Posted on 09/26/2017 5:06:05 PM PDT by Ennis85
My Bad, sent that message to wrong person.
All things considered,the war could have been won even as the US was drawing down under Nixon. The a-hole left lit the fire to anti-war a-holes because they hated Nixon,totally strangled ALL funding and most importantly made sure extremely successful B-52 strikes were stopped. The North was the side that surrendered in Paris but inexplicably we surrendered to their surrender. I put most of the blame on the Democrats and a lessor on the heads up ass Pentagon.
All I can say to Burns and Novick about Vietnam is “If you weren’t there, you cannot understand it”.
The episodes so far have some good material but they have left out a lot about the whole historical context of the war. There is no proper context about Gen. Loan shooting a VC assassin who, in civilian clothes, had specialized in killing ARVN soldiers and their families in their homes.
He was shot as an assassin and spy. Fair game.
No context about Hanoi using Cambodia as their supply, R&R, and attack positions against SVN. When I was there in the Fall 1970, there were a reported/identified 5 PAVN divisions inside the country (1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 9th, plus I interviewed NCA POWs from the 6th Division, which later showed up at An Loc in 1972).
A Lt. Devereaux I interviewed in Long An City, Long An Province (mentioned by Burns in the film), told me on oct. 30, 1970 that the Cambodian operation was “long overdue -harmed infiltration and supply ability, helped III Corps greatly and Long An some”.
From a VC rallier in a Chieu Hoi camp on Route 4 heading to Long An City, he said that “before 1960, the NVA were in Laos and constitute the main force of that Pathet Lao today”. He once personally directed Laotian and Cambodian. troops. His name was #### Phat Nguyen (dressed in a white shirt and had a big grin on his face).
He also revealed an unknown revolt in No. Vietnam in 1956 in Ba Lang because the Communists “prevented fleeing of villagers to South Vietnam. Three battalions were sent to suppress it. “200 men arrested.” “100 men were killed”.
He also told of another revolt in Nghe An province in 1964 by a group called “Front of Republic? Citizens Avant Guad of the North. 60 people from it were arrested and the leader got life. Minimum sentence was 3 years.
[My notes were taken by hand and tape recorder but the notes were truncated in order to get down as much on paper as I could at the time. Then I would review the tapes later. One tape get tangled up around the recorder’s spindle so I lost some really good comments).
Nothing about Hanoi’s occupation of at least a quarter of Laos (with Red Chinese having 10,000 troops in northern Laos).
The total number of SVN soldiers and civilians murdered during the Commmunists’ occupation of Hue and surrounding in now about 8,000 (the show used 2,800 which was one of the first public figures given about two months after the NVA left Hue, but thousands of other bodies were found along the Perfume River and smaller bodies of water going out of Hue and in nearby villages and hamlets, esp. in the sand dunes.
One of my friends, on a subsequent trip to Hue found human bones wrapped in barbed wire with bullet holes in their skulls.
And when it gets to the anti-Vietnam movement, you are going to get a lot of leftist propaganda about it, but since I was inside it, I knew many of the communists who were leading it in the National and New Mobe Committees.
Let’s see how Burns and Novick handle that
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