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1965-1968: The United States Takes Charge

When he took office, President Johnson made two promises with respect to Vietnam: he would not "lose" it and he would not send "American boys" to die there. Johnson failed to keep either pledge.

By 1965, 184,000 American young men were fighting in Vietnam, and many were dying. They fought forces organized by the National Liberation Front (NLF) into guerrilla units and stable village militia. The NLF was a coalition native to the south, made up largely of peasants. Many South Vietnamese noncombatants aided the NLF by supplying military information, food, medical services, homemade weapons, and recruits. In return, the NLF organized village self-defense, established schools, encouraged local irrigation projects, and, in general, functioned as a government throughout large areas of the south.

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1965-1968: The United States Takes Charge

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At the Dinner Table

Native to the villages of the south, the NLF guerrillas, lightly armed and thoroughly familiar with the territory, proved to be a formidable adversary. Because these troops were often difficult to distinguish from the population itself, U.S. military commanders resorted to such tactics as "free fire zones" and "search and destroy" missions. "Free fire zones" were areas in which anything that moved was assumed to be an enemy and attacked; "search and destroy" missions frequently responded to a single sniper attack from a village by destroying the entire village and relocating its surviving population. In this way, every Vietnamese, of whatever political affiliation, became a potential enemy to American soldiers.

By 1966 "free fire zones" were enlarged to areas of several square miles within which saturation bombing by B-52s or shelling by massed artillery cleared the land and made it uninhabitable by either NLF troops or the local peasantry. It was this decimation of the land, more than anything else, that filled the refugee camps in the safe areas near Saigon and other cities.

As the costs of the war rose, in both moral and material terms, Johnson's top advisers became increasingly skeptical of U.S. military estimates of the situation. After the January 1968 Tet offensive, in which guerrillas attacked no fewer than 34 provincial centers, 64 district towns, and every major city in the south -- to the apparent surprise of the American command -- Johnson was strongly urged by his advisers to reject the military’s request for more troops. On March 31, he called a bombing halt on much of the north (bombing of the south continued) and declared he would devote the remainder of his presidential term to seeking peace rather than re-election.

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