A Better War : The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam

Long after the war was over, after the fighting had ended, after Bunker was dead, and Abrams too, after the boat people and all the other sad detritus of a lost cause, the eldest of General Abram's three sons, all Army officers, was on the faculty of the Command & General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. There someone reminded him of what Robert Shaplen had once said, that his father deserved a better war. 'He didn't see it that way,' young Creighton responded at once. 'He thought the Vietnamese were worth it.'

is no greater analytical tool than Occam's Razor, but if I had to pick one worthwhile rival, it is to approach every problem in politics and history with the following mindset : the conventional wisdom is always wrong. This is, of course, far too sweeping a generalization, but it is shocking how often it turns out to be true, and even when it isn't, it is always helpful to approach a seemingly settled problem skeptically. Just in the past few years there have been several really good history texts which have taken this approach--Hitler's Willing Executioners, The First World War, The Pity of War--and though they've produced predictable howls of outrage, the very controversy they've stirred up has forced those who defend the conventional wisdom to do so with far greater rigor, and that's all to the good. Lewis Sorley's A Better War challenges the accepted view of Vietnam, does so with great authority, and will hopefully thereby foster a significant re-examination of this sorest spot in the national psyche.

The basic premise of the book is that late in 1970 or early in 1971 the United States had essentially won the Vietnam War....

Our computer opens on a Microsoft page with all sorts of clickbait articles on it. Lately, they’ve had several pages “devoted” to the Vietnam War - all of which, coincidentally include antiwar demonstrations and pictures of Ho Chi Minh.

The Left is still trying to sell the fiction that the enemy - the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army - were wonderful people and the young American men were a combination of inept and war criminals.

We were good, solid, and competent, the Vietnamese were good people and needed our help and enemy was scum. I am and always be proud of us - and still hate the Left for their treason.

The basic premise of the book is that late in 1970 or early in 1971 the United States had essentially won the Vietnam War...

As the historical record indicates.

The U.S. withdrew its forces at its convenience and the Left wing of our Congress thereupon suspended aid to SVN. When the North violated the Peace Treaty a few years later, the Left looked the other way.

The Left, of course, enjoys advancing the myth that since it ultimately conquered SVN the U.S. "lost the war".

We won the war on the ground and air. We lost on the 6 a clock news, and the politics of Congress, Nixon, and Kissinger.

May Walter Cronkite, McNamara and Westmorland burn in hell for eternity. All three should have been on their knees every night at the Black Wall of the Vietnam Memorial begging for forgiveness until their death. They did not understand this simple concept of war, "If you are not willing to kill your enemy and all that stand with him, surrender for you have already lost."

As a teacher in NYC i had many English Second Language classes. Kids from everywhere. I had a early assignment. Take an index card and on the plain back draw the flag of the nation you came from. On a second card tell the reason your parents came to America. In 1992 I had a 12 year old Vietnamese girl. She handed in her assignment. One card showed the gold background andvtthree red stripes of tge Republic of VietNam. On the other card was her family’s reason for coming. One word printed in caps
FREEDOM.
This girl was born 5 years after the Fall of Saigon. She had no.memory of her country but she knew what it was and she knew why she would never see it and tgat America meant Freedom. Abrams was correct. The South Vietnamese deserved it..

Yet another "America really won the war" cudda-shudda-wudda myth.

A wise man once said, if you trip over a stone on life's journey, don't pick it up. Vietnam is the stone America can't/won't stop lugging around.

Ike warned JFK not to get into a ground war in Asia. Kennedy didn't listen but he should have.

John Paul Vann had a strategery that might actually have enabled the South Vietnamese to win the war for themselves. Nobody who counted listened to him either but maybe they should have. They couldn't have done any worse.

The ARVN, both with and without US troops, won the war twice, but each time, American Leftists threw a life preserver to N Vietnam.

After the Tet offensive was a complete failure, with the ARVN & US troops pushing the communists back out of Hue, and virtually the entire Viet Cong cadre destroyed by their all-out Saigon area attacks not resulting in an uprising of new S Viet volunteers for their cause, as they had hoped, the North's leaders were talking among themselves about throwing in the towel and seeking a negotiated peace.

But they were flabbergasted when Cronkite - the Most Trusted Newsman in America - declared the entire war a failure for the US, and the rest of the MSM and all Democrats joined in singing his song of failure. He donned a flak helmet - to pretend his life was in danger - as he sat in the rooftop bar of that tall Saigon hotel, as the last remaining VC resistance was still firing away in the Chinatown section of Saigon. He pretended the gunshots in the distance meant the war was lost. ("OMG! Look! A flak helmet! Our precious Uncle Walter is in danger!") He resuscitated the North's hopes, and the war dragged on another 5 years.
When the US had drawn down most of their troops after the Paris Peace Accords, the North tried another mass invasion, and got the pants beaten off of them by a force that was mostly ARVN with some US boots on the ground. So they licked their wounds, waiting for US boots to totally leave, and then tried yet another big invasion, that for the first time was resisted solely by the ARVN. And with the same results. The "Vietnamization" of the war was at last a success.

But Nixon's 1972 walloping of the Dems, winning 49 out of 50 states, made the Dems even more hateful & bitter than ever and thirsting for revenge. Watergate was the death knell for S Vietnamese independence, because the loud MSM cacophony of "REPUBLICANS MUST BE PUNISHED!" resulted in the horrific election of 1974, that burdened the US with the most leftwing Congress we'd ever had (up to that point anyway). And the first thing the new Congress did was to completely cut all military aid to S Vietnam. No fuel for their jets & tanks & military vehicles. No bullets for their guns. No shells for their artillery. No nothing for ANYthing military.

Gerald Ford's pleas to the Dem Leftwing to honor the USA's treaties & commitments to the South were ignored. Meanwhile, the USSR & China kept the North's military machine well stocked. And their next invasion, in April '75, rolled right over the defenseless S Viet armed forces. And immediately the American Left said, "SEE? SEE?! We always said the war would be lost. And we have been proven correct. HA! TAKE THAT! You were wrong & we were right"

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