Truth About the Vietnam War

Google Groups ^ | May 3, 2005 | Eagle Eye

[dbz77]

And, the US was defending the Republic of Vietnam from an invasion. Whatever the US administrations and military leaders did wrong, THAT was not one of them.

Let's put things in their proper context, for starters. You're talking about an authoritarian communist regime which, during the 1950s, was murdering many tens of thousands of North Vietnamese civilians, stealing the property of everyone else, and using terror tactics to subject the whole population of North Vietnam to a total destruction of rational social order. None of the usual excuses from historical revisionsists like you apply here: this wasn't self defense because the French were gone; the US was not in North Vietnam during that decade.

This was not a spontaneous uprising or well-intentioned attempt to make a "better society". Ho Chi Minh founded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 (in exile in China). Before that, he was trained by the Soviets while in the USSR. These murderous thugs planned to conquer and enslave their own countrymen before moving on to their neighbors. They did both. Thirty years later, the people in Vietnam are STILL oppressed by their government and living in a failed economy, ruined by the denial of their freedom.

[dbz77]

This is the proper response to anyone who claimed that the Vietnam War was unjust.

[Eagle Eye]

Disclaimer: I had nothing to do with this article.

[vetvetdoug]

What was wrong was Congress' and McNamara’s interfering with the military’s fighting of the war. Telling the enemy we are using the same flight paths and bombing them the same time every day was just plain stupid.

[PugetSoundSoldier]

What? This can’t be serious, and the fact you would post such obvious LIES on the anniversary of brave John Kerry being shot at in Cambodia just shows what a heartless SOB you are...

/sarc

[DMZFrank]

As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I am keenly interested in the distortions, lies, and half truths perpetuated about the Vietnam war by many of those who helped to undermine the US effort there. Much of the conventional understanding of the US involvement in the South East Asian conflict indicates a general disapproval of the United States war effort, and an acceptance of the oft regurgitated leftist conventional wisdom as to it’s historical course and outcome. That is painting the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left is 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 its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. The South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a ruthless Communist assault while engaging in an unwarranted assault on human rights .while ignoring the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) is also part of this narrative. The deceptive reporting of the Tet Offensive, the Communist’s worse defeat among numberless hundreds of others was probably the most grievous deceit perpetuated by the Press .

The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is 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 stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the “ruling class.” All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed 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 and 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 of 1968.

The National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. The North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. The antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland’s request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. They were as thoroughly beaten as a military force can be given the absence of an invasion and occupation of their nation. The Soviets and Chinese recognized this, and they put pressure on their North Vietnamese allies to accept this reality and settle up at the Paris peace talks. Hanoi’s party newspaper Nhan Dan angrily denounced the Chinese and Soviets for “throwing a life bouy to a drowning pirate” and for being “mired on the dark and muddy road of unprincipled compromise.” The North Viets intransigent attitude toward negotiation was reversed after their air defenses were badly shattered in the wake of the devastating B-52 Linebacker II assault on North Vietnam, after which they were totally defenseless against American air attack.

To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.

South Vietnam was NOT defeated by a local popular insurgency. The final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. It was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I didn’t recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place. At the Paris Accords in 1973, the Soviet Union had agreed to reduce aid in offensive arms to North Vietnam in exchange for trade concessions from the US, effectively ending North Vietnams hopes for a military victory in the south. With the return of cold war hostilities in the wake of the Yom Kippur war after Congress revoked the Soviet’s MFN trading status, the Reds poured money and offensive military equipment into North Vietnam. South Vietnam would still be a viable nation today were it not for this nation’s refusal to live up to it’s treaty obligations to the South Vietnamese, most important to reintervene should they invade South Vietnam.

There is one primary similarity to Vietnam. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. In that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.

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 the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our mostly victorious fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[dbz77]

What was wrong was Congress' and McNamara’s interfering with the military’s fighting of the war

What was their motivation for doing such a thing?

[WilliamofCarmichael]

We went from Eisenhower's "massive retaliation" to something called "limited war;" McNamara’s "more bang for the buck."

Hey! He got the Edsel out on time with it. Why not try it in war?

[dbz77]

Limited war is a stupid concept.

It is like doing a partial sterilization of instruments before surgery.

[Tammy8]

I am so frustrated by the fact that most don’t know the truth about the Vietnam War. History distorted before my very eyes, and all I have ever been able to do is try to repeat the truth and correct errors when I can. Thank you for posting this.

[Rembrandt]

I served in VN (Danang) beginning in 10/68, ending in 1/70. Years later I went back and worked in Saigon for my company which was starting a subsidiary. I had a girlfriend and she told me an interesting story about Tet.

In 1968 as in most years, the NVN and the SVN military had a truce at the time of Tet, the only real holiday in VN (think of it as a combination of our Christmas and New Year, it coincides with Chinese New Year - historically, everyone in VN becomes one year older on Tet, the national birthday).

There is a very nice lake in Dalat which is where both the North and the South went to relax every year, the North on one side, the South on the other. In 1968, both sides were relaxing, cooking and restoring their batteries as in past years. Then began the offensive by the North which was an affront to everything that families and the country believed in - Tet was thru the years a time of peace, a time of families gathering together to renew their kinship - when suddenly Ho Chi Minh’s criminals and thugs began firing and bayonetting their countrymen. That was an ugly episode in the history of VN, never to be forgotten.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: "Limited war is a stupid concept. It is like doing a partial sterilization of instruments before surgery."

Ah.. but Washington's civilian geniuses had that all figured out.

"[T]he U.S. adopted what was called the strategy of 'graduated response' developed by General Maxwell Taylor as described in his book The Uncertain Trumpet. This strategy, governed basically by the concept of 'flexibility', allowed the U.S. to respond in kind to communist aggression without necessarily resorting to nuclear warfare. This flexibility should have provided the U.S. with the option 'to proceed or not, to escalate or not, and to quicken the pace or not.' This strategy of 'graduated response' is what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called a policy of 'one more step' and corresponds to his 'quagmire model' in which the U.S. is more and more lured into the war 'not after due and deliberate considerations, but through a series of small decisions.'"

Here

I wonder if the author was referring to small-minded decisions made in the Oval Office.

Meanwhile the MSM employees by 1968 had stripped away their façade of objectivity led by the North Vietnamese Communists' most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite.

I recall the street rabble being described on TV as the most intelligent generation ever. Viet Cong flags carried by the the "anti-war," pro-Communist demonstrators were described as "blue, red and yellow" protest banners.

[dbz77]

There is a very nice lake in Dalat which is where both the North and the South went to relax every year, the North on one side, the South on the other. In 1968, both sides were relaxing, cooking and restoring their batteries as in past years. Then began the offensive by the North which was an affront to everything that families and the country believed in - Tet was thru the years a time of peace, a time of families gathering together to renew their kinship - when suddenly Ho Chi Minh’s criminals and thugs began firing and bayonetting their countrymen. That was an ugly episode in the history of VN, never to be forgotten.

The Tet offensive was also the time when the North Vietnamese left the VC to fend for themselves.

[PhilDragoo]

In May 1996 Proceedings Lieutenant General Charles G. Cooper, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired) reveals a decision point with dire consequences in "The Day It Became the Longest War".

November 1965 the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Army General Harold Johnson; Air Force General John McConnell; Chairman Army General Earle Wheeler; Navy Admiral David McDonald; Marine Corps General Wallace Greene) were allowed fifteen minutes to make their case to LBJ that mining Haiphong and bombing Hanoi was the best way to win.

LBJ amazed the leaders with a profane and obscene intimidation, citing the tired baloney of World War III and the awful wrath of the Soviets and the Chicoms.

In the years since first publication the article has become available online:

The Day It Became the Longest War

Our fighting men won the war in country, but were betrayed here at home.

Of course the war was lost on the home front by traitors like Kerry and Fonda. I was proud to help the Holzers with prepublication work for Aid And Comfort: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam. Toss in Cronkite who lied that the VC won Tet. Kerry, Fonda, Cronkite.

LBJ's motives are suspect. JFK's NSAM 263 was withdrawing advisors; LBJ's NSAM 273 was signed the day after JFK's funeral. And he played to drag it out--extreme cynics say to advantage Brown & Root, Bell, et al. Certainly not to smash the enemy, destroy, kill--no, sanitized target lists, sanctuaries, one hand tied behind the back.

I hope he is testing the George Foreman Fire & Brimstone Buster.

Two million Cambodians ought to be haunting the Democrat Party, the party of treason.

All of a piece with Walter Duranty whitewashing Stalin's mass murders so that Saint Delano would feel affectionate toward Uncle Joe.

Ted Kennedy's befriending the KGB head in a joint effort to defeat Reagan's reelection.

Harkin and Kerry kissing Daniel Ortega commie thug and daughter raper on both ass cheeks.

Hussein condemning Putin and Georgia with moral equivalence.

Patton and MacArthur were dangerous men. . .to the communists.

Now we have the Kerry coterie coughing up the child porn pervert Wade sanders.

The media got control of the images in Vietnam, and with Murtha and CNN almost did the same in Iraq.

Hearts and mines begins at home.

No more Cronkites.

No more Murthas.

No more proportional response.

Ask the households fighting cancer if they want to surgically remove it and prevent its recurrence with radiation and chemotherapy or if it wants to give the cancer cells access to CAIR lawyers and ACLU lobbying, the Greg Craigs and the Ramsey Clarks.

No substitute for victory.

And first control the message--note, in 1997 a ChiCom official praised Hillary for textbook perfect propaganda speeches--but now we have Obamao. . . .

[LucyT]

Thanks, PhilDragoo.

Ping.

[Lancey Howard]

Great post.

BUMP!

[AmericanVictory]

Those who doubt what you say, as we have pointed out before, need to read Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War” and, if you get the opportunity, hear him speak.

Himself a veteran officer and the son of a general, he listened to all of the tapes at Carlisle and conducted numerous exhaustive interviews.

He puts the lie to all of the MSM and also the likes of Bill O’Reilly, who, on this topic, is clueless.

[MeekOneGOP]

bump! bump! bump!

[JDoutrider]

Combat Vet Bump

[snippy_about_it]

I hope he is testing the George Foreman Fire & Brimstone Buster.

With McNamara at his side.

[PhilDragoo]

Noel Twyman in Bloody Treason relates dining with McNamara in the latter's home.

At about 9:00 p.m., McNamara said he had another commitment and insisted on driving me back to the hotel, rather than my getting a taxi. During the drive, he remarked how much he had enjoyed the evening, how much he was impressed with my knowledge, and how surprised he was about it. He said, "The next time you come to Washington, give me a call." He pointedly beseeched me to realize that, of the people he knew in the CIA and government, he sincerely believed they were doing what they thought was the right thing for their country. Then, surprisingly, as we drove up to the hotel, he added that they may have "knocked off some gangsters." As a final statement, when I got out of the car, McNamara commented that what I was doing was very interesting but he thought I was on the wrong tack. I don't know what he meant by that.

I'll supply what I think Noel Twyman is being too discreet to say.

McNamara and LBJ were the cynical force driving the Vietnam War as an industrial investment, The Enterprise, profit for the chosen providers with lucrative kickbacks for their government patrons--while brave men died fighting tyrants.

Don't look behind the curtain--that was McNamara's attempt at misdirection. NSAM 273 signed the day after JFK's funeral.