Vietnam: America's Quagmire

Long before Saigon fell or American helicopters lifted off rooftops, Vietnam was already an old country wearing new names. Its story begins in the Red River Delta, where states rose in the first millennium BC among people whom Chinese chroniclers lumped together as the Baiyue, the 'Hundred Yue'. In 111 BC, the Han dynasty annexed the north and center, and for over a thousand years — until 939 AD — Vietnam existed under Chinese rule, absorbing Confucianism and Buddhism even as it waited for the chance to rule itself again.

That chance came, and Vietnamese dynasties spent centuries pushing south, conquering Champa and reaching the Mekong Delta. By the 17th and 18th centuries the country was split in two, Đàng Trong and Đàng Ngoài, a division that would echo eerily in the 20th century. The Nguyễn dynasty, the last of the imperial line, surrendered to France in 1883, and by 1887 Vietnam had been folded into French Indochina alongside Laos and Cambodia — no longer a kingdom, but three colonial provinces.

The name Việt Nam itself has a strange history. A version of it, Nam Việt, appears as early as the 2nd century BC. The modern form is first recorded in a 16th-century oracular poem and on stone steles from that era. When Emperor Gia Long asked China's Jiaqing Emperor in the early 1800s to recognize him as 'King of Nam Việt', the Chinese court balked — that name evoked an old kingdom spanning southern China — and proposed 'Việt Nam' instead. Vietnamese speakers, reading the words in their own order, heard something different but no less proud: 'the Viet of the South.' For most of the following century, though, the world knew the place as Annam, its people as Annamites.

World War II cracked colonial rule open. With Japan's occupation weakening French authority, Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh coalition launched the August Revolution and declared independence in 1945. France, unwilling to let go, returned to fight the First Indochina War — and lost, decisively, by 1954. The peace accords split the country at the 17th parallel: a communist north under Ho Chi Minh, a Western-backed south under Ngo Dinh Diem. An election meant to reunify the country never happened.

What followed was the war that gave Vietnam its grim fame in the American imagination. North Vietnam, backed by the Soviet Union and China, faced South Vietnam, backed by the United States. American troops, technologically superior, found themselves fighting an enemy embedded in terrain and villages, sustained by supply lines from the north. The war dragged through the 1960s and into the 1970s, consuming lives and American political will alike, until North Vietnam's victory in 1975 ended it.