Posted on 02/20/2014 2:20:18 PM PST by icwhatudo
My child is doing a paper on the reasons we were unable to stop communism from spreading to South Vietnam. I was hoping you could suggest some good sources/websites/books for a young conservative interested in the real story of Vietnam.
I remember one site on FR years ago ("helicopter pilot" or something) that had all kinds of polls showing things were opposite from what Hollywood would have you believe like: support for the war was high, that service members were proud, that returning vets were less likely to use drugs/commit crimes, etc etc.
No More Vietnams by Richard Nixon. Great book telling the full history.
It would help to know the age/grade of your child for making recommendations.
The Twenty-Five Year Century
In the Jaws of History
Just for starters.
High school, honors program
“The Best and the Brightest” by David Halberstam.
ping
Horowitz was the author of much of the propaganda of the Left during the Vietnam War.
In television interviews he correctly states that the post-Watergate Democrat Congress "lost its guts."
Had Richard Nixon not resigned, or, more properly, had not been abjectly paranoid about the press attention given to Senator McGovern in 1972 and diddled Larry O'Donnell's office at the Watergate, and then lied about it on tape, Saigon might not have been allowed to fall after the U.S. pull out.
Many of us here could "go on and on."
ROE, hard to win a war when the US government (the WH) would not allow us to win it. The containment of the spread of communism was a lie. The Vietnam war was solely about making money for the military industrialists. When America caught on to the lie, the riots and protests that ensued divided the country.
TRIUMPH FORSAKEN by Mark Moyar.
You should have your son/daughter first study why America’s left vehemently opposed our entry into WWII *until* Hitler invaded the USSR.From there he/she can just follow the dots.Of course these dots lead to Chronkite...Fulbright (BillyBob’s mentor)...Kerry....and Ayers among others.
5 Star website that pulls hundreds of sources together.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Thomas.Pilsch/Vietnam.html
“Why Vietnam?” Archemedes Patti. Interesting early account of OSS ops in Indochina during and after WWII. An OSS agent himself, Patti paints a picture of a Ho Chi Minh who very much would have preferred cordial relations with the West and particularly the US. Though the Truman admin fed those who would become the Vietnamese back to the French with the Japs kicked out, and...well, we all know the rest. Or should.
You're full of donkey dung. After Nixon resigned the communists knew that Ford would never recommit troops to SE Asia. Absence the US presence there, the communists rolled through the entire area. They weren't interested in conquest. They wanted annihilation.
They killed tens of millions. I knew refugees from the area. Laos. Cambodia. South Vietnam.
The American soldier was the only thing standing between those people and outer darkness.
You don't know what you're talking about. Do us a favor and shut up.
Short answer:
Because we left.
After NVN and the VC were so badly beaten they could no longer field an effective combat force, they agreed to peace accords and we conducted an orderly departure.
With our departure, the left in our Democrat Congress refused to continue to continue to provide SVN with military support.
The NVN and the VC were able to rebuild their forces within 2 years whereupon they ignored the accords and invaded SVN.
Your son needs to realize, if he doesn't already, that the folks frantically climbing the stairs to the embassy rooftop and trying to get on the helicopters a few years after we left, were not US personnel but locals who had worked with the US earlier who were then in a new danger. Of course, the left marks that photo as evidence “we lost”.
On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War [Harry G. Summers]
Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect [U.S. Grant Sharp]
Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam [H. R. McMaster]
Archimedes Patti was full of poop when it came to Ho Chi Minh. Ho was a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920 and played Patti for a fool.
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