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Each chapter from this point forward addresses one year of the war in Vietnam. Chapter three explores the decisions for American buildup in 1965 which were based on faulty, or at least contradictory, metrics. The murky internal political situation in Saigon baffled outsiders yet there remained in 1965 an overriding belief, based on established metrics, that South Vietnam was nearing irreversible collapse. As the American buildup began in earnest, measuring the organizational effectiveness of the new airmobility (helicopter) concept became just as important as measuring effectiveness against the southern insurgency. Success in the November 1965 Ia Drang battle helped establish a key benchmark for MACV—the body count.

After the conclusion of the Paris Agreements, Nixon became increasingly dependent on Kissinger for setting the overall direction of U.S foreign policy. Despite the dark shadow that Watergate laid over Nixon's presidency, the broad outlines of Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy appeared intact, with the exception of Vietnam. After four years of endless bargains mixed with emotional highs and lows, Kissinger snubbed Saigon when he toured Southeast Asia. This chapter focuses on Kissinger's visit to Hanoi for negotiation deals and why they ended unsuccessfully. In contrast, his visit to Beijing brought flourishing results. He was able to engage in broad discussions with Zhou about the state of the world and this is explored in detail in this chapter.

The events of spring 1975 were a tragedy of immense proportions for countless South Vietnamese. However, the October War in the Middle East and the impact of the oil crisis had shifted the focus of Washington and Kissinger. From their standpoint, Vietnam had become a sideshow. Furthermore, Kissinger stated that Vietnam was no longer a policy issue and there was nothing the administration could do to alter the course of events. This chapter illustrates how Kissinger held Congress responsible for the collapse of Vietnam and Cambodia due to its decision to decrease America's assistance to them. However, the author contends that despite Congress's cutbacks, Kissinger's diplomacy hardly improved Saigon's chances and the secretary of state's own policies heavily contributed to the disaster in Indochina in 1975.

The liaison office chief of the People's Republic of China, Huang Chen, deemed that the collapse of Saigon was a result of a very passive approach of the Americans toward the USSR. Consequently, on the next meeting of the two, Kissinger promised that the United States would “organize … barriers to Soviet expansionism”. The question that remains, however, is how these “barriers” will be applied. In this context, two Portuguese colonies merit special attention: Angola and East Timor. This chapter illustrates how these two countries became prime examples of how Kissinger's overall foreign policy outlook, when applied to complex regional crises, not only contributed to the havoc in those regions, but also to the demise of his entire foreign policy architecture. As a result, he manifestly proved his incapability of organizing the “barrier” he was looking for.

Lyndon Johnson saw communism as an enemy that had to be defeated. He came into office as a strong believer in the necessity of standing firm in Vietnam as a bulwark against communism in Asia and in supporting the Saigon regime fully. This stance also reflected his belief that Kennedy's complicity in the coup that toppled Diem linked the fate of South Vietnam to the American commitment. Yet Johnson was also driven by a notion he shared with his predecessor—that should South Vietnam fall, he would face a domestic political backlash which would fracture the support he required to implement his nascent Great Society programs. This sentiment would play a major role in every choice Johnson made leading up to the Americanization of the war.

T This introductory chapter discusses the main arguments of the book and sets out the advantages of an approach focusing upon youth and age relations to the history of empire. It describes the presence of children in non-settlement colonies and why this constitutes an important focus for research. It elaborates the current state of imperial and colonial history, the history of childhood and youth and other related fields of research and sets out how this study will apply a comparative and transnational/trans-colonial perspective in a multi-sited approach to the subject matter. It sets out the rationale for the selection of the specific interconnected sites in East and South-East Asia that form the focus of this book, explaining the comparability of these key centres of British and French colonial rule in Asia, notably Hong Kong, Hanoi, Singapore and Saigon and the nature of their inter-connectedness.

Chapter 7 shows how evidence of unfree migrant child labourers flared repeatedly from centres under British and French colonial rule, horrifying those convinced of the need to make empire ‘respectable.’ Reformers raised the alarm over official inaction or European complicity in the trafficking of children into statuses not easily distinguishable from slavery. They exposed Hong Kong, Singapore, Saigon and Hanoi as linked nodes in networks through which children were trafficked into unpaid migrant labour outside the family. This chapter examines the linked, trans-colonial movement of unfree children that so powerfully posed the question of European responsibility for the raising of youthful colonial subjects. It also explains why British and French engagements with this problem evolved in strikingly different directions.

This chapter concludes by examining the nature of the contribution made to the field. It recaps over the insights gleaned by applying the lens of age to the history of empire, and to the multi-sited approach. It provides a brief summary of the main arguments of each chapter and it elaborates a new research agenda based upon the findings of this book.

In October 1961, President John F. Kennedy sent his personal military representative, General Maxwell Taylor, and White House adviser on Vietnam Walt W. Rostow to Saigon for a firsthand assessment. They returned with recommendations for a massive new commitment, including 8,000 troops. Kennedy backed away from deploying ground forces but approved additional material and advisory support. In this climate, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles authorized the first major Central Intelligence Agency counterinsurgency program and endorsed a Saigon Station proposal to launch a village defense program in the lightly populated but strategically important Central Highlands. The CIA's counterinsurgency role grew after an interagency task force noted in January 1962 that support to irregular formations fell under the jurisdiction of neither the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) nor the civilian aid mission, called the U.S. Operations Mission (USOM).

In June 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk from an outlying province burned himself to death amidst thousands of stunned spectators at a busy intersection in Saigon. The event made an indelible stamp on America's collective consciousness and rudely awakened the Kennedy administration to the gravity of the Buddhist crisis. Buddhists had long regarded themselves as the moral and intellectual guardians of Confucian values against misguided or corrupt rulers. On several occasions in Vietnam's history, they had sought to restore the will of heaven by inspiring a peasant uprising aimed at overturning a deceitful or mendacious government. This time the implications extended beyond domestic concerns. The well-choreographed atrocity of Quang Duc's violent death signified the wide chasm that had opened between the moral ideal and the immoral reality, greatly increasing the chances of a coup.

Involvement of the U.S. military in South Vietnam became more pronounced in the fall of 1961 as the two governments graduated from an advisory relationship to a limited partnership. The situation in Saigon had become so threatening that the Kennedy administration encountered growing support either to send combat troops or, a few observers whispered, to promote a coup. Infiltration from the north steadily increased, causing more of Washington's policymakers to advocate a direct assault on Hanoi. Diem meanwhile continued to frustrate U.S. advisers by refusing to delegate meaningful authority to Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) officers in the field. There was reason behind what appeared to be an unreasonable stand. The move, he well knew, entailed the concession of power to those in the military who bitterly opposed him. Indeed, he feared his senior military commanders as much if not more than the Vietcong, which helps to explain his sudden interest in a foreign military force that would be under his personal control.

This chapter uses the twin concepts of dismemberment and rememberment to investigate the media discourse surrounding a controversial art exhibit held in 2009 in Orange County, California involving mass protests by hundreds of people demonstrating against a community-based art exhibit for showcasing creative reinterpretations of the South Vietnamese national flag and Vietnamese women’s role, as proper gendered national subjects fueled a public outcry against the exhibit as profane, pro-communist trash. The chapter concludes by discussing the ban on LGBT people from the community’s annual new year TET parade, and how this had to do with more than homophobia, but South Vietnamese nationalism, which allows for no alternative identities within the diasporic family. This chapter ultimately aims to broaden the scope for studying Vietnamese American “homeland politics” by venturing to speak to the puzzling ways the overseas communities and identities formed by refugees from South Vietnam are shaped, circumscribed, and policed in the current day by the politics of anti-communism.

This chapter argues that Ho Chi Minh City (also called Saigon) manifests the contradictory historical processes that shaped the city, once the capital of South Vietnam, into the economic hub it is today. For historical context, it first gives a brief summary of urbanization and class transformation under U.S. military rule in Saigon, especially during the time of Vietnamization, and how this period arguably produced a form of “neocolonialism” as many of its critics claimed which never dissipated after the Americans left. By tracking the migration of overseas Vietnamese or Viet Kieu back to the homeland, we can view the ways global change is localized. Through a cultural geography and ethnographic lens, the chapter involves participant observation and interviews with locals and former exiles. Scholars who write about Ho Chi Minh City today tend to focalize contemporary industrialization and globalization processes as manifestations of state governmental reforms or foreign corporate encroachment. This chapter provides this same focus but make connections between current urbanizing developments to the city’s history of war.

This chapter focuses on Vietnam's confrontation with the West during the period from 1858 to 1930. The French forces, with the assistance of the Spanish fleet, captured the Saigon area in 1859. In 1900, the French had completed the conquest and reorganization of Vietnam. The resistance of the Vietnamese patriots failed. In late 1930, under Communist leadership, several autonomous rural communes were organized in Nghe An province to defy colonial authorities, but the massive French military retaliation was bloody and effective.

This chapter discusses the presence of yin and yang in modern guise in Vietnam during the period from 1955 to 1970. When Ngo Dinh Diem became premier of Vietnam, he insisted conformity to the orthodoxy of his own yang model of society, his decision to do which throughout Vietnam resulted in conflict, particularly in the Saigon metropolis. This conflict led to the emergence of the yin component in South Vietnam, which not only completed the yang component of society, but overshadowed it.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began to develop the first of the programs that eventually became the core of the United States-supported pacification campaign in South Vietnam. These initiatives arose almost exclusively in Saigon, where successive chiefs of station and their officers in the field took the lead in articulating responses to communist inroads on the peasantry. This book's account of the CIA pacification programs therefore adopts a field perspective, not only to describe the programs and their effect but also to illuminate agency assumptions about the nature of the insurgency and about the means best suited to counter it. The chronology of CIA involvement comprises six periods, each of which represents a qualitative change in the way in which the agency and the U.S. government approached rural pacification in South Vietnam.