France tried to assimilate its colonies to the home culture, but didn't do a particularly good job of it. The top layer of Indochinese society studied in French schools, many Indochinese worshipped in French Catholic churches, and the opportunists of course did business with the French. As a result, as a French admiral put it, with only a bit of exaggeration: "On our side, we have only Christians and crooks." Much later, the Americans would find themselves in the same position.

After the Germans occupied France in 1940, the Japanese moved into French Indochina as a base for their war against China. And in December 1941, the Japanese used Indochina to launch its attack on the British colonies of Singapore and Malaya (now called Malaysia).

President Franklin Roosevelt didn't like the idea of colonial governments in Asia, and he especially disliked the French colonial government of Indochina, which collaborated with the Japanese through most of the war. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency) cooperated instead with the Vietnamese communists under Ho Chi Minh. With their help, Ho declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in August 1945, within days of the Japanese surrender. It was the second communist state in Asia, and the first communist state anywhere not to have a common border with the Soviet Union. (Ho's birth name was Nguyen Sinh Cung. The Vietnamese put the family name first, but almost always call an individual by his given name--the last in the series. Ho is the exception because his chosen name is a political statement--roughly, "Bringer of Light." He was "Uncle Ho" to his followers and, later, to the anti-war movement in the United States.)

What was so bad about communists in Vietnam?

Elsewhere, the country was ruled by the Viet Minh, as Ho's forces were called. (The full name was the Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh, meaning Vietnam Independence League.) The two sides began a long, seesaw battle for control of the countryside. The tide turned against the French in 1949, when the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Finally Ho Chi Minh shared a border with another communist state.

Then, in June 1950, communist North Korea invaded pro-western South Korea. The United States sent troops advisers in a successful effort to evict the North Koreans from the south, followed by a disastrously unsuccessful attempt to chase them to the Yalu River--the Chinese border. This brought China into the Korean War, which changed everything in Vietnam as well. The United States began to pay most of the costs of the French effort to crush the Viet Minh. It also sent military aid, including U.S. Air Force transports flown by American civilians to support the French Expeditionary Force.

When the Korean War ended, huge quantities of captured American military equipment were funneled to the Viet Minh by the Chinese. Some of it was used to defeat the French garrison in 1954 at Dienbienphu, on the Vietnam-Laotian border. After Dienbienphu, France wanted nothing more to do with its long-running disaster in Vietnam. At a peace conference in Geneva, Switzerland, it gave up its "Indochinese" colonies. Cambodia and Laos became independent countries. Vietnam was divided into a communist north under Ho Chi Minh and a pro-western south under the emperor Bao Dai. The promise, never kept, was that the two halves of Vietnam would decide on a common government in 1956. South Vietnam, backed by the United States, reneged on the election because it would inevitably have led to a communist state: Ho could have turned out virtually 100 percent of northern voters, while the vote in the south would have been divided. Instead, a western-style government was established in Saigon under President Ngo Dinh Diem.

So Vietnam followed the pattern earlier established in Germany and Korea, divided into one half supported by the communist bloc and another supported by the west and especially the United States. About a million northerners "voted with their feet" and relocated to South Vietnam. Many were Catholics who rightly feared for their future under communism, and who in the south became a hard core of support for Diem, himself a Catholic.

John Kennedy became president in 1961, promising to "pay any price, bear any burden" to defend the free world against communism. He built the American military presence in South Vietnam to 16,000 men (and a few women, mostly nurses). They served as advisers to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, typically a captain and a sergeant with each ARVN battalion of about 500 men. They operated helicopter units in direct support of Vietnamese military operations, and secretly flew armed trainers and World War II bombers on combat operations. And the Green Berets set up "Strike Force" encampments along the Cambodian border to stop the infiltration of soldiers and equipment from North Vietnam.

The anti-communist war was not going well in 1963, and Kennedy approved a coup in which Diem was murdered by the South Vietnamese generals. Shortly thereafter, Kennedy himself was murdered. These two killings, of all the millions of deaths associated with the Vietnam War, were hugely important in setting the United States and South Vietnam on a course that ended in disaster.

Who were we fighting, exactly?

When the country was divided in 1955, about 100,000 Viet Minh guerrillas who had been fighting in the south were repatriated to the north. Others greased and buried their weapons and returned to civilian life. Very early, however, they began to operate against the South Vietnamese government much as they had previously operated against the French, murdering landlords and village officials, levying taxes on the peasants, and recruiting new soldiers. They were aided by the former southern guerrillas who had gone north, been rested and retrained, and then sent down the jungle route that would become famous as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (Basically, the route began in North Vietnam, moved west into Laos and south through Laos and Cambodia, before moving east again into South Vietnam, neatly bypassing the ARVN divisions stationed at the 17th Parallel to deter the expected invasion.)

The rebellion became official in October 1957, when the communists in the south--in obedience to instructions from North Vietnam--organized themselves into 37 armed companies. The South Vietnamese government looked upon them as bandits, and regarded their suppression as a job for the police.

Obviously the new force couldn't be called Viet Minh, because the vast majority of Vietnamese regarded the Viet Minh as the army that had liberated their country from the French (and Ho Chi Minh as the George Washington figure of the Vietnamese revolution). So a new name was coined: Viet Cong, meaning Vietnamese communist. By whatever name, the military force was well established by the time the National Liberation Front was formed in December 1960. And the NLF was never more than that--a front for the actual managers of the insurrection, who were Ho Chi Minh and his chief of staff, General Vo Nguyen Giap. Make no mistake: the rebellion in the south was conceived, supported, and directed from North Vietnam. The southerners and the northerners didn't always agree on tactics, but they had the same aim: to overthrow the Saigon government and unite the northern and southern halves of the country.

That summer, South Vietnamese commandos in fast gunboats raided the northern coast under the protection of U.S. warships stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin. They included the destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy, which on August 3 baited the North Vietnamese by making runs toward the shore. That night the two destroyers may or may not have been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats, which in any event inflicted no damage. The American response had already been scripted: U.S. Navy jets rose from the carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation and bombed the North Vietnamese patrol-boat bases.

The war-powers resolution was immediately presented to the U.S. Senate, which passed it with only two dissenting votes. Pausing only to win a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in November (the landslide was in part attributable to fears that Goldwater would get us into war!), President Johnson continued to follow the script that was on his desk. He authorized routine bombing of North Vietnam, sent U.S. Marines to guard an airfield at Danang, and--the fatal step--committed the U.S. Army to fight the Viet Cong on the ground. For their part, North Vietnamese troops entered combat alongside the Viet Cong. One year after I left Saigon, the "airmobile" U.S. 1st Cavalry Division was battling three North Vietnamese divisions in the Ia Drang Valley, and what I had known as a counter-insurgency had become something very like a conventional war, though one without a front or "main line of resistance."

Historians are still debating whether the attack on the U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin was real, imagined, or invented after the fact. Most likely it was a combination of the first two, but it scarcely matters. In the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, President Johnson had succeeded in tricking the Congress into giving him a blank check to prosecute the war as he saw fit. And with his electoral landslide in November, he could claim another blank check, this one from the American people who had given him a landslide victory.

If the U.S. had been content to continue its advisory role, the South Vietnamese government would probably have collapsed within a year or two. (Though this wasn't obvious to those of us who were in Vietnam at the time.) But that collapse would have been a defeat only for the South Vietnamese army and government. Once American combat units were deployed, that was no longer true. With the events of 1964, the United States had committed itself to fight what was then the longest war in its history, and what is still the third most deadly, with the toll of American dead exceeded only by the Civil War and World War II.

Who were the American soldiers in Vietnam?

Note that the overwhelming majority of Americans who served in Vietnam were not combat soldiers. (The "tooth to tail" or "ass to grass" ratio is often estimated as 1 to 10.) The only sound measurement of who was in harm's way is to take the deaths--and even here the measurement isn't exact, since young, black, and working-class soldiers are probably more likely to die in non-combat accidents than those who are older, white, and from middle-class backgrounds. With those caveats, here are the figures:

Wasn't it tough, fighting in the jungle?

"For those who have never been in a tropical jungle they look impenetrable from the outside. Jungle is nothing more than forest. I live in Florida and we call small and large forests, hammocks or bayheads. A cypress bayhead looks impenetrable from the outside and in a way that's true. They are very difficult to get inside because they are surrounded by brush and small trees and vines, but once inside it is relatively easy to walk around. The same is true with mangroves. I've read in books where mangrove forests are impenetrable, yet I have walked through untold miles of mangrove forests.

"In Vietnam there were many types of forests. The ones called triple canopy were the best to walk through. I loved walking through triple canopy forests because the lack of sunlight prevented undergrowth to a large extent. Some types of vegetation such as ferns like to grow without direct sunlight but normally the triple canopy forest was a pleasure to walk through and relatively free of brush. It was also cooler there.

"Even some Vietnam vets have the mistaken belief that one had to hack their way though a triple canopy jungle with machetes. This simply is not true. There were areas where vines and other vegetation were too thick to walk through but these were areas void of the large trees which blocked sunlight.

Of that number, 687 were released at one time or another, most of them in Operation Homecoming in the spring of 1973. Another 36 escaped, and 71 died in captivity, the majority in South Vietnam.

However, many thousands of Americans are listed as "missing in action" in Vietnam (the same is true of earlier conflicts). Most were killed under circumstances that made it impossible to recover their bodies or otherwise confirm their identity. Probably some were prisoners who died in captivity. Perhaps a few were held against their will after Operation Homecoming and the 1975 fall of the South Vietnamese government. It is even possible, though extremely unlikely, that a few American servicemen are still alive in Southeast Asia or even in Russia.