Army, Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN)

Talk about a bum rap and a raw deal.  It’s been over 33 years since Saigon fell in April 1975.  The hardcore protesters forming the core of the antiwar movement today draws upon its experience in the protests of the 60s, against the Vietnam War.  The peaceniks bust on Bush and the neocons for refusing to admit that the Iraq War was a mistake, or that what’s going on now isn’t a colossal goatfuck.  Yet Saigon fell, thousands of Vietnamese fled, in makeshift boats, and continue coming to the US even today.  And somehow, the Vietnam War was a huge mistake on our part?  Were we wrong to have attempted to save South Vietnam from the communist, totalitarian regime of the North?  Aren’t the peaceniks, and their allies in the liberal media, responsible, at least partly, for the bloodbath which did in fact follow from the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, a collapse which occurred because the antiwar movement was successful at getting the US to abandon South Vietnam?

Part of the excuse the leftists and their media lackeys use to try to extract themselves from any apology, admission, or retraction on the issue (which should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about it) is to slam the ARVN and President Thieu, blaming the victim, as it were.

I’ve now read Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN by Andrew Wiest.  Clearly the ARVN wasn’t the tightest, most badass military machine the world has ever known.  Many of its generals were appointed politically and were more interested in money and power than defeating the North Vietnamese (the same accusation could be made about many of the early Union generals in our own Civil War).  And the leaders of South Vietnam weren’t exactly Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln – but then again, neither were the majority of the other 40 Presidents.

But what really comes out in the book vetoes that.  Here are some of the more pertinent facts about the ARVN and the war effort:

1.   Although many of the top generals were, in fact, politically appointed, and desertion was always an issue (as it also was with the VC and NVA, for that matter), there were some notably competent ARVN generals and officers.  General Truong, Hue Ngoc Tran, and Dinh Van Pham are three mentioned prominent in Forgotten Army.  Unfortunately, ARVN salaries were always very low (no one joins the military because it pays well) which had a corresponding impact on morale. 

2.  The ARVN had its share of elite Ranger, Airborne and Marine units which performed well in battle.

3.  For much of Westmoreland’s time, the ARVN was shunted down as a poor relation to the US military, which took the more active role in large scale military operations.  ARVN officers were not trained to call in artillery and air support, which was restricted to the US advisors serving with ARVN units.  Then when US units were pulled out, the US did a poor job training ARVN officers to take over this role.

4.  The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a military disaster for the communists.  Whether it be the US Embassy compound in Saigon, or Hue, all territory taken by the NVA was ultimately lost, and lost with high casualties by the NVA.   The VC was wiped out as a relevant military force after this.  Also, the ARVN acquitted itself particularly well during these engagements, much to the surprise of the NVA.

5.  In 1969 the US and ARVN continued to gain ground and wipe out the NVA.  Unfortunately, the idiocy of Hamburger Hill persuaded Congress and the US public to pull the plug, at which point Nixon began withdrawing US troops from South Vietnam. 

6.   Even during the Easter Offensive of 1972, by which point most of the US ground forces had been withdrawn, the ARVN still gave the NVA a bloody nose.  It was three years before the NVA could launch another offensive.  They had to bide their time while Nixon & Kissinger dicked away at the Paris peace talks and Congress eventually lost patience and completely pulled the plug on military aid to the ARVN, at a time at which China was still supplying tanks, planes, SAMs, and AK-47s to the NVA.

7.   Westmoreland out, Abrams in.  In June 1968, Abrams took over as commander of US forces in Vietnam.  Westmoreland employed “search and destroy” tactics, in which enemy forces would be defeated, then an area left for the enemy to simply walk back in when the US and ARVN had left; in other words, a battle of attrition to simply kill as many NVA as possible, thus this misplaced focus on “body counts”.  By contrast, Abrams’ strategy was “clear and hold”, in which a permanent presence was established once an area was cleared of VC/NVA, and an infrastructure and liaison was permanently established with the locals (not merely given lip service).  This had been tried in the early 60s under Diem, but when he was assassinated the revolving door of various ARVN generals in command let the policies lapse, to the point where by 1965 US intervention was necessary.  In ’68-72, as in the early 60s, this policy paid off well.  Abrams also focused on developing the ARVN as an independent force, knowing that without US forces to back them up, the ARVN itself would be shouldering the majority of the effort.  Westmoreland himself had given short shrift to the ARVN, giving US forces primary responsibility and letting the ARVN atrophy by default.

8.  The problem was that Abrams had only been in a year when Nixon pulled the plug.  When the US forces withdrew, there weren’t enough ARVN replacements to fill the vacuum, so areas which had been “cleared and held” had to be left to the NVA to take back.  In other words, Abrams’ strategy had not been given enough time to work.  The US advisors on the ground reported extremely favorable results at the local level at winning the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese peasants – AFTER Abrams finally gave that portion true priority and not merely lip service.  Advisors like John Paul Vann argued – based on what he saw at the village level – that after 1968 the tide was indeed turning in favor of the US & ARVN.

Puppets?  The peaceniks claim that the South Vietnamese government had no legitimacy in the eyes of Vietnamese, whereas the North Vietnamese dictatorship did.  Consider the following facts:

1.         The NVA was supplied by China and the USSR, it could not have produced the tanks, MiG-21s, SAMs, or AK-47s itself.  The North Vietnamese regime was as much as Chinese puppet as the South was a puppet of the US.

2.         In 1955-56, when the border was established between North and South Vietnam, approximately 450,000 Vietnamese left North Vietnam to go to South Vietnam.  The amount who went North was approximately 10% of this number. 

3.         The NVA expected, when it launched its Tet Offensive in 1968, that the people of South Vietnam would welcome its forces into the cities with open arms, as liberators.  WRONG.  Not only did the South Vietnamese not welcome the NVA, the ARVN fought twice as hard against them. 

4.         Finally, the real proof came in 1975, when the North took over completely.  The waves of refugees leaving Vietnam, and the fact that there are expatriate communities in California and my area, should put paid to any claim that the South Vietnamese really wanted the NVA to come down and “liberate” them.  Whoever believes that is seriously mistaken.

Nixon vs. the Press.  The press acted as a magnifying effect on certain portions of the American public who were not only against the war, but loud and angry about it and willing to protest in public.  Even today I see that the protestors in DC get a disproportionate amount of coverage by the media, which invariably takes them at face value and pretty much gives them as much publicity as they want.  Of course we have Walter Cronkite, who offered his own pithy, idiotic opinion on the whole thing.  Rather than simply giving us FACTS, and the correct ones at that, the press decided to jump on the NVA bandwagon (Jane Fonda) and do what they could to influence politicians such as Nixon to pull out.

The equation is:  X (actual anti-war sentiment in the US) times Y (multiplier effect of liberal media grossly distorting this sentiment out of proportion to its true size) + N (Nixon) = VN (Vietnamization - US withdrawal from Vietnam at a time at which Abrams’ strategies are finally working).  Without the Y factor distorting X, Nixon would not have been in the position of doing VN.

The Johnson Administration, and Westmoreland, deserve some blame.  In particular, Westmoreland idiotic attrition strategy and “light at the end of the tunnel” propaganda was a matter of the boy crying wolf: it was bullshit, so when things actually did turn around, no one would believe the Pentagon anymore.  Certainly Daniel Ellsberg didn’t help by leaking the Pentagon Papers.  But none of this changes what was really going on in 1968 and 1969 – the war was being won.

Also, much of the abuse and scorn thrown on the ARVN comes from US military sources, although these same sources also give credit to the ARVN when it did fight well.

Bottom line was that, never mind corrupt ARVN generals or imperfect South Vietnamese politicians, in 1969 the war was winnable and could have been won by the US and ARVN working together.  They had finally developed a working relationship which was paying dividends, yet the strategically insignificant, Pyrrhic victory on Hamburger Hill, plus the ’68 Tet Offensive, persuaded all the geniuses back home, who did NOT know what was really going on, on the ground in Vietnam, that the war could not be won, just at the point at which it was the most winnable.  In other words, under Abrams the ARVN became a fighting force which could have worked with the US to permanently remove the threat of NVA invasion of South Vietnam.