I understand a NV general said in his memoirs that they lost lost during the Tet holiday. He also said that Walter Cronkite proped them up. I don't know his name so I am not sure what to search. I heard this on talk radio recently.
Links to Cronkites comments would help.
Stats on deaths after US pulled out.
Anything that helps a 17 yo politely refute a lefty teacher who implies a Iraq is like VN.
Some of you lived it and know this stuff. Thanks for you service and helping us set the rcord straight.
You guys forgot more about this story than I know.
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/061021
Excerpt:
Issues analysis
Vietnam deceptions live on
Liberal armchair generals are still fighting the last war
October 21, 2006
Fred Hutchison
RenewAmerica analyst
The tendency of generals to re-fight the last war has been a recurring phenomenon since Carl Von Clausewitz wrote about it in his book On War (published 1832). Sometimes intellectuals who play armchair general make the same mistake. Liberals seem to be caught in a repeating time loop based on a fixation with Vietnam. Many liberals who oppose the Iraqi War are using some of the same arguments that they or their fathers used in opposing the Vietnam War.
http://depts.clackamas.cc.or.us/banyan/1.1/strickland.htm
Good site
“Vietnam, A History” by Stanley Karnow.
He’s kind of a lefty but he gets a lot of the story correct.
Try this site to links on this topic: http://www.swiftvets.com/staticpages/index.php?page=Links
General Tran Van Tra (North Vietnamese general) said:
“We did not correctly evaluate the specific balance of forces between ourselves and the enemy, did not fully realize that the enemy still had considerable capabilities, and that our capabilities were limited, and set requirements that were beyond our actual strength.”
In other words, the Tet offensive was a failure. He was subsequently sacked and put under house arrest for speaking out against the government.
More...
“The Spring General Offensive” is the book that discusses it, the memoir.
Another good quote. “The Tet objectives were beyond our strength. They were based on the subjective desires of the people who made the plan. Hence our losses were large, in materiel and manpower, and we were not able to retain the gains we had already made. Instead we faced myriad difficulties in 1969 and 1970.”
And here is an excellent article about him, at least by NYT standards. Might help your son’s argument, having liberal NYT to back him up.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E6DF1639F936A15757C0A960958260
Best of luck. I’ll be doing a similar project on civil liberties, although it’s more of a semester project and it’s hard to tell that she’s a lefty. Nice that although all my teachers are big lefties, they don’t discuss it in class and the history teacher openly discusses biases he might have (such as growing up in the sixties, being anti-war, influences his view on the US Civil War). So, anyways, good luck.
Anderson, David L. Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953-61 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
Davidson, Phillip B. Vietnam at War, The History: 1946-1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press,1988).
Gillon, Steven M. The American Paradox: A History of the United States Since 1945 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).
Hammond, Paul Y. “Presidents, Politics, and International Intervention” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 386, Protagonists, Power, and the Third World: Essays on the Changing International System(November 1969) 10-18.
Hess, Gary R. Vietnam and The United States: Origins and Legacy of War (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990).
Hitchcock, William I. The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent,1945-2002 (New York: Doubleday, 2002).
Kattenburg, Paul M. The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945-1975 (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1982).
Mann, Robert. A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic Books,2001).
Olson, James S. and Randy Roberts. Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
Patti, Archimedes L.A. Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America’s Albatross (Berkeley, Los Angeles,and London: University of California Press, 1980).
Schulzinger, Robert D. A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Tran-Duc-Thao. “Vietnam and Eastern Asia” The Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 4, French Indochina (August 1947), 409-413.
Wilcox, Wayne A. “Contemporary American Influence in South and Southeast Asia” Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 366, American Civilization: Its Influence on Our Foreign Policy (July 1966) 108-116.
Young, Marilyn B. The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991).
A member of his staff, a Col. Bui Tin had an interview published in the Aug 3 1995 Wall Street Journal saying the same thing.
In 1975 the north had rebuilt and tried again. By this time the US democrat congress cut off all funding to the South. The rest is history.
IRAQ:LEARNING THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM By Melvin Laird
Others who were not there (Vietnam) may differ with this description. But they have been misinformed by more than 30 years of spin about the Vietnam War. The resulting legacy of that misinformation has left the United States timorous about war, deeply averse to intervening in even a just cause, and dubious of its ability to get out of a war once it is in one. All one need whisper is “another Vietnam,” and palms begin to sweat. I have kept silent for those 30 years because I never believed that the old guard should meddle in the business of new administrations, especially during a time of war. But the renewed vilification of our role in Vietnam in light of the war in Iraq has prompted me to speak out.
Victor David Hansen had an excellent article on the Tet business a few years back in the American Legion magazine - maybe a local AL post would have back copies - included quotes from the likes of General Giap who said the North was ready to start peace talks after Tet because they had been so badly defeated, but changed their minds and kept fighting after they heard the likes of Cronkite saying we had lost the war.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Igloo_White
or just google Igloo White - top secret at the time - I was on the installation and maint team for IBM.
This was one reason the VC and NVA had so much trouble getting stuff down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We knew where they were a lot of the time and could bomb very accurately. Our snipers would easily set up ambushes.
In short we kicked their backsides.
BTW Son of Igloo White could be used to seal our southern border with no fence. And could be done with much less $$ than Igloo White cost.
Here’s a reference that will put your son head and shoulders above his teacher, the lamestream media and most Americans. It’s called “Vietnam: A History” and was written by Stanley Karnow. The book chronicles that Vietnam has been involved in various wars and civil wars since around the 1400s. It wasn’t new by the time we got involved, we just stepped in after the French gave up trying to defeat the Viet Cong. And they had been fighting from sometime in the 40’s until they abandoned Vietnam in ‘53 or ‘54 after the battle at Dien Ben Phu (sp?).
With respect to Tet and the Crankcase comment, it is true. One of the leading North Vietnamese generals (don’t recall his name, either; probably has a Phu or Diem in his name, though!) acknowledged after we capitulated in ‘Nam that Tet had been a disaster for them and they were talking about surrendering until the American media spread the story that Tet was a disaster for the US.
Vietnam was called “the Living Room War” because we all sat around the TV in the living room at night and watched the news reports. Something else your son might want to check out is Congress’ battle with Nixon over various pet projects. They would turn the money off the fight the war (no bombs, bullets, gas, or airplane fuel) until they got Nixon to either give in on whatever they wanted or he would compromise with them. This tactic went on for months during the last couple of years of the war. The only problem was that someone didn’t bother to tell the North Vietnamese that the military in ‘Nam couldn’t buy the materials of war and they just kept on killing American kids. There is no way to estimate how many of those names on the Vietnam Memorial might not be there had Congress and the MSM not been so intent on undermining our efforts.
Your son’s teacher sounds like a leftist moron whose knowledge of the war comes from John F’n Kerry, Jane Fonda and the DNC talking points. Those of us who were actually there know the real story.
Tell your son good luck. We fought that war once, it is disgraceful that he has to fight it again.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/09/recounting_abrams_war_in_vietn.html
Short but sweet.
I got to Nam in 66 when Westmoreland was running it. In 68 Gen Abrams took over (I actually met him in Saigon at one of our hush hush facilities and answered questions for him).
Things changed quickly (the rocket attacks on Saigon stopped for one thing) as did they in Iraq with the Franks-Petraeus transition in Iraq.
I left in 1970 a big fan of Abrams.
"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender!"
"It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!"
Description: Emailed quotation
Circulating since: Late 1990s (various versions)
Status: Inauthentic
Vo Nguyen Giap