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This chapter examines the politics of U.S. troop withdrawal from Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s in order to identify the strategies employed by Congress to check an imperial executive and to regain its constitutional prerogatives. When the Vietnam War escalated in 1964 and 1965, most policymakers, including Lyndon Johnson, were very sensitive to the role Congress might play in its evolution. During this period, Congress challenged presidential decisions and helped to create the political pressure that led to a drawdown in American troops fighting the war. The chapter first considers how Senator William Fulbright brought the problems with the Vietnam War to the forefront of public debate before discussing the politics of troop withdrawal since the time of Johnson, with particular emphasis on Richard Nixon's Vietnamization and a range of legislative initiatives such as the War Powers Act (1973) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978).

This chapter analyzes how MACV attempted to measure its effectiveness in training the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) for providing national security once American forces departed. After Nixon’s inauguration in 1969, Vietnamization became the stated primary mission of U.S forces in Vietnam. How did MACV attempt to measure the performance of ARVN forces? How did MACV assess which factors indicated the successful training of ARVN? This chapter explores whether American officers understood that their metrics for effectiveness in search-and-destroy or pacification missions might not apply to the training of ARVN forces. North Vietnamese leaders reassessed their own strategy after Tet and reverted to an emphasis on political action and guerrilla warfare. Did MACV see the enemy’s change in strategy as a validation of U.S. efforts to this point in the war?

This final chapter concentrates on the final two years of U.S. Army participation in Vietnam, 1971–1972. It first considers any refinements made to counterinsurgency theory since the early 1960s and asks if these changes affected how MACV measured its effectiveness and progress late in the war. MACV revised HES in 1970 to overcome biases in reporting. Were other reports revised to account for biases or changes in counterinsurgency theory? From the operational standpoint, the army conducted operations in Laos and Cambodia, expanding the war effort to allow Vietnamization to work and the American army to withdraw from Southeast Asia. How did MACV assess these operations? Did MACV believe the final battles of the war to be a validation of Vietnamization? By the end of 1972, did MACV believe, based on its metrics, that it had successfully completed its mission in South Vietnam?

This chapter illustrates the negotiations that occurred between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho to settle an end to the Vietnam War. However, by the spring of 1970 no such agreement was yet in sight. The chapter also shows how the Cambodian invasion by the United States and South Vietnam in May 1970 expanded the war, resulting in more bombing and bloodshed. As a result of this maneuver, the ongoing process of Vietnamization was curtailed due to the negative reactions it faced, not only from Americans, but from the Chinese as well, which led to the closing down of the promising Warsaw channel of Sino-American contacts, and the Soviets diminishing eagerness for an early move towards détente.

Daedalus was imprisoned with Icarus on the island of Crete by King Minos; Daedalus crafted wings to allow him and his son to escape. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or to the sea, as the heat could melt the wax on the wings, and the water could weigh the wings down. However, Icarus got too near to the sun, the wax melted, and he plummeted to his death. Like Icarus, Nixon had to navigate between the military and the political fronts, forced to grapple with domestic opinion in his effort to win the peace. This chapter focuses on Nixon's first year in office, examining how his Vietnamization policy evolved from the perspectives of the Nixon White House and the Republican Party, which for the first time since the Americanization of the conflict had direct influence on US policy decisions in Vietnam.

The introduction presents the book’s main argument, theoretical framework, and primary research questions. It provides a brief summary of the second Indochinese War or the Vietnam War and how the Republic of Vietnam came into being. It then discusses the Nixon strategy to “Vietnamize” the war in 1969, arguing that the term Vietnamization provides a productive term to interrogate the gendered racial logics of U.S. imperialism during the Cold War in Southeast Asia and its relationship with foreign allies. The chapter first begins with how the twenty-first century offers a generational lapse and new historical occasion to reflect upon the Vietnam War. It then offers a theorization of Vietnamization as a heuristic device to elaborate why cultural memory and discourse surrounding the Vietnam War remain conflicted as tied to the collapse of South Vietnam and its inability to protect and save itself. Vietnamization serves as a critical vocabulary for imagining the “arrested future” or delayed moment of freedom/liberation for American allies, shaping postwar ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and emancipation. As a critical refugee studies project, the book is situated and contextualized within larger debates in Asian American cultural studies and criticism over war. Finally, the introduction provides an elaboration of relevant scholarship under way in this field of history and memory. It explains why it is important to conduct research in the United States, Vietnam, and the Vietnamese American community discussing the geopolitical dimensions of refugee culture and consciousness.

This chapter explores the challenges of implementing reforms for the Republic of Vietnam during its “Vietnamization,” or U.S. troop withdrawal. At the time, there were many underlying difficulties to the task of enforcing fiscal discipline, fighting inflation, and economic restructuring. In the face of this economic conundrum, the Republic of Vietnam and the United States saw things through their own perspectives. American advisors moralized that “it was time for Vietnam to stand on its own feet.” Foreign observers saw conspicuous wealth in a country at war: motorbikes, televisions, and every kind of luxury. Economists criticized what they saw as a country that “consumes much, but produces little.” Meanwhile, local politicians kept approving more expensive budgets but shied away from unpopular revenue-collecting measures, instead blaming the situation on incompetent ministers. For too long, Vietnam avoided the political taboos of currency devaluation and taxation whenever confronted with the structural imbalances of its economy.

This chapter provides some reflections on the educational reforms conducted by the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). It first discusses the Vietnamization of the French educational system during the first decade of the republic. This process contributed to a sharp rise in the social demand for education at all levels, which in turn supported the growth of new kinds of schools such as private universities and community colleges. Through the author's personal experience working in the Faculty of Education, the National Wards High School, and a private Catholic school, the chapter reveals snapshots of the development of the diverse and dynamic educational system in the RVN. In the conclusion, the chapter briefly recounts the author's work as an expert on education from the United States to help the post-1975 Vietnamese government reform its educational system.

The occupation of Iraq illustrated the absence of any memory of counterinsurgency within the Army. One of the most revealing periods was the immediate aftermath of the invasion, when the US Army found itself effectively without a plan. The growing insurgency highlighted the inadequacies of pre-invasion planning, shattering assumptions about the Army’s capabilities. This chapter is not only concerned with the absence of memory – of both Vietnam and counterinsurgency – as it also examines attempts to fill that void, both by reaching back for old lessons and by constructing new ones. The re-emergence of counterinsurgency in 2004-2006 is inextricably tied to the rise of an alternative set of lessons from Vietnam than the ones that the Army brought with it to Iraq. This chapter explores how analogy interacted with reality in Iraq and how those interactions led to the construction of new lessons and the dismissal of old ones.

Following the Vietnamese communist Tet Offensive of early 1968, Presidents Johnson and Nixon reluctantly made the decisions that would ultimately lead to US withdrawal from Vietnam. As these decisions were made and implemented, majority southern opinion and key southern legislators remained supportive of the war. This regional position was particularly important to Nixon when Democrats from other sections abandoned the deference they had shown Johnson. The southern public and media and the voting records of Dixie’s congressional representatives demonstrated this dogged prowar perspective. Majority southern opinion was also evident in the South’s response to the My Lai Massacre and support for Lieutenant Calley, in the hostility toward GI coffeehouses, and in Senators Gore’s and Ralph Yarborough’s failure to win reelection. But the war’s ever-mounting agony was affecting the South. Senator John Sherman Cooper emerged as a prominent proponent of legislating an end to the war, and even former hawks such as Herman Talmadge began to waver following Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in 1970.

This chapter examines American Christian responses to Nixon's foreign policy involving the Vietnam War. Establishing a policy that came to be known as “Vietnamization,” Nixon insisted that he would not abandon the U.S. ally in South Vietnam until it could prosecute the war on its own and thereby protect itself. However, in reality, Nixon wanted Vietnamization merely to delay the collapse of South Vietnam so that it would not appear as if the United States had lost a war under his watch. For conservative Christians, Nixon became a trusted ally in the White House in their bid to protect the world from communism. In contrast, liberal Christians joined liberals throughout America in denouncing Nixon and calling his integrity into question. They were a part of the American movement opposed to all things Nixon, starting with his foreign policy and moving eventually into his role in Watergate.

This final chapter uncovers a little known aspect of antiwar activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the GI movement in Asia and the Pacific. President Richard Nixon’s call to “Vietnamize” the war in 1969 had the unintended consequence of deepening antiwar activism on and around U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines, where the U.S. air war was being conducted. The Pacific Counseling Service, a New Left organization founded in the Bay Area in 1968, played a critical role. At these locales, GIs and their organizers came to see the Vietnam War as a phase of a larger problem rooted in the overlapping histories of empire; they forged fragile political alliances with local baseworkers and anti-imperialist activists that deepened their antiwar politics and steered them toward the work of achieving an unfinished decolonization.