Posted on 08/17/2007 9:43:43 AM PDT by hardback
Our failures in Vietnam were political failures not military ones. In fact, if we could have gotten the politicians out of the way, we could have had the war won in any six month period you care to name between November 1965 and December of 1072.
Our failures in Vietnam were political failures not military ones. In fact, if we could have gotten the politicians out of the way, we could have had the war won in any six month period you care to name between November 1965 and December of 1972.
No doubting Cheney’s qualifications, which are greater than those of any of the folks who want to be President.
One thing about Westmoreland’s tactics: they didn’t get the job done. However, the greater fault was that of the administration. Ole Lyndon couldn’t level, and he couldn’t take it. Don’t think that FDR thought of bugging out during the Battle of the Bulge. But of course comparing Westmoreland’s tenure with that of Abrams is pernicious, they didn’t have the same mission.
Regardless of the Catholic migration, remember the vast majority of the population, both North and South, was Buddhist and grateful to Ho Chi Minh for his defeating the French (being idiot farmers who didn’t know the first thing about the differences btwn communism and freedom didn’t help matters). Again, to borrow a phrase from Al Santoli; we were building castles on quicksand from the start. Sorry, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.
And if we had won the Viet Nam war, and by that I mean politically (we did win militarily), there would be no war on terror. Our lack of political resolve in SE Asia led directly to the current WOT.
After Operation Pegasus in April and May of 1968, I was in the First Marine Regiment in Khe Sanh; the 26th Marines whom we replaced were still in the vicinity. In effect, the Third Marine Division(reinforced) was a five regiment division instead of the usual three. The First Air Cavalry was still in the region. The 82d Airborne as nearby. We were issued maps of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and we thought we were going to Hanoi to take the aftermath of the Tet Offensive to its logical conclusion. One could only conclude that it was right then when LBJ lost the will to win, and let the best opportunity for decisive victory of that war slip away. In my opinion the forces we had mustered in the Khe Sanh vicinity at that time were so seasoned and mobile that they would have sliced North Vietnam in two in a week and finished the whole business in maybe three months.
After Operation Pegasus in April and May of 1968, I was in the First Marine Regiment in Khe Sanh; the 26th Marines whom we replaced were still in the vicinity. In effect, the Third Marine Division(reinforced) was a five regiment division instead of the usual three. The First Air Cavalry was still in the region. The 82d Airborne as nearby. We were issued maps of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and we thought we were going to Hanoi to take the aftermath of the Tet Offensive to its logical conclusion. One could only conclude that it was right then when LBJ lost the will to win, and let the best opportunity for decisive victory of that war slip away. In my opinion the forces we had mustered in the Khe Sanh vicinity at that time were so seasoned and mobile that they would have sliced North Vietnam in two in a week and finished the whole business in maybe three months.
As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I am keenly interested in the distortions, lies, and half truths perpetuated about the Vietnam war by many of those who helped to undermine the US effort there. Much of the conventional understanding of the US involvement in the South East Asian conflict indicates a general disapproval of the United States war effort, and an acceptance of the oft regurgitated leftist conventional wisdom as to it’s historical course and outcome. That is painting the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left is portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. The South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a ruthless Communist assault while engaging in an unwarranted assault on human rights .while ignoring the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) is also part of this narrative. The deceptive reporting of the Tet Offensive, the Communist’s worse defeat among numberless hundreds of others was probably the most grievous deceit perpetuated by the Press .
The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel’s book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the “ruling class.” All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that “while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death.” The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
The National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. The North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. The antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland’s request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. They were as thoroughly beaten as a military force can be given the absence of an invasion and occupation of their nation. The Soviets and Chinese recognized this, and they put pressure on their North Vietnamese allies to accept this reality and settle up at the Paris peace talks. Hanoi’s party newspaper Nhan Dan angrily denounced the Chinese and Soviets for “throwing a life bouy to a drowning pirate” and for being “mired on the dark and muddy road of unprincipled compromise.” The North Viets intransigent attitude toward negotiation was reversed after their air defenses were badly shattered in the wake of the devastating B-52 Linebacker II assault on North Vietnam, after which they were totally defenseless against American air attack.
To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.
South Vietnam was NOT defeated by a local popular insurgency. The final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. It was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I didn’t recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place. At the Paris Accords in 1973, the Soviet Union had agreed to reduce aid in offensive arms to North Vietnam in exchange for trade concessions from the US, effectively ending North Vietnams hopes for a military victory in the south. With the return of cold war hostilities in the wake of the Yom Kippur war after Congress revoked the Soviet’s MFN trading status, the Reds poured money and offensive military equipment into North Vietnam. South Vietnam would still be a viable nation today were it not for this nation’s refusal to live up to it’s treaty obligations to the South Vietnamese, most important to reintervene should they invade South Vietnam.
There is one primary similarity to Vietnam. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. In that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that “We Gotta Get Outta this Place,” to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is a surprising interview.
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NEVER FORGET
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After Sen TED KENNEDY pushed a post-WATERGATE Democrat Congress into cutting off all our funding for the then Free South Vietnamese to fight for their own Freedom with,
...just as the Communist Soviet Union had given $6 Billion in 600 Soviet tanks and 1,000’s of mobile artillery pieces to Communist Vietnam for its planned ‘Final Solution’ in the Free South, came:
Pictures of a vietnamese Re-Education (SLAVE LABOR) Camp
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1308949/posts
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1806248/posts
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What price for the still Free (that’s US) to pay now, in a new time of war in a new century with our own Freedom directly at stake right here at home..?
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NEVER FORGET
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“We lost the war here at home”.
Amen! You’re right. (Also, the ridiculous Rules of Engagement played a big part as well).
An exaggeration on my part, but there were many places where people were in as little danger. Saigon was probably more like, I read, Algiers was after the first two or three years after the French Army crushed the first efforts of the FLN. Of course, troops in uniform(or in civies) are always targets while on the economy. That’s why there were incidents in Berlin and on Ramstein back in Germany. The bad guys are always trying to make a splash.
God bless you for your service.
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