Posted on 10/18/2002 10:13:43 PM PDT by onedoug
It's that time again...tho re-fight the Vietnam War. This time via the online poll for the program The History Channel cablecast this evening on the subject.
I voted yes, despite the politics that led us there, because I refuse to believe that so many brave Americans lost their lives their needlesly.
I yet feel our involvemnt there was a great enterprise from which, as was the case with the fall of the Soviet Union, we will yet emerge victorious.
I'm curious what Freepers...expecially my fellow Vietnam veterancs, may think.
I always find the issuance of Ho Chi Minhs March,1946 Order to be very interesting. He actually authorized the French to come back in (the North) and assisted them in destroying the Nationalist Vietnamese. Thousands were butchered. "Uncle Ho" as the left loves to call him not only was a founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party, but the French Communist Party as well.
The USA entered Vietnam as a member of SEATO. As did other nations. All were duty-bound to do so (come to the assistance of a member state). The North has ALWAYS been covetous of the South. They invaded numerous times in previous centuries. So many in fact, the South construction a couple of walls on the 17th Parallel to keep them out.
This from UNHERALDED VICTORY by Mark Woodruff:
"America's victories on the battlefield up until 1973 were overwhelmed by later events, and the sad fact is that Communist North Vietnam did later invade and conquer it southern neighbor. Those who predicted that the surrounding countries would fall like dominoes were proven wrong, but the world will never know if they might have fallen if America had not acted when it did. In 1994, Singapore's President Lee Kwan Yew noted that America's actions in Vietnam had given his country ten years to strengthen itself against the Communists, ten years without which Singapore might well have fallen. One can only speculate on how many other then-vulnerable states could also be added to the list."
Your points about Cam Ranh Bay are very well met as a deep-water port on the cusp of the western Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Plus, the point you make concerning Singapore can hardly be questioned as asserted from such a unique perspective. One of even my current co-workers in Singapore readily attests to the assistance of the Israeli military in formulating that island's defensive strategies, as no one else had heretofore given them the time of day on that issue.
You'll undoubtedly realize that a good slice of my take on this issue is sociological over even military. This derives from my senses of the Vietnamese people during the war, which - I think to my credit now as I was then a dumb kid - were as greatly reinforced for me during my return trip there in APR 2000 (re#33). You're especially right when you say that, "The North has ALWAYS been covetous of the South." When I went to Hanoi on the final leg of that latter trip, I really sensed their differences. The northerners are decidedly colder and bureaucratic to the point where one could almost feel their notions of superiority.
Yet I'm still optimistic that truth for them will out, and that their latest generation of leaders will yet realize that in order to engage in real terms with the world that their people will have to be freer, because that is the only way that capitalism works. And even in this the realization that capitalism is going to be the way of the world.
I actually hope the same for the Chinese to the north, but still hold out more hope to such ends for the Vietnamese as I truly believe them to be a hardier people.
Everything hopefully as even marking the greater Good to you and yours.
Regardless, Kennedy's policies w/r/t Cuba/Vietnam make me see red every time I think about them - primarily, I think, because I lived through it, couldn't see what was going on while it was right there under my nose (even though I couldn't stand him and the whole "Camelot" schlockfest at the time), and came far too late to a realization of what he'd done...
Same with Czechoslovakia 1968.
Yeah right, like the French would have been of any help. NOT!
Their government was unstable before Diem... corrupt and afraid of the north.
Johnson was a fool. His Great Society destroyed the black family.
In these two things alone, he beats out Clinton and Carter for worst president... so far as we know.
Those of us who have never seen combat need to understand the horror and sacrifice of war and the love between the men who are sent by the politicians and bureaucrats to misadventures like Nam with one arm tied behind their backs. For a taste of what that’s all about, check out “We Were Soldiers.”
Robert STRANGE (he certainly is!) McNamara popped up on the book tour circuit a while back promoting his mea culpa on Viet Nam. Through clenched teeth, I watched him weep crocodile tears during one TV interview as he declared that he KNEW the entire exercise was wrong as it unfolded -- but did NOTHING to try to stop it.
They are excavating a new, lower level of Hell for McNamara as you read this. It is next door to LBJ's. My hope is that he and Johnson will spend eternity seeing the faces of the 58,200 and thousands more who still carry the physical and emotional scars of their blunders while they fan each other in a futile effort to cool themselves.
There must NEVER be another Viet Nam (or Somalia! -- thank you, Bill Clinton) -- EVER!
With a silent prayer for ALL those who fight and die for this country, I also pray that we never send our young people into harm’s way for any purpose but to preserve what remain of our freedoms and/or our deepest, most provable national interest.
No one ever suggested the froggies were THE commies in Vietnam, and I disagree that putting them back into Indochina was necessary to get them into NATO. I am also familiar with the history of the French war against the Viet Minh and the division of the country after their pull-out. Yes, we had advisors, in low level miltary training mission sort of way much as in many other countries, under Eisenhower.
The great increase in our involvement came after 1960 with Kennedy. During the '61-62 school year, one of my best friends had a Laotian foreign exchange student living with him, and we all learned far more than was ususal about the whole Indochinese situation at that time. The real road to intervention was paved when the Kennedy brothers of unhappy memory had the CIA and others get heavily involved in South Vietnamese internal politics, especially the coup against Diem. I remember it vividly at the time, and I remember reading the documents at length when the Pentagon Papers were published in the '70s.
I have alluded on other threads to MacArthur's plan to use a radiation belt along the Yalu, but I hardly think that that simpliciter disqualifies Dougout Doug (as his detractors called him) as a strategic thinker. Having read extensively in WWII and the MacArthur literature, my conclusions about MacArthur differ greatly from yours. And, as VMI man who greatly admires George C. Marshall, given the Marshall-MacArthur feud, I have to swallow my institutional pride to give Mac his due.
I was involved in some of the debates within the military community during the war about whether we ought to have been there and whether we were winning or losing at any given time. I know the arguments you're making, I agree that our ultimate failure was political, but I would also argue that the politics made the warfighting itself impossible. I still have no use for Westmoreland and the body count types, I have too many friends who didn't come back. I have a lot of respect for the men who fought the war at the squad, platoon, company, and even battalion level, but not much for the higher command levels, in the Army or the puzzle palace. I reserve my greatest contempt for the politicians, Hanoi Jane, and the cowards of the "New Left" whose personal fear of being drafted for cannon fodder led them to oppose the war.
I still think, based on everything I read, our involvement on the ground as we did it was a serious mistake, which almost destroyed the army -- you had to be on active duty in the mid-to-late '70s as I was to really appreciate how badly we were wounded -- and rent the country. We would have been much better off to have left Diem alone, let the Vietnamese fight their own war with training and supplies, maybe used some air to interdict the North, and let the chips fall where they might.
Though as I mentioned earlier, this is all academic now. ...Always thought for the future, however.
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.