A war of numbers
By 1967 the American war in Vietnam had become a large, expensive and settled commitment. The decisive escalation had come earlier: the first Marine combat units landed in March 1965, and in July 1965 President Lyndon Johnson approved a rapid increase in ground forces. What changed in 1967 was scale, familiarity and doubt. The war was now a fixture of the evening news, a major item in the federal budget, and a growing source of argument at home.
The year is often remembered for protest, music and the Summer of Love. This article covers the other side of it: how the war was being fought and judged, and why the confidence of official statements in autumn sat uneasily with what Americans were beginning to think.
The build-up
American troop strength in Vietnam rose quickly. Figures are usually given as rounded year-end totals: roughly 184,000 at the end of 1965, roughly 385,000 at the end of 1966, and roughly 485,000 at the end of 1967. The peak, a little over 540,000, came in 1969. The year-by-year rise, and the way Washington argued over each increment, is the subject of the wider story of Vietnam troop levels.
General William Westmoreland, who commanded American forces, repeatedly asked for more men than the president was willing to send. A request that would have taken the total well above 600,000 was scaled back, and in mid-1967 Johnson settled on a ceiling in the neighbourhood of 525,000. Allied forces added to the total, most notably from South Korea, which sent tens of thousands of troops, along with smaller contingents from Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines. The South Vietnamese army remained far larger than any single allied force.
American deaths rose with the numbers deployed. Roughly 11,000 Americans were killed in 1967, compared with about 6,000 in 1966. The figures climbed again in 1968. Behind every statistic were the young men described in accounts of soldiers in Vietnam, many of them draftees serving a one-year tour.
Strategy: attrition and the body count
Westmoreland’s approach is usually summed up as attrition. Because North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces could slip across borders, hide in the countryside and choose when to fight, American commanders did not expect to seize and hold territory in the conventional way. The aim was instead to find and destroy enemy units faster than they could be replaced, until the other side concluded that further fighting was pointless. Large “search and destroy” sweeps, supported by helicopters and heavy artillery, were the typical tool. The big 1967 operations in the south, such as Cedar Falls in the Iron Triangle and the Junction City operation near the Cambodian border, followed this pattern.
Attrition needed a yardstick, and the yardstick became the body count: the number of enemy dead reported after each engagement. Officials spoke of a “crossover point”, at which enemy losses would exceed what Hanoi could replace. Critics, including some within the military, doubted that the counts were reliable and warned that the focus on numbers rewarded the wrong behaviour. Whether the strategy could succeed also depended on a question that was never settled: how many casualties North Vietnam was willing to accept. Its leaders showed little sign of reaching the limit that American planners had assumed.
The air campaign ran alongside the ground war. Rolling Thunder continued against targets in the north, and in 1967 the list was widened to include more sites around Hanoi and Haiphong. Debate over whether it was achieving anything sharpened during the year, both inside the administration and in Congress.
Pacification and politics in the South
Military operations were only one strand. In May 1967 American civilian and military pacification programmes were brought together under a single organisation, with the aim of improving security and local government in the villages. The results were uneven, and Cedar Falls showed how forcible methods could undermine the goal.
South Vietnam’s own politics were also in flux. After a constituent assembly drafted a new constitution, elections were held in September 1967. General Nguyen Van Thieu was elected president with Nguyen Cao Ky as vice president, on a plurality rather than a majority of the vote. Administration officials presented the vote as evidence of political progress. Critics pointed to restrictions on candidates and doubts about how freely the contest had been run.
Public opinion shifts
At the start of 1967, polls generally showed that more Americans supported the war than opposed it, although patience was thinning. During the year, the share saying that sending troops had been a mistake grew. Reportedly, by the autumn Gallup found for the first time that more respondents thought the war was a mistake than thought it was not, though the margin was narrow and the answers were sensitive to wording. Johnson’s approval ratings slid over the same months.
It is worth being careful about what this meant. Opposition took several forms. Some Americans wanted to withdraw, some wanted to escalate to win quickly, and many simply wanted the fighting to end without knowing how. Many who called the war a mistake did not take part in antiwar protests, and many protesters were far more radical than the public at large. Dramatic events such as the March on the Pentagon in October drew attention, and speeches like Martin Luther King’s Beyond Vietnam address in April widened the argument, but the change in opinion was slower and less tidy than the images suggest.
Money, politics and the Great Society
The war’s cost mattered to domestic politics. Johnson wanted to keep funding his Great Society programmes while also paying for the war, and in August 1967 he asked Congress for a tax surcharge to restrain the deficit. The proposal stalled, and the relationship between military spending, inflation and the American economy became a recurring concern as the year went on. Some historians argue that Johnson’s reluctance to make a clear choice between guns and butter weakened both efforts.
Political challenges were beginning too. By late 1967 a small group of Democrats was looking for a candidate to oppose the president, and in November Senator Eugene McCarthy announced that he would run on an antiwar platform.
A confident November and what followed
In the autumn the administration mounted a public effort to reassure Americans that the war was being won. Westmoreland was brought home in November to give that message in person. At the same time, a series of hard border battles, including Dak To in the Central Highlands, showed that the enemy was still able to mount large engagements. Behind the scenes, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had concluded that the current course was not working and announced his departure later that month.
The gap between official optimism and reality was exposed when the Tet Offensive began at the end of January 1968, after the siege of Khe Sanh had already started. Those events belong to 1968, but the doubts that made them so damaging had been building throughout 1967.