Posted on 01/14/2018 2:01:33 PM PST by nickcarraway
#8. Yes. You could drive over much of SVN without any problems. A group of us did that in Nov. 1970, driving from Pleiku (stopped at the War Museum there before leaving) to Kontum, then flew by chopper out past and left of Dak To. Didn’t take any enemy fire though that was the only time our Huey gunners put the M-60’s out.
Drove through a lot of the Delta without any problems. Also travelled by chopper a 7th ARVN speedboat on the Ham Leuong River/Oc Island without problems.
Things were improving significantly during this period of time, esp. in the Delta where miracle rices had increased both yields and the number of harvests from one to 2-3, thus giving the farmers extra money to buy things they needed for a decent life. Only the Communists opposed this and attacked the Revolutionary Development Cadres of So. Vietnam, medical teams, hospitals, schools, and transportation.
#35. Cornell was the center of a well funded pro-communist, pro-Ho/NVN study organization led by Prof. George McT. Kahin roughly entitled the SE Asia Study Program.
It turned out such well known pro-communist Hanoi propagandists as D. Gareth Gary Porter, David Marr, and possibly George Hildebrand, Guy Gran, etc.
Hopefully in veteran journalist Sol Sanders relatively recent autobiography you’ll find out who Kahin really was re communist ties going back to Indonesia and possibly Thailand in the 1940’s/50’s.
There is some information on those Cornell graduates who worked in the pro-Hanoi “Indochina Resource Center” and related projects t www.keywiki.org, search under “Hanoi Lobby”. Some of the above names appear as witnesses for various pro-communist Hanoi front groups before Congress in their attempts to cut aid to our beleaguered allies in the 1971-75 period.
In fact, Porter,Fred Branfman and Kahin testified against aid to SVN at the Sen. Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on Foreign Assistance and Economic Policy”, on S. 633, Feb. 24 and March 6, 1975. Kahin was identified as “Cornell University on behalf of Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)”.
The FCNL was a registered lobbying arm of the Society of Friends but its leadership, including Ed Snyder, Ex. Secy, had incredibly long records of supporting No. Vietnam and the VC against So. Vietnam.
Tom Hayden, who created and led the absolutely pro-Hanoi lobbying and propaganda arm known as the Indochina Peace Campaign, also testified in these hearings.
If you want just one issue to see Kahin’s coverup “academic” scholarship in his book “The US in Vietnam”, see the pathetic paragraphs on the slaughter that Ho, Truong Chinh and Giap etc brought against their own people who protested the disasterous “Land Reform” and other policies.[See: “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”, Sen. Internal Security Subcom., Sen. Judiciary Committee, 1972, and Chapter 6 “The Vietnam Workers Party: Liberalization and Peasant Revolt”, in the masterpiece on the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) by Robert Turner (later professor), “Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development”, Hoover Institution, 1975.
As for Lansdale, Boot is half right and half wrong, the book reviewer is full of crap and the author is more full of crap.
Since known of them knew Gen. Ed Lansdale, everything they have is second hand or “hearsay” - not that the stories people tell of working with Lansdale are incorrect, etc.
My late friend Kuomintang Gen. Bernie Yoh (See: “SACO: Sino-American Combined Operations” book for his WW2 exploits against the Japanese in China), worked with Lansdale in the Mekong Delta, including among the famous Sea Swallows of Fr. Hoa (they cleared much of their province of hardcore VC units) (Just saw book of “Outlook” magazine preprinted stories on VN which included the story of Fr. Hoa and his group of anti-communist local forces) - in Barnes & Noble.
Using Lansdale’s great knowledge of guerrilla warfare (He led efforts against the communist Huks in the Philippines), the retired general and Yoh helped to organize SVN local militias against the VC (RFs, PFs, PSDF predecessors) in the Delta.
When I was in the Delta in the Fall of 1970, I travelled from the coast to the Cambodian border (Chau Phu Mt., Chau Doc province), down to Ca Mau at the southern tip of the region, and things were going very well. ARVN forces took the U Minh Forest from the NVA, something no other military force had been able to do in over 40 years.
The “hearts and minds” program, when well run and funded, created literally miracles in the Delta from economic, educational, to medical and administrative successes anyone could see if they wanted to (Not the NY Times’ correspondent who was in the same village that I was at the same time).
Lansdale, Yoh and John Vann (among other Americans) had a lot of really good, workable ideas on how to get the local populace to resist the communists by improving their lives as well as to get the central SVN govt involved in this process as a sign to the people that they cared (which is why the Revolutionary Cadre program was created and led by former Viet Minh officer Nguyen Be - whose training center had a huge black turkey as their mascot at Vung Tau).
The Hanoi Lobby Left, esp. in academia, is still, today, trying to portray Ho and his murderers as some kind of “freedom fighters” despite the fact that they never gave real freedom to any of the countries they invaded/conquered.
One website you might like to visit for more information on all of the above if www.vvfh.org (Vietnam Veterans for Factual History). This is one of the few national veterans organizations that is taking a counter-disinformation academic offensive against the Hanoi Lobby in the educational systems.
VVFH is made up of combat Viet vets who got into teaching and include the aforementioned Prof. Robert Turner (Un. of Va. Law School), and others.
Finally a national effort is underway to counter the leftist crap that is being “taught” at our universities from Notre Dame, Purdue, Wisconsin, many California schools, and many smaller colleges, down to high schools.
Max Boot is sometimes just as confused about Vietnam as are real hardcore Leftists but I don’t think he is intentionally shilling for Hanoi like Chomsky, Furr, Franklin, the late Marilyn Young (NYU), the late Ed Herman (Un. of Pa), Cortright, Appy, etc.
The battle is on for the “truth” about Vietnam, which you will not find in the Ken Burns/Novick films, nor many new books by the Left.
The truth is very complex and if you don’t know history, or for many of us, you if haven’t been there during the war, you can easily be deluded by the concerted Academic Hanoi Lobby disinformation/indoctrination courses and books that are flooding America.
Organizations such as VVFH are dedicated to the truth, no matter what it is.
good stuff... they don’t call it Big Red for nothing.
John Vann, one of the unsung heroes if the VN war
i’ll look into the VVFH
thx
Lyndon Johnson was told in 1964, before he ever shipped in the first American ground combat troops, that it would take a commitment of 500,000 combat troops and 5 years of fighting to defeat North Vietnam.
A 500,000 man field army is very expensive and Lyndon Johnson was not willing to fund it. Vietnam was for him an annoying distraction from his Great Society welfare state- that was his true love- he was only willing to send in enough military power to “demonstrate American resolve”. Which of course ended up being a much longer, bloodier and more expensive war that ended poorly. You can find all of the details in McMaster’s excellent book “Dereliction of Duty”.
Lyndon Johnson was told in 1964, before he ever shipped in the first American ground combat troops, that it would take a commitment of 500,000 combat troops and 5 years of fighting to defeat North Vietnam.
A 500,000 man field army is very expensive and Lyndon Johnson was not willing to fund it. Vietnam was for him an annoying distraction from his Great Society welfare state- that was his true love- he was only willing to send in enough military power to “demonstrate American resolve”. Which of course ended up being a much longer, bloodier and more expensive war that ended poorly. You can find all of the details in McMaster’s excellent book “Dereliction of Duty”.
At about the same time, local cadres in the Mekong Delta were handing out thousands of land titles to former tenant farmers. The statement was then made, “The NVA will never conquer South Viet Nam through the Mekong River provinces.” That statement proved true. In effect, the hearts and minds of the Delta inhabitants had been won. Later, when the Communists tried to sequester land titles they had a fight on their hand, and instead of collectivization, gave it up.
All my young years were news and reports and of course my peers and dads going off to Vietnam and those that returned not in coffins had not much nice to say about war. Mothers tears and funerals, and idiots burning draft cards, cutting off their fingers and trying all sorts of crap to avoid the draft. That was my youth.
I was lucky. Graduated a year early and Vietnam collapsed just after my 17th B day in 1975. But through my early HS years there was a dark cloud around all of us, will we be drafted, will our lotto numbers come up? Will our grades be good enough to go to college? Do we really want to fight a war in a jungle when we have barely figured out sex and can't drink?
So again, thank you Vietnam Vets for doing all the work so I didn't have to enter the fray. Could it have been different? Yes, but it happened. It's history. We actually won that but you would not know unless you spoke with the vets coming home telling us HS kids,"it's over kid, don't worry about it. We won by God but it was bad."
To Bookshelf. You are right about the local RD cadre giving out “Land to the Tiller” land titles in the Delta, which is why the VC assassinated some of them. It was very successful and the landowners got a title encased in plastic to preserve it.
The VC tried to confiscate these documents and met a lot of resistance from the new landowners, who were armed, often as part of the PFs or PSFD forces (who I met with in both Pleiku and the Delta.
When you read the transcripts of Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation (which I got as part of a special FBIS journalists’ packet), you could follow the instructions and targeting of SVN officials and operations. These were described as successes and “threats to the revolution”.
Teachers, medical personnel, agricultural specialists, etc. were also targeted but this turned the population against the VC which is why there were no major revolts against the SVN govt in the Delta even during Tet.
In fact, when I was there I n the Fall, 1970, the VCI (Viet Cong Infrastructure) was falling apart in many provinces, bigtime with leading cadre often bringing in the smaller fish, plus aggressive ARVN counter-measures were decimating the VCI understand).
Of COURSE the Vietnam war could have ended differently. If there were no LBJ in office, it could have ended VERY differently!
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