If we bombed them, they would have withdrawn as the General points out . . .
We did bomb them - endlessly. They were in "Total War." We were in a limited war. That is not the fault of the anti-war crowd - that's the fault of leadership. You can't lead the country where it does not want to go. I was just an Army Huey driver. On my first tour (67) I was in Pleiku. At the end of 67 my unit, the 119th Assault Helicopter Co., worked what was called FOB2 out of Kontum for a month. We put all kinds of people well across the border into Laos. Their purpose was to gather intell and/or disrupt the flow of men and material on the Ho Chi Minh Superhighway. Ours missions were just part of the effort. Many times our missions had to be squeezed in between Tac Air and B-52 sorties also lined up to interdict day and night.
Did it stop the flow? Hardly! After a year and a half at Mother Rucker imparting my vast knowledge of helicopter intrument flying to students I was back in Nam. Only this time I was in the tri-border region to the North (South Vietnam-North Vietnam-Laos) (West of Pleiku was, of course, Cambodia-Laos-South Vietnam). For a few months in early 70 my job was to fly the Army's 24th Corp Arty CG around the AO. He loved to fly and his big guns (175s and 155) at firebases south of the DMZ were trained on those fingers of the Trail coming into South Vietnam from Laos. Of course the best way to see the results of the daily poundings by Arty and airstrikes was from the open door of a UH-1. Day and night they would be hit. And day after day we would be in the area south of Khe Sanh to see how they had hacked out another click of road. No sign of trucks and men and whatever, but they were down there, probably in holes.
As Paul Harvey would say, "Now you know . . . "
Was it General Giap? Whoever? He short-changes his own troops. They had the will and desire. We did not. LBJ can rot in hell.
I don't want Kerry (or any other democrat) to be president but not because he may have or may not have thrown medals over the WH fence. Listen to some of the LBJ tapes when he is discussing the conduct of the war with McNamara or other lackies. He was tormented from the beginning and never had a plan for winning. I will never forgive him for that.