can you expand on that please? Vietnam was before my time and I am trying to make sense of it in light of watching Angelina Jolie’s new movie about Cambodia.
It would be good to get together with some old geezer like me, and just let him talk. I couldn’t possibly do that much typing.
Try “Strategy for Defeat” by Admiral Sharp for one perspective.
We were already involved by the time Kennedy was killed, and we were in too deep for LBJ to cut and run. He didn’t want to spend money on VN; he wanted to spend it turning America socialist. Whether it was policy or whether he was just buffeted by events I do not know. What he did, though, was to expand our presence gradually, doing just enough not to lose, while never doing anything that could lead to victory.
He was afraid that Russia and China might come into the war if he mined Haiphong Harbor and bombed Hanoi, the rail lines that brought military aid from Russia and China, or the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Nixon did exactly those things, and it brought the commie murderers to the table and did not bring the Ruskies or the Chicoms in. This, together with his successful Vietnamization program allowed him to keep his promise of Peace with Honor. The war was won.
At the same time, the left was successfully doing to Nixon what they’ve been trying to do to President Trump. Poor Nixon had no Internet to disseminate the truth, so he resigned for good of the country. That was the cue for communist traitors in the Senate to disgracefully repudiate our treaties with South Vietnam, leaving them helpless in the face of North Vietnam, backed as always by Russia and China.
As we all knew it would, a bloodbath ensued, and every leftist’s hands run red with the blood of the innocent.
The region had been French Indochina before WWII. Japan conquered it, and after their defeat France returned.
There had been a long going anti-French, anti-Japan insurgency movement, the Viet Minh, led by Communists Ho Chi Minh and Vo Giap. The French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Vietnam split in half, a Communist north ruled by Ho Chi Minh and a pro-Western south ruled by President Diem. The United States aligned with South Vietnam at this time.
Ho Chi Minh’s Communists wanted to unify the country and began waging an insurgency campaign against South Vietnam using the Viet Cong as a proxy army. They killed village leaders and other South Vietnam officials. We began sending advisors and ordnance to help South Vietnam defend itself from the Communist insurgents. President Eisenhower gave his “falling domino” speech stating that we intended to defend South Vietnam in order to prevent all of Southeast Asia being conquered by the Soviet bloc.
President Kennedy continued our policy of sending military advisors and equipment to South Vietnam. The Viet Cong insurgency continued. In November 1963 President Diem of South Vietnam was deposed in a coup, likely engineered by Kennedy, and killed. President Kennedy was assassinated three weeks later.
South Vietnam was essentially leaderless and out of control when Lyndon Johnson took office. Johnson made the decision to send the first American ground combat troops to Vietnam, arriving in early 1965. But as McMaster documents in his book LBJ was not willing to commit the troops and money it would take to defeat Hanoi. Despite what the American public would be led to believe this would be nothing more than a “display of resolve”. All that Ho Chi Minh and Giap had to do is outwait us.
Here is his speech on the subject.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-135-015.aspx
As you can tell, it's sort of an open wound. Half of my Boot Camp Platoon is on the Wall, fed into the Grinder, AFTER we knew it was lost.
https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/1119/19182.html
Reston on Who’s to Blame for Vietnam
By Godfrey Sperling, Godfrey Sperling Jr. is the Monitor’s senior Washington columnist. November 19, 1991
NO one has provided more persuasive evidence that it was President John F. Kennedy who got the United States into the Vietnam war than James Reston in his recently published memoir, “Deadline.”
Describing his interview with Mr. Kennedy following the young president’s summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, Mr. Reston has this to say: “I remember that Saturday morning very well. He (Kennedy) arrived at the US embassy (in Vienna) over an hour late, shaken and angry at having been delayed by an unexpected extra meeting with the Soviet leader. He was wearing a hat - unusual for him - and he pushed it down over his forehead, sat down on a couch beside me, and sighed. I said it must have been a roug h session. Much rougher than he had expected, he said.” Kennedy then told Reston that Mr. Khrushchev had threatened him, warning that if the US did not agree to communist control over access to Berlin, the Soviet Union would proceed unilaterally to dominate the routes from Western Europe to Berlin. Kennedy said that he replied that the US would fight to maintain access to its garrison in Berlin if necessary.
Kennedy then went on to tell Reston that he felt sure that Khrushchev thought that anybody who had made such a mess of the Cuban invasion had no judgment. “Khrushchev,” writes Reston, “had treated Kennedy with contempt, even challenging his courage, and whatever else Kennedy may have lacked, he didn’t lack courage. He felt he had to act.” Soon thereafter Kennedy sent more advisers to the battlefront in Vietnam.
“This, I thought,” Reston continues, “was a critical mistake. Once Kennedy had over 15,000 ‘advisers’ engaged not only in giving advice but also in giving support on the battlefield. US power and prestige were thought by many officials in Washington and in Asian capitals to be committed.”
And here is Reston’s assessment of the “who done it” argument that still is being waged - of who it was that got the US into what became a winless war that killed many Americans and finally sapped morale on the homefront: “No doubt, as President, Johnson was more responsible for commiting the US to that struggle (he eventually had 500,000 Americans in the war), but in my view Kennedy started the slide.”
Defenders of Kennedy on this issue usually point to Robert Kennedy’s denial that his brother had any intention of going to war in Vietnam. Reston writes: “Robert Kennedy, eager to protect his brother from blame, always denied that the President intended to increase the nation’s commitment to Vietnam, and also denied that the Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting in Vienna had anything to do with it. But he didn’t hear what his brother said to me in the Vienna embassy, and I did.” This is not just another reporter telling us of how something important happened.
As a VN era vet it is hard to make sense of a war where we have to fight for a countryman that won’t fight for his own freedom. There are exceptions, of course, but that sums it up.