combat with an enemy of whom the U. S. may have little or no experience. It is a model by which cultures may be analyzed and, when used prior to engagement, vice in hindsight, it may yield valuable insights and possibly alter the outcome.

By using three of Cassirer's six categories this paper has created a plane of understanding for the U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Religion explains why Americans initially became involved and how the missionary nature of the U. S. Judeo-Christian religion was rejected by the Vietnamese religious blend of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. History demonstrates how the U. S. civilian-military leadership was ignorant of the Vietnamese heritage, a primary reason why Ho Chi Minh was repeatedly misinterpreted as being a Communist and not as a Nationalist using Communism as a power base to aid in reuniting Vietnam. Science contributes significant insights into quantitative (Western) and qualitative (Eastern) way of thinking. These different approaches were paralleled in the disparate views of time held by the Americans and the Vietnamese, a contrast that allowed North Vietnam to break down the U. S. public will by extending the duration of the conflict, and ultimately led to the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

Notes

¹              Edward Doyle, Stephen Weiss, and the editors of Boston Publishing Company, The Vietnam Experience: A Collision of Cultures (Boston: Boston Publishing Company, 1984), 38,

²               Doyle, 38.

³              From an Interview in Santoli entitled "Everything We Had", 172, quoted by Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History Of How American Culture Of How American Culture Led Us Into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1985), 32.

⁴              Doyle, 38.

⁵              Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1972), 401, quoted by Baritz, Backfire, 21.

⁶              Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1982), 76, quoted by Baritz, 21.

⁷              Seymour M Hersh, The Price Of Power (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 569, quoted by Baritz, 21.

⁸              Taylor, 401, quoted by Baritz, 21.

⁹              Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1995), 29.

¹⁰             McNamara, 32.

¹¹             Ernst Cassirer, An Essay On Man: An Introduction To The Human Philosophy Of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 278,

¹²             Cassirer, 93.

¹³             Cassirer, 15.

¹⁴             Cassirer, 98.

¹⁵             Herman Melville, White Jacket (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 189, quoted by Baritz, 26.

¹⁶             John Winthrop, Papers, ed. A. B, Forbes (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), Vol. II, 295, quoted by Baritz, 26.

¹⁷             Cassirer, 114.

¹⁸              Cassirer, 114.

¹⁹              Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 24.

²⁰              Jean Herbert, An Introduction to Asia, trans. Manu Banerji (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 31-32,

²¹              Georges Condominas, "Vietnamese Religion," in The Encyclopedia of Religions, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1987), Vol. 15, 257.

²²              Herbert. Jean Herbert summarizes the major beliefs of the three religions:  Confucianism, like Judaism, claims to sum up the teaching of several previous sages, but it honours above all its main exponent, Confucius (550-478 B. C.), whose name it bears. Its teaching is not based on any metaphysical dogma; it is, in theory at least, devoid of mythology and ritual; its basic texts are numerous and voluminous and it does not require any clergy. Many authors refuse to consider it a religion because, in itself, it is practically atheist.

Its main object is to organize the life of society along the most satisfactory principles, and for that purpose, it relies mainly on the practice of five cardinal virtues: love, which lies at the root of all the others; justice, which assigns his rightful place to every individual; respect, by which one recognizes others' rights and performs one's own duties; wisdom, which makes it possible to discriminate between good and evil; and sincerity. It admits that man is fundamentally good and particularly emphasizes filial piety and ancestor worship., 69.

Taoism, the other great religion of Chinese origin, seems to have become crystallized at about the same time as Confucianism, from the time of Lao Tse (604-517 B. C, according to Chinese tradition), the presumed author of the greatest Taoist text, the Tao-teh-king. This major text has been translated many times into all Western Languages, and the interpretations given vary to the extreme.

Like Confucianism, Jainism and Buddhism, Taoism does not claim the benefit of divine revelation: it sets itself up as the product of the wisdom and vision of human beings. It claims to be in possession of practical truth on the basis of a particular interpretation of the principles governing the world, but it does not claim to possess the absolute truth. Like the Hindu word yoga, the Chinese word tao means 'both the way to be traveled and its final goals, both the method and the fulfillment'.

It has become customary among Westerners to stress the contrast between a Taoist philosophy which, everyone agrees, is worthy of the highest esteem, and a 'popular religion' which is often viewed with undisguised contempt. Actually, the two aspects that are thus separated are closely linked, but their foundation is practically incomprehensible to the intellect and cannot be grasped except by those who have submitted themselves for years to the harsh discipline required. At the most, it may be noted that among the members of the intellectual and spiritual elite one finds an extremely high conception of the Universal Order which is a Reality, a specific Principle, the Primary Principle -- not a Reality qualified by moral attributes and appearing in the shape of Providence, by a Reality characterized by its logical necessity and viewed as a Power of Realization, primary, permanent and omnipresent. This same elite is also deeply conscious of all the consequences arising for man out of the need to conform to this Universal Order (in particular, non-action, wu-wei) which leads to actual mysticism, for the material necessities of life, the possibility of delaying death, etc., which manifests itself in various practices, most of which seem to us to be in the nature of superstition. But similar contrasts could easily be found within other great religions, not excluding Christianity., 70.

Buddhism has a founder, Gautama Buddha (560-480 B. C. It must be noted that Chinese and Japanese Buddhists believe the Buddha to have been born in 1027 B. C.), and a dogma; but the latter is not the result of a divine revelation: it is the outcome of one man's clear-sightedness and no one is therefore under any compulsion to accept it as an absolute truth.

Its sacred scriptures are immense, but official and complete lists are available. Practically all of them have been couched in writing, most of them have been printed and large sections have been translated into western languages.

Its mythology, which was originally almost entirely borrowed from Hinduism, later grew and prospered much further. Its ritual is extremely complex. It attaches the greatest importance to monastic and convent life, which, to it, represents the ideal state for both man and woman. Metaphysics form its essential basis -- although, as a matter of principle, it refuses to approach some of the greatest problems -- and supplies the exclusive foundation for its philosophy and ethics. It deals above all with the way in which we can escape from the illusions that are the actual cause of our present life and it does not concern itself much with the details of this life., 72.

²³             Herbert, 33.

²⁴             Condominas, 257.

²⁵             Doyle, 19.

²⁶             Doyle, 60.

²⁷             Doyle, 58.

²⁸             Baritz, 24.

²⁹             Karnow, 257.

³⁰             Cassirer, 224.

³¹             Herbert, 13.

³²             Cassirer, 226.

³³            Karnow, 110.

³⁴             Iver Peterson, "A Long and Divisive War", New York Times, May 1,1975. Peterson continues with additional background:  The French, seeking trade routes to China, encountered this spirit from the people they slowly subdued and colonized beginning in 1858. The French made Vietnam one of Europe's most profitable colonies in the Far East, But their colonialism produced a nationalist independence movement that finally prevailed.

³⁵             Karnow, 110.

³⁶             Karnow, 71.

³⁷             Peterson, "A Long and Divisive War."

³⁸             Baritz, 58-9.

³⁹             L. A. Patti Archimedes, Why Viet Nam? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 86, cited by Baritz, 60.

⁴⁰             Iver Peterson, "Along and Divisive War."

⁴¹             Baritz, 62.

⁴²             Karnow. Stanley Karnow provides some additional historical background:  The situation changed drastically in 1949, when the Chinese Communists reached the Vietnamese border. China could now provide the Vietminh with automatic weapons, mortars, howitzers, even trucks, most of it captured American materiel, some of it Soviet equipment earmarked for the Korean war. Chinese advisers joined Vietminh detachments, and Vietminh units crossed into China to train at camps near Nanning and Ching Hsi. [Gen.] Giap swiftly expanded his battalions into regiments, and soon he had mobilized six divisions, each numbering ten thousand men, among them a "heavy division" composed of artillery and engineering regiments. The image of ragtag of Vietminh guerrillas persisted, but it was pure romanticisim Giap now commanded a real army, backed up by China's enormous weight., p. 199-200.

⁴³             Peterson, "Along and Divisive War." Peterson writes, "the principal feature of the Geneva accords -- they were not signed by any of the governments present, only assented to -- provided for the temporary partition of Vietnam at its waist, in the area of the 17th parallel, into two zones for the regroupment of the two sides' military forces after a cease-fire. The accords, stressing that the demilitarized zone was not to be a permanent political boundary, provided, circuitously, for a referendum on the form of government for the whole country to be held in July 1956." He continues later in the same article, "At the end of 1955, after an election in which 450,00 voters in Saigon managed to cast 605,000 ballots, Mr. Diem (an ardent nationalist who had agreed to serve as Prime Minister under Emperor Bao Dai) deposed the frivolous and ineffectual Bao Dai as head of state and declared South Vietnam a republic, with himself as its President."

⁴⁴             Karnow, 30.

⁴⁵             Baritz, 61.

⁴⁶             Peterson, "Along and Divisive War."

⁴⁷             McNamara, 36.

⁴⁸             Robert Trumbull, "Johnson Pledges Help to Vietnam to Fight Poverty," New York Times, May 13,1961.

⁴⁹              Karnow, 267.

⁵⁰              Karnow, 56,

⁵¹              Karnow, 55.

⁵²               McNamara, 33.

⁵³               McNamara, 30.

⁵⁴               McNamara, 31.

⁵⁵                "Vietcong Found Gaining," New York Times, January 28, 1964.

⁵⁶                McNamara, 33.

⁵⁷                Cassirer, 261.

⁵⁸                Cassirer, 261.

⁵⁹                Carl G Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (New York: Random House,1955), 35.

⁶⁰                Herbert, 323.

⁶¹                Anthony F. Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars. Clocks and Cultures, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1989), 305.

⁶²                Albert Einstein, in a letter dated 23 April 1953, quoted in D, de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 15, cited by Anthony F. Aveni, Empires of Time: Calendars. Clocks and Cultures, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1989), 305.

⁶³                McNamara, 6.

⁶⁴                McNamara, 9.

⁶⁵                Karnow, 271.

⁶⁶                Karnow, 271.

⁶⁷                McNamara, 48.

⁶⁸                Baritz, 45.

⁶⁹                Karnow, 537.

⁷⁰                Don Oberdorfer, Tet!  The Turning Point in the Vietnam War (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1984), 329. Although initially written in late 1969, Oberdorfer opined that the Tet Offensive marked the turning point of the Vietnam War. Specifically, the decline of U. S. public opinion, the replacement of Robert McNamara with Clark Clifford, and subsequent withdrawal of incumbent President Johnson from the upcoming Presidential race all combined to force incoming President Nixon to move to end the U. S. involvement in Vietnam.

⁷¹                Dougan, 42-3. Dougan specifies the combined arms present, "[They] included eighteen 105mm and six 155mm howitzers, six 4.2mm mortars, six tanks and ninety-two single- or Ontos- mounted 106mm recoilless rifles, in addition to 175mm guns at nearby camps.

⁷²                Dougan, 59.

⁷³                Karnow, 557.

⁷⁴                Don Oberdorfer, iii.

⁷⁵                Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 62.

⁷⁶                Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities, 63.

⁷⁷                Herbert, 103.

⁷⁸                Thomas Cottle and Stephen Klineberg, The Present of Things Future (New York: The Free Press/MacMillan, 1974), p. 168 quoted in Time Wars, by Jeremy Rifkin (New York:            Henry Holt and Co.,1987), p. 52.

⁷⁹                 Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,1987), p. 53.

⁸⁰                 Paul M. Belbutowski, "Low Intensity Conflict and Asia: A Matter of  Time", Low Intensity Conflict and Law Enforcement, Vol. 3, No. 1 (London: Frank Cass, 1994), 1-8.

⁸¹                 Marie-Louise von Franz, Time Rhythm and Repose (New York: Thames and Hudson,1978), 5.

⁸²                 Rifkin 4.

⁸³                 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 316-7.

⁸⁴                 Jung, 317.

⁸⁵                 Herbert, 102.

⁸⁶                 Robert H. Lauer, "Temporality and Social Case of the 19th Century in China and Japan," The Sociological Quarterly. No. 14 (1973), pp. 452-53, quoted in Time Wars by Jeremy Rifkin (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1987), 115.

⁸⁷                 von Franz, 16.

⁸⁸                Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, L ondon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 6, quoted in, The Arrow of Time, Peter Convey and Roger Highfleld (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 26.

⁸⁹                Peter Convey and Roger Highfield, The Arrow of Time (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990). The authors provide an additional example:  Newton's mechanics promises vast predictive power, allowing one instant to provide all possible information about the past and future of the universe. Take the positions and speeds of all the stars in our universe at any instant and plug these values into a cosmic computer that solves Newton's equations. Frozen in that instant is the past and the future: the computer could calculate the positions and speeds of the stars at all times. But what his equations fail to do is to decide which direction of time constitutes the actual past and future or our universe, Instead they strip time of its sense of direction, leaving no room for its relentless march onward., 29-30,

⁹⁰                 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History Of Time (New York: Bantam, 1990), 18.

⁹¹                 Hawking. Hawking expands the idea: The fundamental postulate of the theory of relatively, as it was called, was that the laws of science should be the same for all freely moving observers, no matter what their speed. This was true for Newton's laws of motion, but now the idea was extended to include Maxwell's theory and the speed of light: all observers should measure the same speed of light, no matter how fast they are moving., 20.  He continues, "An equally remarkable consequence of relativity is the way it has revolutionized our ideas of space and time. In Newton's theory, if a pulse of light is sent from one place to another, different observers would agree on the time that the journey took (since time is absolute). Since the speed of the light is just the distance it has traveled divided by the time it has taken, different observers would measure different speeds for the light. In relativity, on the other hand, all observers must agree on how fast light travels. They still, however, do not agree on the distance light has traveled, so they must therefore now also disagree over the time it has taken. (The time taken is the distance the light has traveled -- which the observers do not agree on -- divided by the light's speed -- which they do agree on.) In other words, the theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time! It appeared that each observer must have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different would not necessarily agree.", 21.

⁹²                Convey and Highfield. The authors expand on this idea noting that the common sense approach says that time can't run backwards, yet all the modern science advances still hold. Consider Newton's Mechanics, Einstein's Relativity, and the Quantum Mechanics of Heisenberg and Schrodinger -- they would all appear to work equally well with time running in the reverse direction. The exception, of course is the Second Law of Thermodynamics., p. 23.

⁹³                Kenneth George Denbigh, Three Concepts of Time (New York: Spring-Verlag, 1981), p. 94.

⁹⁴                Denbigh, 167-8.

⁹⁵                Denbigh, 168

⁹⁶                Herbert, 104.

⁹⁷                Dougan, 55-6.

⁹⁸                Karnow, 549.

⁹⁹                Stephen Young, "How North Vietnam Won the War", Wall Street Journal, 03 August, 1995.

¹⁰⁰             Herbert, 112-3.

¹⁰¹             Karnow, 557.

¹⁰²             von Franz, 10.

¹⁰³             Vo Nguyen Giap and Van Tien Dung, How We Won The War (Philadelphia: Recon Publications, 1976), p. 48. Most of the text of this monograph initially appeared in an article by General Vo Nguyen Giap and his aide General Van Tien Dung under the title "Great Victory of the Spring 1975 General Offensive and Uprising" in the Vietnamese newspapers Nhan Dan and Quan Doi Nhan on June 31 and July 1, 1975. Another version of the text appeared under the title "A New Development of the Art of Leading a Revolutionary War" in the Vietnam Courier of August and September, 1975. The italics appear as written in the original work.

¹⁰⁴             Giap and Dung, 49. The italics appear as written in the original work.

¹⁰⁵            Joint Task Force Commander's Handbook for Peace Operations (Fort Monroe Virgina:  Joint Warfighting Center, 1995), p. 11-3.

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