Bullshit on Vietnam. We could have won if the administrations (LBJ and Nixon) had listened to the military leaders on the ground, esp. at the Provincial level. They knew where the enemy was, esp. the Ho Chi Minh Trail and how it could be taken out or just taken to the point that Hanoi could no longer send men and supplies down it with limited impunity.
We should have destroyed the port of Haiphong in the beginning, plugged up the Mu Gia Pass and then bombed (with some good stuff) the HCMT while putting a couple divisions across it. Every military ground veteran who was out there said it could be done.
Our strategies after Tet also greatly improved as did the So. Vietnamese military. Fighting the NVA with AK 47s and PRGs and all the artillery they wanted, with M1’s and some M14’s was not a winning strategy for the ARVN.
The same with poorly armored APCs (Battle of Ap Bac, early on), almost no 155’s to reply against NVN best in the world Soviet Bloc artillery.
No real efforts to take out Hanoi and Red China’s opium/heroin production (there is more to that than you know).
Congress crippled our aid efforts to the Cambodians, deliberately, and many Cambodian soldiers and their families were killed (often by massacres) when it need not have happened). I was there for a week and saw a local militia whose arms looked like a WW I museum collection.
The Cambodian Air Force was a few T-28s, and I counted about 15 Mig 15’s on the runway at Ponchentong Airport that couldn’t fly because they had no spare parts to maintain them. Their jet air force consisted of two French Fougrois Magister trainers that flew over us.
As for the “Great Society”, it was a liberal failure at its creation and LBJ should have known better than to try to bribe societal reform.
Also, many of our Republicans failed to, as usual, take on the Democrats and make decent arguments for their positions, and this failure went right up to the White House and NSC (again, I was there as a journalist and had friends in high places).
We always seems to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and the Democrats since the 1980’s have made that their national policy. I call it treason.
We always seems to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and the Democrats since the 1980’s have made that their national policy. I call it treason.
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I agree! I also call the article’s statement about our “Military Defeat” a bunch of Communist Supporting Bull Crap. We DID NOT suffer a “military defeat.” We suffered a Political Choice of throwing in the towel because of the peacenics. We have as a nation, never recovered from the Jane Fondas of that time. I call their actions Treason of the highest order for which they should have been drawn and quartered! And that includes our former Sec. of State, John F. Kerry.
It is my firm conviction that if the John Kerry-Ted Kennedy wing of the Congress had not forced our military to lose what should have been a very manageable victory in VN, the rise of islamofascism may not have been engendered, or would at the least have been slowed and quickly extinguished. We will be paying for the horrendous missteps of the Kennedys, including the 1964 immigration bill, for the rest of the century, should our nation continue to last.