Apocalypse Now: Supplement 1

Dark Arts in Vietnam

“‘You know, you never beat us on the battlefield,’ I told my North Vietnamese Army counterpart, Colonel Tu, during a meeting in Hanoi a week before the fall of Saigon.

‘That may be so,’ he replied, ‘but it is also irrelevant.’”

—An American Colonel

Dark Arts in Vietnam

The Crown of Empire

Just as Robert E. Lee was assuming command of the Army of Northern Virginia, a treaty was being negotiated on the other side of the world between two fading monarchies, the conclusion of which would set in motion a chain of events that would one day bring the great-great-grandsons of Union and Confederate veterans to the steaming jungles of Vietnam, where they would fight and die by the tens of thousands.

On June 5, 1862, Vietnam’s last precolonial emperor met with emissaries of Napoleon III, the last emperor of France, and signed the Treaty of Saigon, ceding Saigon, the island of Poulo Condor, and three provinces of “Cochinchina” on the country’s southernmost edge to the French. That following year, as Grant’s Army of the Tennessee closed in on Vicksburg, the French secured three more Vietnamese ports in the Treaty of Huế, and subsequently declared Saigon the capital of French Cochinchina—a plantation colony that would endure until 1946.

Surely few Americans north or south were aware of such developments. The future of their nation was being decided in bloody fields and forests from Virginia to Mississippi; the thought of an American empire stretching all the way to Southeast Asia and beyond could only be entertained by the most prescient and insane. But the seeds of empire were sown in the earliest days of the republic, and so decades after Appomattox, the glorious Union was ready to flex its muscle again and intervene against any uncivilized nation guilty of “loosening the ties of civilized society.” Though the country would pass through moods of isolation for the next half-century, global war would crown America an empire anyway.