Posted on 09/09/2014 8:06:24 AM PDT by grayhog
Rory Kennedy, film-maker and daughter of the late Robert Kennedy, produced a film which debuted in theaters this week about the fall of Vietnam.
I haven’t seen it yet and am debating whether I will. I'm half Vietnamese and have mixed feelings and for many years refused to watch coverage of the war and the pervasive inaccuracy in the media. It's too close to home. In 1995, 20 years after the withdrawal and debacle, reporters interviewed my father who was Vietnam's last cultural attaché. Perhaps they were trying to get the record straight.
My father left Vietnam with Ambassador Martin at the end, chronicled in that famous photo of the last American helicopter leaving Saigon. And that story merits its own letter. My mother, brother, and I were sent home to the United States from Saigon earlier that year because we knew what was coming. I find it interesting that so many don't know about the helicopters pushed into the sea. My father shared that with me as a young child and everyone who was there knew. Some even jumped into the water and swam to the ships because the choppers couldn't land. Ralph Blumenthal writes about this in an article on the documentary.(Blumethal review link)
"Desperate to rescue Vietnamese allies and their families, some Americans quietly began an unauthorized airlift."
“Sometimes, there’s an issue, not of legal and illegal, but right and wrong,” Stuart Herrington, an Army captain at the time, says in the film."
"Even Mr. Kissinger seemed affected, Ms. Kennedy said. She asked him about a State Department employee who had defied orders and sneaked back into Vietnam to save Vietnamese comrades. Mr. Kissinger told her that he had been forced to rebuke the man publicly but privately greeted him in his office as “my greatest hero.”"
"As he related this, Ms. Kennedy said, Mr. Kissinger teared up. The episode, and Mr. Kissinger’s reaction, did not make it into the final cut."
Ms. Kennedy did not plan to include the footage of Kissinger crying about the man who went back to help the Vietnamese. My "greatest hero" Kissinger called him. Reading this brings tears to my own eyes and my father always felt a debt to the Marines who took him to safety. I wonder why she cut this scene? Is there a sense of remorse and tone of regret in this film? Because if you read the media reports at the time and for many years after, there was no such thing.
Here's an excerpt from a review by A.O. Scott.
"The story is full of emotion and danger, heroism and treachery, but it is told in a mood of rueful retrospect rather than simmering partisan rage. (complete NYTimes review here)"
A tacit admission of their own previous partisan reporting? The media and the people refused to listen, obscured facts, misrepresented policy and military objectives.
Dr. Kissinger says that he believed Vietnam could be like South Korea today. Quite possibly. We lost the war at home, the American people lost their resolve because of the "media's willing self deception" (Jim Webb). My father dedicated his professional life to this sliver of land in this far eastern part of the world and we betrayed the confidence of the very people we committed ourselves to. This is the truth, having experienced and suffered from it first hand.
Vietnam was the first televised war in a most liberal age with students across America doing drugs, relishing free sex, and denouncing the war, a war started and escalated by Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon came into office to fix the mess, set up a withdrawal plan, and was excoriated. He paid a price for what is laughable by current administration's standards.
This may be the Kennedys' idea of an apology, so be it, but perhaps it is an obligation to her uncle's conscience as well as her own almost 40 years later. Our departure from this fledgling, struggling country in its hour of need is a disgrace on many levels.
We did not lose on the battlefield during the war. We lost at home.
"You know you never beat us on the battlefield," I told my North Vietnamese Army (NVA) 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." (Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. full article link)
Colonel Tu knew military victory was not possible, but he also knew America's Achilles heel was a generational shift in attitudes that shockingly was more sympathetic to the invading communists of the north than our democratic allies in the south. The NVA followed the Leninist playbook to win the propaganda war, and the cultural elites in our media, academia and entertainment were as Lenin would say, useful idiots. As Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking Soviet intelligence official ever to defect, said:
"During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness." (Link to article)
Our actions had devastating consequences. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were murdered outright or died cruel deaths in the concentration camps as the army of North Vietnam swept through the south. As many as a million more fled by any means possible, the ‘boatpeople’ risking their lives in rickety boats on the high seas, knowing what lay in store for them if they remained. Many thousands didn’t survive the journey. Our abandonment of Vietnam destabilized the region, as Laos and Cambodia quickly fell to brutal regimes carrying the same communist flag as North Vietnam, resulting in the murder of millions more. Comparisons to modern Iraq are appropriate as we watch the barbaric ISIS rampaging through Syria and Iraq, filling the void left by our departure.
Here is one of the singularly accurate and best reviews of the media's role on the war. The Honorable James Webb has served as senator, Secretary of the Navy, distinguished combat marine, professor, Emmy award winning journalist and author. (Jim Webb Bio link).
If you want to understand the major factor why we "lost" the Vietnam War, read his column which I pasted below in full. Webb begins with media tycoon Ted Turner's public apology for just one of a multitude of lies perpetrated by the media. (Link to article)
I have an employee on my team from Vietnam. She was 7 when Saigon fell and her dad was a South Vietnamese army officer. She doesn’t talk about it much but when she does it chills your heart. Luckily they escaped with the clothes on their back a year later.
Aside from that she is the happiest and hardest working gal I know. I guess she knows how crappy life can be and enjoys the one she has.
Respectfully, as a point of accuracy, Ion Mihai Pacepa was Romanian, not Soviet, as the article indicates. Thank you.
“During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America’s presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren’t facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.” (Link to article)
John Jerry (did you know he was in VietNam?) is not going to like reading this quote.
This was one of the most monstrous betrayals of our country’s honor ever committed. It was the turning point between our innocence and the sliminess we see today. We committed to rescue our allies in Vietnam and at first, at least, our leadership and our media supported this mission enthusiastically. I was one of the tens of thousands of young men back then that saw our country finally engaging the aggression of the Soviets and their allies with our own lives. We were willing to risk all we had - as several American generations before us had - and we were sent off to cheers.
It became a harder war than we had anticipated but we did the hard duty and we took our losses. Meanwhile, back at home, traitors led an “anti war” movement that was really a pro-enemy movement led by Leftists and assisted by the enemy. The leadership of that movement had a lot of assistance by the media and before too long, all the media put out was propaganda against our fight and against us. The American people eventually went right along with this, swelling numbers at demonstrations and joining in on the abuse of us, the veterans. Most people went along because they didn’t want to risk themselves or family members and they didn’t bother learning what was true - they just listened to the TV and read the newspapers and went right along with the people who wanted the North Vietnamese to win.
In the end, we betrayed our men, our allies and our own ideals. The pictures of that scramble to desert the Vietnamese in 1975 should shame us as long as we live.
“It became a harder war than we had anticipated but we did the hard duty and we took our losses”
Only because of politics, not because we couldn’t do the job.
Good article.
Back in the 1980s I read a book called A Bright Shining Lie about John Paul Vann’s two tours and his frustration in early 1960s as an adviser that the South Vietnamese army refused to take any aggressive action against the enemy to avoid political repercussions of casualties.
For example even with the weapon superiority of tanks and helicopters the SVN refused to follow retreating vietcong into the jungle to kill them for fear of casualties.
He recalls a story of the SVN troops hiding in armored vehicle pinned down by sniper fire.
That this led to the US doing their fighting for them.
I think the answer is more complex than that - we were tough, brave, and honorable but our weapons, tactics, techniques, and Intel were behind the power curve a lot of the time. I could go down a list of things that didn’t work - even worse, worked against us - but none of that takes away the real effectiveness and courage of our troops.
I have had a long time to look at what went right and what didn’t - and from my perspective, we never really settled on tactics that could really protect the Vietnamese while destroying the VC and the NVA - other than CAP units.
I remember feeling critical and contemptuous of the ARVN while I was there but my attitude changed when I realized that we were deployed there for 13 months while the ARVN had to fight continually until they were killed or crippled. They knew that they were in for a long fight, so they were usually a lot less aggressive than we were.
Hi Sickoflibs - I read that book as well. By the 1970’s, the RVA Army was fighting better along of us. Lots of training and development, plus prologed exposure to our troops helped ramp them up. Similar thing is happening in Afghanistan now with its Army. I just hope we don’t pull the rug out on them. Like Vietnam, air cover alone makes a massive difference. Today’s fight against the jihadist is similar to our fight 50 years ago against the communists.
I recall the book pointing out that letting the Viet Cong retreat rather than following and killing them led to them becoming battle trained, and that the ARVN had the clear equipment advantages thanks to the US. The morale was that those from the North will more willing to fight and risk their lives.
In the end of course it was pretty ugly, 1970s with us leaving.
In spite of the VN war lessons on how long the US public will support a expensive war with high casualties (when we are not directly attacked) there seems to have been an expectation that the US voter ~ 30-40 years later would have unlimited patience with Iraq, shown not to be true again.
It could almost make you believe that John Kerry is some kind of commie plant.
. /S
I read that book as a young man looking for answers. And boy, did it answer a lot.
It introduced me to the concept that some folks would rather lose their country if it produced any benefit to them in the slightest.
Of course I am referencing the corrupt leaders in South Vietnam, who in theory were on our side but would rather see their own countrymen slaughtered before they would allow themselves to be drawn into a battle that might make them look bad. I learned that in order to recieve artillery support an ARVN infantry commander had to bribe the nearby artillery commander in advance or "so sorry, no artillery support for you, even though you are about to be overrun".
The congressional action that truly sounded the death knell for South Vietnam and “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” was not simply cutting aid, but passing a law (the FY 1973 Dep’t of State Auth. Act, Pub. L. 93-126, 87 Stat. 451) that provided:
“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, on or after August 15, 1973, no funds heretofore or hereafter appropriated may be obligated or expended to finance the involvement of United States military forces in hostilities in or over or from off the shores of North Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia, unless specifically authorized hereafter by Congress.”
“...Today’s fight against the jihadist is similar to our fight 50 years ago against the communists...”
And today, like then, the Dems are hobbling out efforts, supporting the enemy instead of the Country, and actively subverting our efforts.
And here we are. Again.
“...are hobbling OUR efforts...”
Sorry.
sin loi. Where's his DD214?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.