Posted on 07/09/2019 12:20:21 PM PDT by fugazi
55 years ago, Capt. Roger H.C. Donlon’s Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha 726 manned a camp at Nam Dong, situated just east of the Laotian border and 30 miles west of Da Nang. Accompanying them was a few dozen Nung mercenaries, a team of South Vietnamese Special Forces, an Australian advisor, and a civilian anthropologist who was an expert on Vietnamese mountain tribes. For the last month, the team used the post to protect the locals and train fighters. The base was also a thorn in the Viet Cong’s sandals, as it was situated on Ho Chi Minh Trail, the communist infiltration route that ran from North Vietnam through Laos.
By the evening of 5 July 1964 all signs pointed to a battle at Nam Dong. Patrols discovered that the VC had assassinated two local chieftains friendly to the Green Berets. Locals were clearly on edge and wouldn’t say why. The trainees began fighting with the Nung (it was suspected — and later confirmed — that a large percentage of the locals were VC sympathizers). Staff Sgt. Merwin “Woody” Woods wrote his wife that “All hell is going to break loose here before the night is over.”
Woods was right; by nightfall, a reinforced VC battalion — nearly 900 guerrillas — massed around the American outpost for their pre-dawn assault. The attackers had already cut the fence and overrun the perimeter security teams. Armed with intelligence on building locations from sympathizers inside the camp, the enemy kicked off their surprise attack at 2:26 a.m. with devastatingly accurate mortar fire. Within seconds, several buildings were on fire as Green Berets rolled out of their racks to arm themselves and fight back. Grenades, machinegun, and automatic small-arms fire suddenly enveloped the
(Excerpt) Read more at victoryinstitute.net ...
I was only born long after VN war ended. I never understood why the USA simply didn’t march west from Khe San to the border of Thailand. Have our Thai allies reinforce their Norther border, and cut the Ho Chi Minh trail in half. At that point, Laos is only 100 miles wide.
Would the North vietnamese have wanted to start a full on frontal war with the USA? I highly doubt it.
Op Lam Son 719. Using S. Vietnamese supported by US Troops. Utter disaster. Nearly 40k KIA both sides.
It’s easy (and interesting) to debate 50-plus years later what we would have done. Are you right? Maybe. But keep in mind that we have more intelligence than Gen. Westmoreland could have dreamed of. Yes, we can definitely put a lot of blame on the LBJ administration, which hamstrung our military by sending them to war but kept them from actually doing anything that would have a strategic benefit. But in all fairness, we didn’t know what the Chinese or Soviet Union would have done if we went all out against the communists. We are fortunate to live in a world where atomic/nuclear weapons have only been used once, and that was to end a war. Had we fought to win and had the NVA on the ropes, that might not have been the case.
I’ve been watching PBS’s Vietnam War documentary. We should have never gotten involved in what was basically a civil war.
Got Netflix? Watch the Vietnam War. We should wave never gotten involved in their civil war. And after we got in, half the people were NV sympathizers. Our troops were given an impossible job to fight an enemy they couldn’t identify.
At that point in the war the Ho Chi Minh Trail was only a goat track compared to what it would be later on. Early in the war the North was using freighters and sampans to move supplies into the South. Once the seaborne resupply was shut down, the Trail was greatly expanded.
But yeah, that war was amazingly stupid from a strategic standpoint.
General Bruce Palmer, Commander of U.S. Army Vietnam and Chief of Staff of the Army believed that we should have done exactly that. The details of his plan were provided in his book: The Twenty-five Year War.
The United States Government and the politicians were spooked by the CHICOM intervention in Korea and feared that the same thing would happen in Vietnam if we expanded ground combat into North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They preferred to let 50,000 U.S. soldiers die and accept stalemate or defeat rather than put their careers at risk.
I was at the Wall for the first time over the 4th and I was just speechless and sick.
Big difference between the South Vietnamese Army and the U.S. Army, especially given the restrictions that were placed on our combat power. I sat on the border with my troops prepared to secure and recovery U.S. aircraft and their crews that were shot down in Laos, but we were not allowed to go. Might turn up on the evening news.
I'm not surprised that you have that opinion, after all you were watching PBS. Read what the North Vietnamese leaders have to say. They believed that they were the vanguard of a Southeast Asia and eventually world wide conquest by the Communists.
Yet it didn’t happen after we left, defeated. It was widely known among the intelligence community and the generals that the war was unwinnable as early as 1965, yet we continued to pour our treasury and lives into it.
Not according to the North Vietnamese leadership. They came very close to end the war on several occasions.
Certianly, many in the military and in government knew that we could never win under the restrictions imposed on us by our government.
Not according to the North Vietnamese leadership. They came very close to end the war on several occasions.
Certainly, many in the military and in government knew that we could never win under the restrictions imposed on us by our government.
God bless them. Thanks for posting.
Yet they never surrendered, did they? We dropped more ordnance on Vietnam in a month than all of Europe in WWII. There was no front. NV had no factories or infrastructure to destroy. Their weapons were all provided by China or the USSR or captured from th US. We dropped millions of tons of bombs on the Ho Chi Min Trail alone and never closed it for more than a few hours. There were Viet Cong everywhere being hidden by sympathizers all over SV. We simply could not occupy the entire country. And it didn’t help that the SV government was weak and corrupt and incompetent and seen as a puppet government of the US.
It came down to the simple fact that they were willing to sacrifice as many people as necessary to win.
You are doing a good job repeating all of the arguments presented by the Ivy League types in the State Department, in academia, and on the Left. It contains a flavor of truth to seem rational, but it masks the real truth. The politicians didn’t want to win. And we didn’t.
Monday morning quarterbacking is easy.
To illustrate your point, Navy attack aircraft regularly saw the Russians offloading SAMS in Haiphong. LBJ’s ROE prevented attacking the ships loaded with missiles that shot down hundreds of US aircraft.
We lost near 10 thousand....
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