For more than three decades America’s war in Vietnam has been characterized as a tragedy. It was an event that tore apart the country, felled a presidency, and changed America’s view of herself and the opinion of others about America. Almost no one born after the late 1940s remembers when the Vietnam War was regarded as a noble little war with scant promise of bursting the bounds of control and bearing tragic consequences.
It has almost been lost from memory that, in the late summer of 1965, the Vietnam War was not unpopular either with the American public or with the men who fought it. The men were nearly all young Baby Boomers, the sons of those who remembered the Great Depression. The Cold War and containment of communism framed the circumstances in which they were raised and which formed their beliefs. Most young males of this period expected to be drafted, or to volunteer, and to serve in their country’s uniform. Their fathers had won World War II and their grandfathers had fought the War to End All Wars. It was their turn to face down evil wherever and in whatever form it appeared, and they did not shrink from the task. Having eradicated fascism in Europe and Asia, America was needed by the world to deal with the Red Menace. And an America that was just emerging from its chrysalis of innocence believed it was equal to the task. We had confidence in our government and our armed forces. We had yet to learn that democracy is not an ideology easily exported to a country where our indigenous high priests were avaricious and corrupt while the other side’s, regardless of their political beliefs, were ascetic and nationalistic.
Moreover, at least to those who paid attention to such things, Vietnam had entertained us since the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. It was, after all, a small, quaint, tropical country with elephants and tigers, diminutive citizens in colorful dress, and—since the rather puzzling and fatal departure of our ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem, in November 1963—a land of rotating governments. We marveled at the fiery suicides of Buddhist monks, who all seemed to be named Thich something or other; and we wondered at the evil of the crafty Viet Cong, those barefoot, slightly built peasants who could surely be beaten with just a bit of American firepower and technology. True, the French lost to them, but who, these days, were the French? They had not seemed to amount to anything since the distant high tide of the Napoleonic Wars, and France certainly wasn’t the United States.
By the spring of 1965 it was clear that American firepower and technology required Americans to apply it, so the first regular U.S. ground troops landed. By August of that year their numbers had grown from a couple of battalions to 88,000 men. Casualties were relatively few, but their rate and frequency were escalating. Since the beginning of our involvement in Vietnam in 1959, some 906 Americans had died there. For the families and friends of those nine hundred six, each death was a tragedy. For the rest of us, casualties were not yet important. No one in his darkest dream foresaw the day when more than fifty eight thousand names would adorn a black wall in our nation’s capital. Mostly men, these were the names of America’s sons, husbands, and fathers. Eight million of our young men and women would serve in our nation’s uniform over the next decade, and five million of these would serve in Vietnam itself, in the skies over Vietnam, or in vessels offshore. It was to pass that all of us would be affected, one way or another, by events in this tiny, far-away country.
In August 1965 this was all in the future. America was far different then. Vietnam competed with other events for space on the front pages. The cities were in their late-summer doldrums, vacations were coming to an end, and schools were preparing to open. Headlines most often dealt with domestic matters. In mid-month the Watts section of Los Angeles erupted in flames as rioting “negroes” protested their lack of civil rights. Astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad prepared for and went into orbit in the Gemini 5 spacecraft, paving the way for Neil Armstrong to set foot on the moon four years later. The Sandpiper, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, was showing at theaters across the country; the Beatles were singing for Help; Petula Clark was wailing about Downtown; and Sam the Sham was doing the Wooly Bully. In baseball, the Twins and Dodgers were leading their leagues and would meet in the World Series two months later. An average daily record of 6.2 million shares was traded on the New York Stock Exchange, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average had just broken 900.
Yes, Vietnam was there, all right, but it was in the shadows. For America it was a noble little war in which the depraved enemy would soon give up in the face of just, perhaps, a bit more American might, and justice would prevail in yet another place in the world. None of our crystal-ball gazers knew that Vietnam and America were at a turning point. It was in this month, in this year, that Vietnam began its advance to the foreground of our national consciousness, where it was to take up residence and remain for a decade. Operation Starlite was the first event in that journey.