Professor- 'Vietnam syndrome' returns as nation deals with Iraq war

BY JOHN REYNOLDS AVALANCHE-JOURNAL The United States lost the war in Vietnam in part because the U.S. people ultimately came to hate the war and hate themselves because of the war. That legacy, according to Cornell University professor Keith Taylor, is important because it continues to permeate how the U.S. public approaches military conflicts 30 years after the fall of Saigon. Taylor was one of several speakers who addressed aspects of the Vietnam War's legacy on the second day of the fifth triennial Vietnam Symposium. The symposium is held by Texas Tech's Vietnam Center, which also maintains the largest non-governmental archive of materials related to the Vietnam War. The three-day gathering wraps up today.

The Vietnam experience made the U.S. public so sensitive to death that now "hardly anything is worth dying for," Taylor, the Ivy League professor and Vietnam vet said. At various times, that national internal paralysis has been called the "Vietnam syndrome." While the first Gulf War supposedly cured the country of that ill, Taylor said he saw a resurgence of those sentiments surrounding the current war in Iraq. "I saw people at pointy-headed universities indulging as self-hating Americans," he said. "It seemed awfully familiar." When learning about the Vietnam War, students need more than just cynical ideas about the United States' uses of power, he said. Taylor said the main lessons of Vietnam are that democracy can be messy and that people should be careful about what they wish for. "Abandoning Vietnam was the people's choice," he said, where "betrayal of an ally could be rationalized as liquidation of a bad investment." The legacy of the South Vietnamese allies who were left to their fate after North Vietnam's takeover of the South continues to reverberate in the United States' Vietnamese-American community. Up to 1 million South Vietnamese were taken to re-education camps after the fall of Saigon. About 200,000 remained interned for a considerable time. Quang Pham's father, Hoa, was one of those prisoners. Pham, who came to the United States when he was 10, has described his father's ordeal in a soon-to-be-published book titled, "A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey." Hoa Pham was a lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese air force by war's end. He was able to fly his family out on a U.S. transport plane, but he landed in a re-education camp for 12 years. His son said Friday that there was very little re-education in those camps. "Re-education is a euphemism," said Quang Pham. "The proper term is prison camp. The education was only six months. The rest was hard labor." The United States eventually arranged for the emigration of the prison camp survivors in the late 1980s, but these men had a difficult time adjusting to life in the Vietnamese-American communities that were beginning to thrive, especially in California, Texas, Louisiana and Maryland. Pham's father, for instance, couldn't get a job, even for something as menial as pumping gas at the Van Nuys, Calif. airport, Pham said.

The symposium concludes today with one more legacy: how Vietnam affected the 2004 presidential election. On hand to talk about their role in the election will be several members of Swift Vets and POWs for Truth. Their advertising campaign last year accusing presidential candidate John Kerry of lying about his service in the Mekong Delta made the Vietnam War a big factor in the election. Also today will be a panel discussion on the Vietnam Veterans Against the War group, of which Kerry was a high-profile member. john.reynolds@lubbockonline.com t 766-8725

As the campaign began to ramp up last year and Vietnam became an important issue at least one Freeper commented that he'd be glad when all the old people were dead so we can stop talking about Vietnam.

The issue had never been Vietnam. The issue was always the United States and how distorted were the reporting and Washington policies. Here is were the war was lost.

The above Freeper reference shows just how distorted history had been. The campaign stripped away much of the crap. It had never been combat troops saying, "If only we had. . . ." What more could they have done?

To be fair some in Washington were afraid of Russia and China entering the war thus they enforced restrictions and others paid with their lives.

Some in New York and Los Angeles were afraid that America would win the war and thus they imposed their own restrictions. The "anti-war" crowd and their Ho owned the networks' "news" reporting.

The Communists' most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, had the biggest impact.

The Vietnam experience made the U.S. public so sensitive to death that now "hardly anything is worth dying for"

I bet that in context that statement expresses the frustration of encountering an enemy-friendly media environment upon returning from winning all the battles only to see the war lost here.

The overwhelming majority of us who were not in Vietnam saw the same thing but we did little about it. At least today we have effective means of speaking against MSM distortions and the America haters.

Can it happen again? That's a big reason we still talk about Vietnam.

I wrote the following after battling with a leftist law professor during a lecture that I attended.

I attended a lecture entitled "Vietnam and the Iraq war" given at the University of Chicago by professor Geoffrey Stone 20 January 2005 to a graduate student class. As a veteran of the South East Asian war games from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving has an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with a no unit has a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I was highly interested in the form that the lecture might take. After a cursory reading of professor Stone's curriculum vitae, I suspected that professor Stone's take on the South East Asian conflict might indicate a general disapproval of the United States war effort. I was not disappointed. The lecture was an attempt to paint the American war effort in Vietnam has misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left was portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in it’s attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wish to preserve their unique culture. He described the South Vietnamese government in terms simultaneously unmindful of their struggle to survive a relentlessly ruthless Communist assault and portrayed it one dedicated to an unwarranted assault on human rights while neglecting to mention ANY of the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese. He described the Tet offensive has a surprise for the United States in which 1100 American soldiers died and 2300 ARVN soldiers, and not much more about it.

I challenged him on the following points, the reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections in accordance with the Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns by Ho Chi Minh spoken of in professor R. J. Runnel's book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign ordered that 5% of the people in each village in Hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the "ruling class." All told says Rummell, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Congress killed 195,000 to 865,000 and North Vietnamese. These were not combat and men women and children, and hardly the moral high ground claims by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that "while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people in children to a horrible death." The same genocidal pattern became the Communists standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet offensive.
I pointed out that the national liberation front was a creation of the North Vietnamese third party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from the north. I pointed out the disastrous military defeat that the Tet offensive was for the North Vietnamese and that the Vietcong were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the North Vietnamese until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. I pointed out how the north Vietnamese high command repeatedly said that they counted on the antiwar movement to give them confidence that they should hold on in the face of their innumerable battlefield reverses and defeats. I pointed out the antiwar movement prevented the feckless Lyndon Johnson granting General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, which the North Vietnamese feared would do the most damage to their ability to prosecute the war, and thereby prolonging it to this nation and the South Vietnamese's disfavor.

When he tried to say that United States should have known it could not put down a local popular insurgency, I pointed out that the final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivision, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. I pointed out to him that it was the type of blitzkrieg that German Panzer General Heinz Guderian would have readily recognized. I said how I didn't recall seeing any barefoot pajama clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel fotage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon.

There were legions of half-truths and omissions that this professor spoke to in his extremely biased lecture. When I asked him why he left out so much that was favorable to the American effort in Vietnam, he airily dismissed my argument has being just another perspective, but tellingly he did not disagree with the essential truth of what I said.

Professor Stone strikes me as just another seditious liberal masquerading has an enlightened academic.

He was totally unable to relate how the situation in Iraq is comparable to the situation in Vietnam, but I helpfully volunteered one for him. That a seditious near traitorous fifth column of protesters is trying to undermine our efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. I said that in that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar.

When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that "We Gotta Get Outta this Place," to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by our refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was a fair amount of resentment for the antiwar movement, and toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and much more than that as a soldier. 19 of my friends have their names on that memorial wall and Washington DC. I think they deserve to have the full truth totaled about the effort that they did their young lives for. The country is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our nation's history.

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