Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 by James S. Olson, Randy W. Roberts

Dienbienphu, the eight years of war had resulted in the deaths of nearly 300,000 Vietminh and up to a million Vietnamese civilians. France counted 95,000 dead. But the war was not a body count, a simple military equation in which the party that piled up more kills emerged as victor. As Ho Chi Minh had believed all along, the first Indochina War was a political conflict in which the Vietminh outlasted the French. It was a lesson the United States would have to relearn
     

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    The Making of a Quagmire, 1954–1960
     
There are profound differences between the Vietnamese and American people, in customs, outlook, political training, and philosophy. I hope we can find a bridge between Eastern and Western cultures.
     
    —Ngo Dinh Diem, 1961
     
    Intoxicated with his victory, convinced that he would win the elections in 1956 and take over South Vietnam, and now ready to live more fully his commitment to communism, in 1954 Ho Chi Minh set out on a savage campaign. With the French gone, he was determined to right the other great wrong in Vietnam: upper-class Vietnamese landlords who exploited peasants. Actually, few North Vietnamese peasants owned more than three or four acres, but Ho created Agricultural Reform Tribunals in every village to identify landlords. Accusations, lies, informants abounded as neighbor turned against neighbor. The tribunals had quotas of landlords to identify and kill, and their justice, if it could be called that, was as swift as it was capricious.
     
    Ho behaved as if he had something to prove. Stalin was dead, but his legacy of viciousness and mass death lingered. Several million
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peasants in the Ukraine had succumbed during his campaign of terror and land redistribution, and Mao’s ruthlessness knew no bounds. Mao had repeatedly since 1949 employed mass terror as a blunt instrument of political control. The victory over the French at Dienbienphu had demonstrated the triumph of Ho’s nationalism, while the Agricultural Reform Tribunals revived communist credentials.
     
    With a year, thousands of landlords were dead and tens of thousands more were in labor camps for “reeducation.” The whole process was a political disaster. By the summer of 1956, Ho decided the campaign had gone too far. On August 17, he wrote a public letter confessing that “all this has caused us to commit errors and meet with shortcomings carrying out land reform.” Of the people who had been executed, Ho Chi Minh simply said, “One cannot wake the dead.” In Nghe An Province, however, his apology did not satisfy his constituency. Early in November, farmers in Quynh Luu district, angry about the land reform program as well as the government’s official anti-Catholicism, rioted and government troops were dispatched to restore order. The whole program, in Vo Nguyen Giap’s description, was “an extraordinary error.... We did not emphasize the necessity for caution and for avoiding unjust punishment of honest people... [and] resorted to terror on a wide scale.” With the end of the Agricultural Reform Tribunals, political life in North Vietnam settled down.
     
    Not so in South Vietnam. In the Mekong Delta, formerly Cochin China, debt burdens and farm tenancy rates had risen in the last years of the war. The country depended on rice and rubber exports, as well as French money, to keep the economy going, and that source of funds was about to dry up. There was a wealth of peasant resentment of the French and the pro-French Vietnamese. Rural South Vietnam was ripe for rebellion. The region was also a bewildering caldron of competing ethnic, religious, economic, and political groups. Most of them were at least reasonably happy that the French were gone, but there was nothing approaching a consensus about who would fill the vacuum and rule the country. In Hanoi, there was only one power center in 1954. In South Vietnam there were many.
     
    The least of the South Vietnamese power centers, the remains of the