Winning America's "Lost" War (Semper Fi!!!)

Winning America's "Lost" War By Carlton Sherwood FrontPageMagazine.com | May 5, 2005

Thirty years ago, Americans were transfixed by the chaotic images flickering across their TV screens. Hordes of frantic South Vietnamese men, women and children desperately clinging to the U.S. Embassy fence in Saigon, pleading for escape. Chinook helicopters teetering precariously on the embassy roof, evacuating the last Americans even as North Vietnamese Communist Army tanks rolled into the outskirts of the city. Huey gunships, the very symbol of American combat power in Vietnam, commandeered by fleeing South Vietnamese Army pilots, either ditched into the sea or pushed overboard from the decks of crowded American aircraft carriers.

If the film footage wasn't compelling enough to make the point, all three television networks, the only sources of broadcast news in the last days of April 1975, made certain their audience got the message. This undignified, ignominious retreat, they reported, marked the end of the Vietnam War, a shameful chapter in U.S. Military history, "the first war America lost."

Even today, that same theme is echoed by one of those network news anchors, CBS' Walter Cronkite. "We knew we had lost in Vietnam before we saw that final day," he said in a recent interview marking the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. "It taught the military a very important lesson that I think it has begun to forget in some ways, that it could not fight an unpopular war. We were clearly not omnipotent. We shouldn't be arrogant about our power and the use of our power."

You could almost hear Cronkite's familiar sign-off, "And, that's the way it is."

But, was it, really? Did the U.S. military lose the Vietnam War? If not, who was responsible? And, what about the Cronkite's remark: "It taught the military a very important lesson that I think it has begun to forget in some ways, that it could not fight an unpopular war." Unpopular with whom, the dominant Leftist media?

Perhaps, a more important question: Is it the fog of war or the dense smoke of over three decades of political, anti-military propaganda that continues to confuse and divide Americans about the true history of Vietnam? Certainly, Vietnam is used routinely today to accuse the U.S. military in Iraq and to question America's Global War on Terrorism. But, is that rhetoric based in fact, or, so much 1960's anti-war revisionist bunkum, more the stuff of Hollywood fantasies than the real, documented history of those who served in Vietnam?

Now, thanks to a distinguished group of Vietnam combat veterans, the American public is beginning to hear different, far more factual answers to those questions and many others. This time, they will get it straight from those who know Vietnam best, former POWs, American pilots held in North Vietnam prison camps for years, in places like the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" where they were brutally tortured, beaten, starved and sometimes murdered by their Communists captors.

Earlier this year, the former POWs created the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (VVLF), a non-profit educational organization, designed, in part, to "separate truth from fiction, to expose the myths about Vietnam and those who perpetrate them and, to do so, factually and accurately."

The chairman of the VVLF is Col. George E. "Bud" Day, a Medal of Honor recipient and Air Force pilot who was held prisoner by the North Vietnamese Communists for six years. Other VVLF Board Directors include POWs Col. Kenneth Cordier, CMDR. Paul Galanti and Marine pilot James Warner. Mary Jane McManus, the wife of former POW Kevin McManus, is also on the board, along with Army combat veterans Robert A. McMahon and Wallace Nunn, who also serves as Chairman of the Medal of Honor Foundation.

Last week, the VVLF launched its new website www.vietnamlegacy.org which contains full bios of each Board member and several links to other informational web pages and references for scholarly works on Vietnam history.

If the names of Col. Day and others on VVLF Board seem familiar, they should be. Last year, they were among the handful of Vietnam combat veterans who publicly denounced Sen. John Kerry for his post-Vietnam activities, for his "slander and betrayal of all those who served in Vietnam." First, in Swift Boat TV ads and later in the documentary, "Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal," the VVLF Board members excoriated Kerry for his 1971 testimony before the U.S. Senate where he accused the POWs and other Vietnam combat veterans of genocide, deliberately "murdering" and "torturing" hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians.

At the time of Kerry's Senate testimony, all of the VVLF POWs were still being held in North Vietnam prison camps under constant threat of execution as "war criminals." In "Stolen Honor" they vividly recall the reaction of their Communist captors to Kerry's accusations and the demoralizing effects of propaganda by such anti-war activists as Jane Fonda.

"Stolen Honor" was scheduled for airing in early October 2004 on 62 Sinclair Broadcast network stations. However, the Kerry Campaign, the Democratic National Committee, 18 U.S. Democrat Senators and several "Old Media" national news organizations launched an all out, concerted effort to have the documentary censored from the airwaves and banned from being shown even in privately owned theaters.

Eventually, however, "Stolen Honor" was seen by millions of Americans in the closing days of the election when it was made available for free on the website www.stolenhonor.com

Frustrated by the political Left's determination to silence them, and concerned about the public's lack of understanding about Vietnam history and those who fought in that war (most Americans alive today were not born before 1972), the POWs hope to provide a counter-balance to the propaganda that still permeates the media and public education today.

For example, contrary to the assertions of Cronkite and others in the mainstream press, the American military had nothing to do with the fall of Saigon, much less losing the war. The last American combat unit left Vietnam in August 1972, nearly three years before the 1975 Communist invasion. The U.S. military remained undefeated in battle throughout the Vietnam War.

Instead, it was Congress or, more specifically, the nearly two to one Democrat majority in the Senate (61 to 37) and the House (291 to 144) in 1975 that voted to cut off all military funding to the Saigon government that was directly responsible for the defeat of South Vietnam. Congressional Democrats literally abandoned our South Vietnamese allies and it was they, not the U.S. military, who were responsible for the carnage that followed, the slaughter, imprisonment and forced "reeducation" of millions of innocent civilians throughout Southeast Asia by an avenging North Vietnamese Army.

Several months after the last U.S. ground combat forces left Vietnam in 1972, the North Vietnamese Communists and the Vietcong signed the Paris Peace Accords, promising, among other things, to cease all hostilities and to NOT invade South Vietnam, much less conquer it, as they did in 1975.

Then, or now, 30 years later, rarely is there ever a mention of this diplomatic treachery. Broken treaties, even ones for which the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, apparently aren't worthy of mention in the evening news, certainly not in history text books, at least not when it comes to Vietnam.

As for the popularity of the war, among Walter Cronkite's friends and colleagues in the "Old Media" and the anti-war community, the war became "unpopular" in 1968, immediately after Democrat President Johnson announced he would not seek a second term and Republican Richard Nixon, who vowed to "bring peace with honor" to Vietnam, was elected. For his efforts to withdraw American troops, eliminating the draft in the process, Nixon was rewarded with a landslide reelection victory in 1972 (521 to 17 electoral votes), burying his liberal Democrat opponent Sen. George McGovern who advocated a "cut and run" policy, a complete and immediate withdrawal from Vietnam.

If the only accurate polls are those taken in the voting booth, Nixon's lopsided reelection victory (46 to 28 million votes) clearly demonstrated an overwhelming majority of Americans still supported the war in Vietnam at least through 1972, probably much longer. Media polls taken prior to the November 1972 election somehow missed tens of millions of Americans who supported the Nixon Administration's war policies -- the so-called "Silent Majority" -- much as last year's media exit polls apparently failed to count a majority of Americans who had just voted to re-elect President Bush.

Those are but a few Vietnam myths spawned by political propagandists and the mainstream media, ones the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation hopes to dispel. While protecting and preserving the "honor and reputations" of those who served in Vietnam is paramount for the VVLF, their "mission" today is to prevent an inaccurate history of Vietnam to erode U.S. national security. They do not want history to repeat itself, provide "terrorists" a political victory in the Halls of Congress or on the streets of America they could not possibly achieve on the battlefield, much like the Communists did in Vietnam three decades ago. Nor, do they believe the media, academics and show business entertainers should be allowed to go unchallenged when they regurgitate enemy propaganda and advocate the wholesale defeat of the U.S., as John Kerry, Jane Fonda and numerous other Leftists did while Americans were still fighting and dying on Vietnam battlefields and in Communists prison camps.

"The false history of Vietnam has been used to endanger and demoralize our troops in combat, undermine the public's confidence in U.S. foreign policy and weaken our national security," Foundation chairman Col. Day said. "Radical leftists such as Sen. Kerry and Jane Fonda lied about the war 35 years ago and are lying about it today. The goal of the VVLF is to continue the work of countering more than three decades of misinformation and propaganda, and set the record straight."

Carlton Sherwood is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, a thrice-wounded, decorated Marine Vietnam combat veteran and producer of the documentary Stolen Honor.

It matters for many reasons.
Historically it matters - do not allow diplomats and politicians to p*ss away hard won victories. Do not adandon allies when they are in need.
Ethically - When you make a pact, stick to it.

Also, we learned, far too late, that the MSM was manipulating facts to make it seem as though the US/RVN were losing (Cronkite and hi infamous statements about the 1968 Tet offensive) or that we were nothing but a bunch of war criminals (Kerry, Fonda, et al.).

This is just a short list.

Does it really matter what happened so long ago ?

You must be a young 'un. There are many here who not only remember Viet Nam, but also served. They were called murderers, rapists and baby killers. Lies were told about them and about the war. It's time to set the record straight! Perhaps it would do you some good to do some studying on things that happened not so long ago.

God bless Carlton Sherwood. The alphabet TV networks had a stranglehold on news being fed to the American people, and, of course, there was no Internet, no cable TV, and very few conservative pundits with newspaper columns.

For instance, CBS's Saint Walter Cronkite could tell America that the Tet Offensive was a major U.S. military defeat, when in fact it was the NVA/VC that suffered the huge losses. The U.S. military won every battle over there, but lost the PR war at home thanks to our left-wing contingent.

And equal blame should be shared by LBJ, Robert McNamara, and other U.S. 'leaders' who were the biggest bunch of spineless jellyfish that ever thought they could micro-manage a war.

Perhaps you should be a little less patronizing . I have nothing but respect for veterans but whilst we are in a war against an evil enemy at the moment stirring up division over the past is not something I am going to be a party of. We failed in our ultimate objective in Vietnam. That is basically how i have always viewed it . Given what a poor and repressive nation Vietnam is now I believe the enemy ultimately had a bigger failure. We were always noble in our motives there. You should not arrogantly criticize people for not caring about issues but show them why they should take an interest.

We didn't lose the war. It was given away by our government. We dominated every military engagement. I know, I was there.

We won if you consider we accomplished our objectives. The real purpose of the conflict was to save Western Europe. We had to demonstrate that we were willing to take casualties in a conflict with communism to dissuade the Soviets from moving on Europe.

"Does it really matter what happened so long ago ?"

It truly does matter. Every American should be made aware our military did not win the war. The politicians did. There are so many books that have been written by military folks on how the politics, the extremely poor management of the war on the part of President Johnson, and his DoD McNamara totally screwed things up. Historical facts, are available to show battle by battle how the US forces, ground, air, and sea, repetively pushed back and battered the Vietcong and their Chinese and Russian "supervisors". If Nixon was in during the Johnson years he would have given our military the authority to destroy the North Vietcong completely.

So it is important for Americans to understand our military did not lose the war, our politicans did, with of course the help of all the anti-war (communists sponsored) organizations and their puppets like Hanoi Jane and Lt J.F. Kerry who had no right to go to Paris and interfere. He should have been by all rights, tried in a military court for the treasonous acts he performed. NO EXCUSE. He was not permitted as a United States Naval Officer to meet with and enemy we where at war with. It is that simple. He is in violation of two or more UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) articles as well as the 14 Amendment to our Constitution.

Hope this helps explain why Americans should not believe the L/MSM distortions during and up to today regarding who lost the Vietnam War. To many Americans sre to damn lazy and just don't care about seeking the truth on this issue. Well guess what. Saddam believed based on our supposed failure in NAM that we where nothing but "paper tigers", and would never attack him succesfully. So he just went on his happy way figuring America would just bomb him on occasions in the north and south no fly zones. And let him continue his dictatorship. Well this POTUS and his Father proved the theory wrong that America no longer can win wars.

If you think that was arrogant and patronizing, you ain't seen anything yet! I really could care less if you want to educate yourself or not. If you wish to remain ignorant, that's your perogotive.

Personally I think you are the rude one to insinuate that no one should care about correcting the falsehoods of Viet Nam because you don't. Many here at FR care very much. If you aren't interested, then go away.

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