U.S. Marines In Vietnam, Volume 1 (of 9): The advisory & combat assistance era 1954-1964

Seven sovereign states currently make up the Indochinese Peninsula. Burma and Thailand occupy what is roughly the western two-thirds of the entire peninsula. To the south, the Moslem state of Malaysia occupies the southern third of the rugged, southward-reaching Malaysian Peninsula. East of Thailand lies Cambodia, which possesses a relatively abbreviated coastline on the Gulf of Siam, and Laos, a landlocked country. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), which borders to the north on China, and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) form the eastern rim of the Indochinese Peninsula.

Vietnamese have often described the area currently administered by the two separate Vietnamese states as resembling “two rice baskets at the ends of their carrying poles.”[1-2] This description is derived from the position of extensive rice producing river deltas at the northern and southern extremities of the long, narrow expanse of coastline and adjacent mountains. Vietnamese civilization originated in the northernmost of these so-called “rice baskets,” the Red River Delta, centuries before the birth of Christ. Pressured at various stages in their history by the vastly more powerful Chinese and by increasingly crowded conditions in the Red River Delta, the Vietnamese gradually pushed southward down the narrow coastal plain in search of new rice lands. Eventually their migration displaced several rival cultures and carried them into every arable corner of the Mekong Delta, the more extensive river delta located at the southern end of the proverbial “carrying pole.” Although unified since the eighteenth century under the Vietnamese, the area between the Chinese border and the Gulf of Siam came to be divided into three more or less different regions: Tonkin, centered on the Red River Delta; Cochinchina, centered on the Mekong Delta; and Annam, the intervening coastal region.