True. And during those ten years, we killed the main part of the vicious old ex-Viet Minh "Hard Core" VC and many or most of the older NVA leadership. Can you imagine how horrific things would have been in Vietnam if those original fanatics had taken control? The revenge murders and reeducation camps were bad enough ten years after the fact.
We also bought a certain measure of respect, in that the Communist credo was that American capitalists were nothing but weak, degenerate "paper tigers", nothing significant in the unstoppable path of worldwide socialist revolution.
Then we show up, hundreds of thousands of us, pale and only recently integrated, the wrong uniforms of the wrong material, boots that rotted as soon as they hit the paddies and supplied by slow ships and mostly prop planes over 9,000 miles of open ocean. We had out-of-touch leaders and primitive tactics and the only maps we had were from the French.
We adapted. We adapted to finding out that there were a lot more enemy than anyone back in Washington had guessed. We adapted to the local VC with their damnable booby traps and their life-sucking rice paddies, we adapted to the Hard Core VC with their carefully-planned and merciless ambushes and night attacks, we adapted to the "Hard Hat" NVA with their modern weapons and even artillery and tanks and their huge numbers. We learned to fight in the lowland, the rivers, the mountains with triple-canopy jungle. We learned to kill and beat them all, while the world watched and carped and second-guessed. We even learned that the Vietnamese people, whether they supported the VC or the ARVN were the whole object of our war, the people we came to protect.
We put up with the mind-numbing heat, the month-long rains, the ridiculously poor M16, the Dear John letters, the 194-lot C-Rations, and the pinheads at home who quit on us even before the war started.
So what did we end up with? Well for one, we weren't the United States who let Hungary die while offering words of comfort and nothing else, and we weren't just offering bags of rice this time - we were offering the lives of our most precious sons for another people entirely and no matter what the world thought of our war, they saw a far stronger, more resilient American than they thought still existed. Meanwhile Thailand, and Indonesia, and the Philippines, and Malaysia and Myanmar got a breather from the communist steamroller for ten good years - enough to shake the fever.
When the Cold War finally choked to death, it was the vision of all those young American men and their poor suffering families that the Soviets saw at the negotiation table. There were no more National Liberation Wars, ever again.
Well said ...
As the Brits say .... Hear Hear
Excellent Gyrene ... Excellent.
Well stated, Brother, thanks!
I don’t think any sane person questions for one minute the bravery, or determination of the American soldier in Vietnam, but no one, not even the soldiers themselves can argue that much of that life spent did not need to be, had better policy and leadership existed in DC.
Yes, we killed more of the enemy than they killed of us, but how much of that life lost that was ours was preventable? That’s not an irrational or unfair question, and it is not remotely a question that questions the determination or sacrifice of the American Soldier.
I don’t argue with anything you claim was bought, but the belief that that could have been bought without less loss of life, is not an irrational one.