alt title(s): Vietnam War
"In the final analysis, it's their
war: they're the ones who have to win it or lose it."
—President John F. Kennedy
"'You know you never defeated us on the battlefield,' said the American colonel. The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. 'That may be so,' he replied, 'but it is also irrelevant.'"
—Col Harry G. Summers Jr. and Col Tu, April 1975, described in a history book
The Vietnam War (or rather wars) was one of the most controversial wars that the United States took part in. Many South Asian countries (plus Australia and New Zealand) took part alongside the Americans, against the Soviet and Chinese-backed North Vietnamese. But first, a little background.
Vietnam and most of the rest of Indochina was a possession of France's colonial empire from the 1880s onwards. While Vietnam gained independence from France in 1954 after a long war with the French, Americans intervened as the most popular party in Vietnam was the Communists, lead by Ho Chi Minh. The Americans were
in no way planning on letting Communists control Vietnam, so the country was split into South and North Vietnam; North was Communist, South was a democracy
In Name Only (in truth a corrupt neo-fascist state led by a string of America-backed dictators).
Unfortunately, tensions flared in the region, and with the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, President Johnson was left to salvage what he could. American ships were (supposedly) attacked by North Vietnamese ones in 1964, and so America ordered a military presence in Vietnam to 'protect the freedom' of South-East Asia (i.e. get rid of the Communists). In strictly legal terms the United States didn't enter a war, as Congress never wrote a declaration of war. The entire conflict was essentially an executive order.
It was a very popular area for war films from the 70s to the early 90s. Most of these films are opposed to the war, with John Wayne's
The Green Berets being the only real exception.
Expect a bunch of drugged-up draftees (which wasn't actually the case for everyone, since 2/3s of the American soldiers were volunteers, including three future major party US presidential nominees) who will shoot anyone who looks South-East Asian, whether they are the enemy, their own side, or civilians. Also expect an emphasis on American casualties, even though 5,000,000 civilians died compared to 58,000 American soldiers.
Expect incompetent officers, stuffed-up academy cadets being "fragged" (killed with grenades) by their own soldiers, various wanton atrocities, and even Catch-22 explanations about "having to destroy the village in order to save it".
National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam insurgents (known as Vietcong- a derogatory term meaning "Vietnamese Communist", VC, Victor Charlie, or just Charlie) and NVA soldiers don't feature very much, except as sources of weapons fire, evil torturers, punji trap layers or occasionally corpses.
Expect much use of napalm, because it smells like the victory the Americans never got. It's worth noting, however, the North Vietnamese forces never won a major battle themselves either - the Tet Offensive, a military campaign by the Viet Cong, was intended as a demonstration of the weakness of the American grip on the country rather than a strike at military objectives- the VC actually took so many losses they played no further major part on the war. Their secret is in part that no matter what the Americans threw at them, the North Vietnamese took the blows willingly as part of the price to pay for the cause and
just kept coming; they wanted to win more than we wanted them to lose. This is the only way insurgencies are ever resolved.
This is also the first war to feature helicopters as a weapon and primary transport; in Korea they were very small, and limited to recon and light medical evacuation. The UH-1 Huey, with both side doors open, flying low over the canopy of a jungle with a grizzled soldier manning the door gun is one of the war's most enduring images.
Someone
will use the word "klick" at some point, meaning a kilometre.
The Hollywood-Approved Soundtrack
TM to the Vietnam War is Creedence Clearwater Revival. "Fortunate Son" is the most popular, but "Who'll Stop The Rain", "Run Through the Jungle", "Have You Ever Seen The Rain" and "Suzie Q" will also show up. One has to wonder what CCR's legacy would be without Vietnam-Era films. In terms of other songs, expect "Gloria" and Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" to play somewhere. If it's a protest movie, also expect "Ohio" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young,
Garfunkel, Oates, and Cher. The song is about four students that were killed by the National Guard during an Anti-Vietnam War protest on the campus of Kent State in Ohio, and is the go-to song to highlight how divisive the war was back in America.
Because this was both an insurgency and a conventional war, you can also set air combat stories here. The F-4 Phantom II the MiG-17 and the MiG-21 feature heavily here, with the war also seeing major use of the S-25/SA-2 "Guideline" SAM (although the bulk of shoot-down were due to conventional AAA fire).
Vietnam has also formed parts of the backstory for a number of other works of fiction, including
The A Team,
Airwolf,
Magnum PI,
Rambo,
Taxi Driver,
The Bourne Series and
Jon Sable Freelance. Leo McGarry in
The West Wing was a Vietnam vet.
In fact, any grizzled action hero during
The Eighties has a fair chance of being a Vietnam Veteran - it became such a common source of angst that some movie reviewers took to abbreviating it to "Vietvet".
Vietnam Vets also appear in later-set military stories as grizzled veterans (
Team Yankee,
The Sixth Battle).
Compare
Holiday In Cambodia,
Unwinnable.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- The manga Apocalypse Meow; The Vietnam War WITH FUNNY ANIMALS!!
- In the original Cyborg 009 manga, the protagonists attempted to stop their enemy, the evil Black Ghost organization's War For Fun And Profit plans to escalating the war in order to sell advanced weapons & massproduced Super Soldier versions of the titular character to both sides. In the newer anime this was changed to the fictional country in Darkest Africa that was the homeland of 008.
- The Sankei Newspaper comic strip version of Astro Boy had a Time Travel plot that involved Astro being captured by arms dealers who tried to sell him to one or more of the participants in the war. After he escapes he tries to save a small village from being bombed by the US military. This is probably the darkest storyline in Astro's long career & possibly one of the darkest in Osamu Tezuka's as well. Not only was this one of the few times Astro actually kills humans beings, blowing up several tanks & bombers, but it's all in vain, as more show up the next day & kill everybody anyway, with Astro running out of energy & sinking to the bottom of the Mekong river, where he remains until The Nineties.
- Dutch from Black Lagoon is a Vietnam veteran. Also, Yallow Flag, the Bad Guy Bar the cast go to was built by South Vietnamese refugees.
- The Vietnam War features into the backstories of several characters in Blood+. David and Akihiro Okamura both had parents in the jungle, while Saya, Haji and Karl fought one another there.
Comic Books
- In the background of the Alternate History of the Watchmen comic, the Vietnam War ended with a decisive American Victory. But that was due to the godlike super-being Doctor Manhattan showing up at the request of Richard Nixon and transmuting all the jungles into poison gas, forcing the insurgents to surrender or face complete genocide.
- Check out the no holds barred mini series Born (I'm not kidding!) for a taste of what Vietnam was meant to be like. Garth Ennis throws every single criticism there is in the books, and then some
- Marvel had the The 'Nam, a series that was originally intended to be a seven year Myth Arc of soldiers trying to do their duty through the major years of the US's involvement in Vietnam.
- The original Super Hero Origin story of Iron Man involved Tony Stark being injured and captured in Vietnam, while demonstrating a new weapons system developed for the Americans to use in the war.
Film
- Apocalypse Now - possibly the Trope Codifier
- Across The Universe
- Full Metal Jacket
- Oliver Stone's Vietnam trilogy:
- Platoon
- Born On The Fourth Of July
- Heaven & Earth
- Good Morning Vietnam
- The Deer Hunter
- Hamburger Hill
- Casualties of War
- We Were Soldiers
- John Woo's Heroes Shed No Tears and Bullet in the Head
- Go Tell the Spartans
- The Boys in Company C
- Bat*21
- The Hanoi Hilton
- Flight of the Intruder.
- A Bright Shining Lie, adapted from Neil Sheehan's nonfiction book
- Who'll Stop the Rain aka Dog Soldiers
- Part of Forrest Gump
- Portions of American Gangster
- The film-within-a-film Tropic Thunder features a cast of dim-witted actors (including Robert Downey Jr. as a very dedicated white actor who plays a black character via surgery), which is The Film Of The Book. However, the author never went to Vietnam.
- Rambo 2.
- The Chuck Norris film Missing In Action.
- The Odd Angry Shot about Australian soldiers in Vietnam.
- The John Wayne movie The Green Berets. Its unabashedly pro-war tone and such technical and narrative goofs as having the sun set in the East in the final scene make this an example of 'Nam Narm for many.
- The film Coming Home deals with an injured Vietnam vet's attempts to re-enter civilian life after the war.
- Big Wednesday involves the attempts of a close-knit group of California surfers to avoid fighting in the war.
- The Killing Fields deals with the Cambodian civil war that erupted in the wake of the Vietnam conflict.
- Originally intended to be mentioned in James Bond: Tomorrow Never Dies. Bond was warned that if he was caught scuba-diving in Vietnamese waters, he could provoke another war with Vietnam - 'only this time, we might win.' The US military requested the line be censored from the film.
- Taking Woodstock (referenced many times)
- Referenced in Three Seasons: one of the characters is a former GI who comes back to Vietnam looking for the daughter he had with a local prostitute during his tour of duty.
- The War, starring Kevin Costner, and if This Troper remembers correctly, Eli Wood's first film.
Literature
- George R R Martin's The Armageddon Rag features a main character who was anti-Vietnam, and got married to avoid the draft. One of his friends was less lucky.
- Robert Mason's autobiography Chickenhawk tells of his time as a UH-1 pilot in Vietnam.
- Run Between the Raindrops (aka Citadel) a novel by Vietnam veteran turned Hollywood actor/advisor Dale Dye, and inspired by his own experiences in the Battle for Hue.
- Just about anything written by O'Brien, but most notably The Things They Carried.
- The Executioner. Vigilante Mack Bolan was a Vietnam veteran (the series of action novels was started in 1969) and later Gold Eagle publications had origin stories set during that era.
- In Country, a Bobbie Ann Mason novel later adapted to film.
- Over The Wall, a children's book by John H. Ritter in which overwhelming Vietnam guilt haunts every major character in the book. There's also an incest plot involving the loose cannon main character and his Soapbox Sadie cousin, in case the book might have seemed too juvenile for its audience.
- The Quiet American is about Vietnam before American intervention.
- In the novel (and film) Firefox, Michael Gant is a Vietnam veteran hired by British intelligence (with US help) to steal a Soviet superfighter. He suffers from flashbacks. At really inconvenient moments.
- The Forever War: Vietnam. In space.
- The eponymous story in Stephen King's Hearts In Atlantis covered the college protest angle of Vietnam, while "Blind Willie" and "Why We're In Vietnam" covered two soldiers' lives after the war.
- Flight of the Intruder, also adapted as a film, involving A-6 Intruder strike fighters.
- Forgotten Honor, by Eric Poole, is the biography of Sgt. Leslie Sabo, who was killed on Mother's Day 1970 and recommended for the Medal of Honor, after which the Army lost his paperwork for 30 years.
Live Action TV
Music
- Billy Joel's "Goodnight Saigon".
- The song and video of Alice in Chains' "Rooster"
- German Thrash Metal act Sodom derived lots of inspiration from its mainman's Tom Angelripper's fascination with the Vietnam conflict. As a German teenager in the 70s Tom was quite used to the sight of US military personnel (stationed in German NATO bases), in the songs and albums devoted to the topic the band manages to denounce the many horrors of the conflict while also expressing understanding and a kind of human piety for the soldiers having to navigate that hell. The album Agent Orange is the best-selling German thrash metal platter ever.
- Their 2001 album M-16 is an another take on the subject.
Tabletop Games
- The ridiculously lethal RPG Recon is set in the Vietnam War, and is a great way for a group to play a really, really short game, because I assure you, nobody will be left alive by the third encounter.
Theater
Video Games
- Battlefield Vietnam is a team-based First Person Shooter set in Vietnam. It brought some important things to the combat model established in the WWII-set Battlefield1942, notably the rise of the helicopter, boat combat on inland waterways, jet aircraft, and jungle fighting. Competitive Balance concerns kept it from accurately simulating asymmetric warfare. Despite not having very high sales numbers, the industry smelled a trend, and a wave of Follow The Leader games set in 'nam arrived, most of them shovelware; but, unlike the still-ongoing endless parade of WWII shooters, this trend fizzled when everyone remembered that almost no one actually liked this war.
- Vietcong series of First Person Shooter, quite notorious for its high difficulty managed to capture the atmosphere of Vietnam War. The game is notable for quite realistic portrayal of hardened soldiers and their environment as well as for including less popular themes, such as supporting the Montagnard tribes and urban combat during the Tet Offensive. With helicopters, plethora of military tropes and music from the 60ties added for good measure.
