Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1967. Firsthand look in Vietnam finds war dictated by political considerations

The Journal's managing editor, Charles H. Spilman, reported in Vietnam and around Southeast Asia for four weeks in the spring of 1967, still early in the Vietnam War.

He summed up the experience in a news analysis published April 9, 1967.

"In wars that Americans have fought in the past, military considerations have been paramount. We have hit the enemy with everything we had, whenever we encountered him. But the war in Vietnam is different: It is really two wars in one, a military war and a political and diplomatic war.

"It is difficult for a man in the presence of an armed enemy to accept any restraints on his actions -- when you are being shot at you want to shoot back. Yet the Americans in Vietnam have been put under restraints that have been dictated by political considerations, for the war in Vietnam has standing on the sidelines powerful forces whose existence cannot be overlooked."

At the time of Spilman's visit to Vietnam, the suggestion that America would simply pull out of the country seemed ridiculous to the people Spilman interviewed there.

"Generally, such a pull-out was looked upon as inconceivable," Spilman wrote. "The United States just could not void its commitments in that way. But if it should discontinue its efforts in Vietnam, everyone agreed, it would lose face all over the East. An influential member of the Philippines Congress put it even more strongly. He said: 'The day the United States pulls out of Vietnam, that day it forfeits all claim to being a great power and to being a leader of the Western world.' "

Spilman wrote that everyone he spoke to in Saigon -- from officers directing the war to the enlisted men "counting the days until their year's duty there is ended" -- were talking about peace and the end of the war.

"But nobody seems to know just how it is going to be achieved," he wrote, "or when."