Donald Trump Blasts Obama’s Military Weakness; ‘Bring Back Patton’

“I don’t think he had much at all to do with Corsica.”

That could be, I’m not sure at what point Patton left 7th Army for the 3rd. The 7th Army went from North Africa to Sicily to Corsica, and from there landed in southern France. I like to tell dad that he invaded the French Riviera.

“Patton could be difficult: one must wonder how anyone would have fared serving under him.”

A family friend of ours was a young German POW, maybe about 17 at the time. While Walter was confined as a POW Patton employed him as a sort of valet. Among other duties he polished Patton’s riding boots. He’d leave the freshly polished boots outside Patton’s bedroom door before the General’s morning ride. One morning Patton took the boots inside and a few seconds later they came flying back out the door with Patton shouting “Dirty!”- Walter had missed a line of dirt in the crease between the heel and sole.

One night some MPs came to get Walter. They had a US Army overcoat for him to put on. They drove him past the camp gate and took him into town, to a dance for the local young people. The MPs waited outside until the dance was over and then took Walter back to the POW camp. Years later Walter was still amazed that the MPs did this, which greatly amused my father although he never let on. It was very obvious to dad that Patton had ordered the MPs to do this, there is no way in the world that those MPs did that on their own. The gruff and harsh General George Patton kept his act of kindness well concealed but it was there, at least in this one instance.

“I beg to differ: this was a counterinsurgency, not WWII. The overarching plan was to keep the harmless locals alive while defeating the NVA and VC on what battlefields we could pin them to.”

I agree that that was Kennedy and Johnson’s plan, and pretty much Nixon’s, but it didn’t work because Hanoi also got to vote in how that war was going to be fought. And after waiting for the American people to get fed up with years of casualties and no end in sight Hanoi ultimately conquered South Vietnam in 1975 via a massive armored invasion that George Patton would have recognized.

The NVA had learned in 1964 that they couldn’t afford to take on US troops in conventional battle, at the battle of Ia Drang Valley made famous in ‘We Were Soldiers Once and Young’. So their strategy was to keep pressure on South Vietnam by murdering local village officials and keeping up a chronic low level insurgency.

Hanoi seemed more than willing to sacrifice all of the Viet Cong because they probably didn’t want them around anyway. The VC was shot to pieces in the 1968 Tet Offensive and ceased to be an effective force. They were replaced with NVA infiltrators.

The sole reason that Hanoi was able to wage a 25 year insurgency is because we allowed North Vietnam to remain a sanctuary for the entire war. They could resupply and regroup at will. Their two main cities were intact. Their large harbor was open for most of the war. We allowed the Ho Chi Minh trail to remain open because it crossed into neighboring Laos and Cambodia.

There was one prominent American who did say that we should either take the war directly to North Vietnam or get the hell out, and that was Barry Goldwater in the 1964 campaign. And Goldwater knew well that the threat of the USSR and China entering the war was overblown- Goldwater was both a US Senator and a major general in the Air Force. The USSR and China had an acrimonious split in 1962 and weren’t interested in playing at nuclear war with the United States. But they were perfectly happy to bleed American manpower forever by supplying Hanoi with equipment if we wanted to leave North Vietnam off limits.

Ah, the joys of re-fighting Vietnam!

Some of what you're saying is obviously true: we had our government micromanaging the war from afar and including really stupid stuff like Macnamara's genius plans for nuclear landmines at the DMZ and "Project 100,000".

Other stuff is just silly - going all Curtis Lemay and bombing cities wouldn't have helped much. At the end, Nixon bombed Hanoi enthusiastically but all that got us was a lot of lost B-52s and a bad deal for ending the war. We did bomb the supply sites, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, bridges and pretty much else but that only served to slow things a little bit and hand the enemy a lot of airman prisoners.

The real problems of fighting in Vietnam was really a whole lot of things:

1.We were conducting a long-distance war pretty much on our own in the days of piston-engine transport planes and at best, Boeing 707s and C-141s. The real support took weeks to get there and it was expensive. This at a time when we had the War on Poverty, the Space Race, and an ongoing Cold War to pay for.

2. The center of gravity in that war was the South Vietnamese government and their ability to support and protect their own people. We essentially steamrolled over Saigon an dismissed them as inept and corrupt when getting them on their feet and adequately supported should have been the focus of effort.

3. Nah, we're the modern superpower and we rolled in with the latest 1960s gear and promptly killed a lot of trees with F-4s and Thuds that couldn't hit a 500 meter circle to save their lives. The enemy weren't supermen, there was just a lot of them. We had the local VC who were really just farmers with old rifles whose main contribution was informing on their neighbors and bothering us with extra prisoners to feed. We had the Main Force VC or "Hard Core" VC who were much less numerous but very effective at night attacks, ambushes, and the main casualty-producer, mines and booby traps. They were also good at murdering our allies in the villagers after we left them. Then we had the "Hard Hats", the NVA regulars which were numerous and effective and tough and well-equipped and never seem to come in anything less than battalions when you ran into them. They were good fighters but they were from "out of town" so they had trouble dealing with the local conditions and often made the mistake of trying to beat us in a head-on fight.

4. Because of the long distances from the "World" to Vietnam, logistics became overwhelming, requiring a preponderance of maintenance and supply and administrative troops and very damn few combat troops in proportion. Something like 10% teeth to 90% tail in reality. That meant that we never had the actual combat forces available to prosecute an effective 7 day a week campaign against all the forces the enemy had in the field. Our infantry was aggressive and deadly but getting worn out through day-to-day attrition from wounds and diseases.

5. As pointed out before, we discovered that a huge shift had taken place among our own people. Since the wonderful days of the "Greatest Generation" our people decided that fighting someplace a long ways away was just too much to do for their country and found wonderfully imaginative ways of avoiding going to war. Everything from running off to Canada, hiding out in college, declaring themselves to be homosexuals, or just hiding under the bed and hoping for a high draft lottery number became popular. I guess that all those 4Fs from WWII must have had a lot of kids. The American women also saddled up to the effort by massively finding somebody else while we were deployed to Vietnam and sent Dear John letters fit to beat the band.

Those of us who did go and fight did well. An enemy unit that stood and fought lost, period and by the last days they were drastically thinned out. If we had had the backing, they would be voting Republican today but a combination of weakness in the American spirit at home combined with a government that didn't have the talent or the will to win let the enemy finally take over.

We did fine. Too bad most of you stayed home.

“We did fine. Too bad most of you stayed home.”

Considering that I didn’t turn 18 until 1969 I wasn’t in much demand to join you all. But I’d been paying close attention to Vietnam since 1962 when my father did a tour as part of MACV. We had ARVN officers rotating through our house for years when we lived in DC and I was familiar with how the war was being fought. Strategic Hamlets and other ideas dreamt up by Kennedy’s whiz kids who wanted to believe that they were only dealing with an insurgency. But it was a protracted invasion from the North and the only way to end it with dispatch would have been to focus the battle on them and not in the South.

“Other stuff is just silly - going all Curtis Lemay and bombing cities wouldn’t have helped much”

Well ‘going Curtis LeMay’ is what ultimately convinced Japan to give up. But focusing on bombing alone is a mistake since the way to end aggression would have required taking their territory and capturing their leaders. What we did in Berlin and Tokyo.

“1.We were conducting a long-distance war pretty much on our own... at a time when we had the War on Poverty, the Space Race, and an ongoing Cold War to pay for.”

The distances were about the same as in the Pacific War. We had supply bases in the PI and Thailand. The Aussies and the ROKs were helping us, they didn’t want a Communist beachhead on their doorstep.

The spending priorities you mention were largely Johnson’s decision. The Cold War and NASA were ongoing but no one forced Johnson to add the massive Great Society welfare spending. His decision was to downplay Vietnam in order to fund his welfare programs.

“2. The center of gravity in that war was the South Vietnamese government and their ability to support and protect their own people...”

Kennedy really set chaos in motion when he approved of the coup against Diem. Vietnam was rudderless for years afterwards and probably led to Johnson’s decision to send American GIs. But the decision to make the government of South Vietnam the center of gravity was our choice. We could have made Hanoi and its aggression the focus.

“3. ... The enemy weren’t supermen, there was just a lot of them....Then we had the “Hard Hats”, the NVA regulars which were numerous and effective and tough and well-equipped and never seem to come in anything less than battalions when you ran into them. They were good fighters but they were from “out of town” so they had trouble dealing with the local conditions and often made the mistake of trying to beat us in a head-on fight.”

We learned after the war that we had eliminated nearly an entire generation of NV men. Huge losses, above what our wizards believed would make them quit but they were committed to taking the South.

Giap learned from Ia Drang that it was a mistake to engage American troops directly. That was 1964 and I suspect it would have only gotten worse for him as we learned the region better. But it seems to me that he would have been forced into exactly the sort of fight he wanted to avoid if we had made him fight for his territory instead of letting him dictate the time and place that he was willing to battle.

“4. Because of the long distances from the “World” to Vietnam, logistics became overwhelming, requiring a preponderance of maintenance and supply and administrative troops and very damn few combat troops in proportion. Something like 10% teeth to 90% tail in reality...”

Your numbers are on the mark. When we had 500,000 troops committed only 35,000-50,000 were in direct combat. But the logistics were ones we managed to deal with in WWII. It was a matter of priorities and our political leaders were happy with half measures. Not so good for those of you at the tooth end of things.

“5. As pointed out before, we discovered that a huge shift had taken place among our own people. Since the wonderful days of the “Greatest Generation” our people decided that fighting someplace a long ways away was just too much to do for their country and found wonderfully imaginative ways of avoiding going to war. “

There was a large measure of public support for the first couple of years after the Gulf of Tonkin and the commitment of combat troops. But the protracted nature of the war, the lack of a clear plan to win it, the 2S deferments that let some people get out while others served eroded public support. Americans aren’t the most patient people in the world.

You are persistent, I'll give you that - but even though your Dad worked for MACV and you followed the war closely as a kid, trust me, I saw everything much closer than you did.

The "Center of Gravity" I referred to is that no counterinsurgency will ever work if you don't have a viable system left to run things and defend themselves when you stop helping. We had a kind of disdain for the ARVN while we were there, sort of an institutional bias for everyone that weren't Marines, I guess but not without some basis. Where we took the damn ball and ran, in hindsight I'd say that it would have been more effective to shore up Thieu or whomever and make the ARVNs into a long-term fighting force.

God bless the Aussies and the ROK Marines and the Filipinos, I guess but there weren't enough of them there to direct traffic, much less take on the NVA 308B Division. We took that on.

The young people today had a hard time in Iraq and Afghanistan but I don't think any of them have any conception of what over 400 dead a week among your division looks like (Operation Hastings). We had a river of wounded slowly flowing home through Clark AFB in the Philippines, Tachikawa AFB and Yokosuka Naval Hospital in Japan and a hundred other stops on the road home. I was part of that flow in '67 and it was three years before I could resume active duty and later go back to Vietnam as a Lieutenant in '75.

I am very proud of us and who we were and how we did. Just not as proud of our country - like you said, "Americans aren’t the most patient people in the world". To deserve people like us, people who were willing to give up our youth, our health, our positions with friends and family back home, even our lives - our country needs to be better than that.

“trust me, I saw everything much closer than you did.”

I’m sure that you did. I tend to put a lot more value in what those on the ground know than ‘official’ versions that are too often filtered. I picked up a good deal about Vietnam by listening to dad and his LtC friends talk shop.

One of his classmates in Staff and Command college at Leavenworth had just returned from Vietnam in 1955-56 and briefed the class because no else knew a thing about the place. Dad’s Pentagon office partner did a tour in 1961 and wrote back saying “they may not be calling it a war but they’re sure using up ammunition like it is one”. A year later dad had his own tour.

“The “Center of Gravity” I referred to is that no counterinsurgency will ever work if you don’t have a viable system left to run things and defend themselves when you stop helping.”

True. Kennedy and his boys greatly complicated that effort when they managed to get Diem and his family assassinated, which effectively decapitated South Vietnam for about four years.

“We had a kind of disdain for the ARVN while we were there, sort of an institutional bias for everyone that weren’t Marines, I guess but not without some basis.”

Vietnam lacked a strong sense of nationhood, a problem similar to what we found in Iraq. Hard to get the locals to fight for something that they aren’t especially committed to. From what I’ve read South Vietnamese Marines were pretty good fighters as long as they had gas and ammunition. ARVN and the SV Marines turned back the NVA’s Easter Offensive in 1972. But they didn’t stand a chance in 1975 after the Watergate Democrats cut off all supplies to them, a very black mark in Congress’ history.

“To deserve people like us, people who were willing to give up our youth, our health, our positions with friends and family back home, even our lives - our country needs to be better than that.”

I came to basically the same conclusion as the war dragged on and the peace movement became the heroes of the press and politicians here stateside. Very discouraging in all respects.

I think that "discouraging" is very apt. As you can tell, even almost 50 years and much more time in uniform (I served 27 years altogether) I am still too focused on a single year-and-a-half in the early part of my life.

It isn't just me, though. I am always in contact with others who made it back and they still carry the sorrow and the pride from way back then.

While I was working at Quantico in 2005 I had to go get my base sticker renewed at the Provost Marshal's and while I was the, I noticed that one of the MPs was grey-haired and a little portly and maybe just a bit old to be a lance corporal. I called him over and asked him if "rank was really that hard to get in the MP field".

He and I went to lunch and he told me that he had been a grunt in Vietnam and had been wounded and sent home to recuperate - he showed me his scar on his forearm where the bullet had gone through. While he was home, he watched the news programs and listened to his family and friends and he said he realized that "his country didn't love him anymore" and he deserted to northern Michigan and changed his name and disappeared.

Many years later he was stopped for some traffic violation and the police discovered his real identity and handed him over to the Marine Corps. The Corps in its wisdom offered him two choices: a court-martial or to serve his remaining year or so on active duty. Thus we had a 60 year old lance corporal MP for a while. He was happy to be back with us.

Thanks for the invigorating discussion of our war. I'll always be proud of those Marines and soldiers and Navy Corpsmen and all the others who spent those years with us.

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