Hi,
It's not a secret that the US government was sympathetic, at first, with the Viet Minh and helped train them and gain power.
In theory it all stopped in 1945.
I knew of an old officer in the French Foreign Legion who fought in Indochina, he was totally not pro-conspiracy theories at all but swore that some of the soldiers he encountered were really white and that for him it made no doubt those were american soldiers.
Is it possible that the US continued helping the Viet Minh and therefore waged a secret war against one of their allies?
Thanks
I have seen one French document from 1945-1946 that speaks of an unknown American with the Viet Minh. But there was no follow up and their intelligence reports contained a lot of second and third hand information.
It is very strange that he assumed that a white skinned person was American. The Viet Minh had hundreds of Japanese army deserters fighting with them early in the war, and then thousands of Chinese advisors assiting them later on. They would have lighter skin than the averge Vietnamese peasant.
Now, if he was correct and it was a westerner he saw, it would most likely be a German or Frenchman. There were many Germans, even former SS, recruited into the French Foreign Legion and deployed to Indochina. Some of them switched sides and fought in the Viet Minh or the religious sect armies in southern Vietnam. There were also French defectors, notably Georges Boudarel, who served in the Viet Minh.
The American OSS teams in Vietnam were rather small, and missing members would have raiesed an alarm quickly. And the OSS leader Archimedes Patti wrote a critical book called Why Vietnam? that makes no mention of lost members. To go beyond that, keep in mind that the French were a defeated nation after WWII and jeasously guarded their position in Indochina. They even refused to endorse Allied operations in Indochina during the war, unless they could place Frenchmen in leadership roles. During the war against the Viet Minh, the US came to support 80% of the costs. The French became very suspicious and conspiritorial when it came to Americans 'undermining' French sovereignty in Indochina. I think this attitude can explain why your friend and his peers at the time may have labeled these light skinned men Americans. And of course that's much easier than admitting that your own men had defected to the enemy.
EDIT: To clarify, it is not possible thay there was an effort for the American government to assist the Viet Minh/ DRV. Washington spent billions supporting the war and even considered using nuclear weapons in 1954 to prevent the collapse of Dien Bien Phu. Not to mention there is no evidence for American support of the Viet Minh after Sept 1945. Almost all of this material for this era is declassified and has been poured over by scholars.