Vietnam War

 

Yet again I notice a massive oversight:  I’ve done blogs on all those obscure wars no one really cares about, but haven’t addressed this one directly, though I have done so in other blogs.  This war actually occurred in my own lifetime and veterans exist in my presence, though I’m not aware of any relatives who fought.  My uncles were WWII veterans and too old by this time, most of my male cousins were too young, the only one possibly old enough was in college and probably exempt from the draft for that reason.

 Golf.  My brother likes to play golf, a hobby I don’t share – my preference is shooting guns at the range.  So sometimes they pair him up with a partner.  One time his partner wound up being an elderly veteran.  My brother asked him, “WWII?” which prompted Mr. War Guy to respond, “how old do you think I am?  No, Vietnam.”  Well, with the war 40 years ago and no children serving, that means US Vietnam war veterans (enlisted men, NCOs and junior officers) would be at least 60-70 years old by now; senior officers and generals would be long dead.  By now the WWII veterans are dead, and absent magic, so would be our AEF and Civil War veterans as well.  As noted earlier, the last veterans of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) died in the early 1950s.

 Draft.  This was the last war for which we actually drafted soldiers – we switched to a volunteer military in 1973.  The Selective Service is still in existence and I happily registered when I turned 18 in January 1987, but my subpar hearing kept me out of West Point, ROTC, JAG, and the National Guard.   

 Movies.  There are plenty of movies about the war. I don’t think I’ll try to mention all of them, but those of them that I will mention, I will cite chronologically in the narrative.  I’m also seeing some Vietnam War segments in “The Umbrella Academy”, to the point where the character (Klaus, #4) is still wearing his combat uniform back home far away from combat.   See below….

 Background.  Among other items which French Emperor Louis Napoleon, aka Napoleon III, accomplished between 1848 and 1870 – the biggest being expanding Paris to its current 20 Arrondissement size and giving us those wide avenues – the other foreign policy “thing” he did outside Mexico was taking “Indochina” from China and making Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia a French colony.  Hanoi and Saigon received a French treatment, the latter becoming the de facto “Paris of Southeast Asia” – just as Beirut was the “Paris of the Middle East” and Bucharest fancies itself the “Paris of Eastern Europe”. 

 During WWII the Japanese took Indochina away from France, while the Germans took France away from France.  We sent advisors to Vietnam to help a communist guy, Ho Chi Minh, train his own rebels, the Viet Minh, to fight against the Japanese.  They did so with the understanding and expectation that after the war, Vietnam would become independent, but the US saw fit to give it back to France.  A new guerilla war broke out, and by 1954 the Viet Minh had defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu.   Promised elections never materialized, so by 1956 Vietnam was separated into North (communist) and South (pro-US, another mish-mash corrupt democracy). 

 By the late 1950s the North Vietnamese began a campaign to take over South Vietnam.  [Movie:  “The Quiet American” with Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine.]  The US sent advisors, but not ground troops.  [Movie: “Go Tell The Spartans” with Burt Lancaster].  By late 1963 the guerilla war was going poorly for the North Vietnamese until Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated.  This threw the South Vietnamese regime into turmoil and allowed the North Vietnamese to get back on track.

 Gulf of Tonkin & Ia Drang.  By 1964 the communists were on the verge of winning the war.   President Johnson got US forces sent to Vietnam by 1965, with the first encounter between US ground troops and the NVA at Ia Drang.  This deployment was the only strategic surprise we enjoyed against the North Vietnamese.  [Movie:  “We Were Soldiers” with Mel Gibson].

 Tet 1968.  [Movie:  “Full Metal Jacket” with Matthew Modine and Adam Baldwin.  This is actually my favorite Vietnam War movie.]  The story had been that the war was going great (from 1965-68) and we were winning.  We really had not much idea how many forces the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) had, just a vague estimate, so comparing what we understood to be enemy casualties – the body count – with what we believed was the enemy’s troop strength, came up with a fairly arbitrary assessment of our progress.  In January 1968, during the Vietnamese New Year holiday time (analogous to Chinese New Year) the North Vietnamese launched simultaneous attacks across South Vietnam.  Half of Hue was taken, and VC guerillas even infiltrated the US Embassy compound in Saigon.   Eventually all those gains were wiped out with heavy casualties, putting the NVA/VC so far behind that it would take until 1972 to rebuild to the point of making another general offensive.   But the huge surprise of a general offensive when Westmoreland, McNamara, and the President had been telling the American people that the enemy was on its last legs killed the administration’s credibility – the sad irony being that in the aftermath of the offensive the NVA/VC were in fact in a very weak position.  [Movie: “Platoon”].

 Westmoreland out, Abrams In.   “Seek & Destroy” vs “Clear And Hold”.  [Movie:  “Hamburger Hill”].   Part of the problem was that US General Westmoreland was using a strategy called “seek and destroy”.  US/ARVN units would seek out enemy forces, engage them, push them away, then leave the area, which would be reoccupied by the enemy in our absence.  Unless we knew for certain that we had literally killed all the enemy soldiers, this strategy was doomed to failure.

 In 1969 General Westmoreland was replaced by General Abrams.  Abrams had a better idea:  after clearing a village or area of enemy troops, hold it with a garrison force and move to the next province over.  Now you’ve secured the area.  Overall this works better, but with one major catch:  it takes a lot of troops, both US and ARVN, to make it work.  From 1972-73 we were drawing down troops, leaving the ARVN to fight by themselves.  The South Vietnamese didn’t have enough troops on their own to make “clear and hold” work. 

 Over the Border.  Another problem was that, politically, neither Johnson nor Nixon could justify a comprehensive campaign of invading North Vietnam, destroying the NVA up there, and conquering Hanoi.  Even if we succeeded in clearing all of South Vietnam of the NVA and VC, what then?  We’d have to keep US troops in South Vietnam indefinitely.   If you want the war to end, and for us to be able to bring our troops home, you are going to have to invade North Vietnam and decisively defeat the North Vietnamese Army.   And if you can’t do that, you’ve entered a war you will never win.  So what’s the point?

 Easter Offensive 1972.  As noted, the Tet Offensive depleted the NVA/VC to the point where it took until 1972, four years later, for them to launch another one.  At this point we still had troops in VN but were drawing them down.  Even so, the ARVN managed to hold off the NVA and this offensive was another failure.

 April 1975.   By now, the US troops had gone and US support for South Vietnam was at its lowest.  The North’s patience was rewarded when the ARVN collapsed and NVA forces were able to overrun South Vietnam and crash the gates into Saigon, which fell by April 30.  By now it was GAME OVER for South Vietnam.

 Office.  I work with Vietnamese clients.  Half of them are named Nguyen, the rest Tran, Huynh, Pham, Phan, Luu, etc.  They come mostly from South Vietnam, Saigon in particular (no one is going to call it Ho Chi Minh City).   It’s rare that I get any clients from North Vietnam, though my office manager is originally from north of Hanoi – she was a little girl when the Japanese occupied her part of the country. 

 M16s & Helicopters.   The two biggest flavors which distinguish this war for us Americans are the M16 rifle – taking over from the M14 – and helicopters bringing troops in and out of battle. 

 At the risk of doing NORML more favors, I’ll bring up this issue.  I’ve been watching “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific”, both of which take place during WWII and focus on US soldiers in Europe and the Pacific.  Almost all of them smoke.   As noted in a prior blog, I do not and never have.  Barring personal experience and not having any friends who do smoke, I gather that nicotine calms and relaxes you without impairing your judgment.  Sure enough, these soldiers seem very relaxed after a cigarette but can function and talk normally.  Any long-term health issues are eclipsed by a concern of surviving the next battle and the war as a whole.  They have more immediate concerns than lung cancer.

 Vietnam is the first war where you see US soldiers smoking marijuana.  When Napoleon sent his troops to Egypt, alcohol was absent due to Egypt being a Muslim country.  However, hashish, which is highly concentrated cannabis, was available and rapidly proved very popular with the French soldiers, who persisted in enjoying it despite Napoleon’s express prohibition.  They even brought it back to France with them.  In “Platoon”, Sgt Elias (Willem Dafoe) and his supporters enjoyed marijuana.   There was even a real-life soldier, Peter Lemon, who had blazed up in a firebase, just when the enemy decided to attack.  He fought just as well as anyone else and even won a medal – the Congressional Medal of Honor.  https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/medal-of-honor-peter-lemon-was-high-on-marijuana-he-single-handedly-fought-off-two-waves-of-vietcong.html

 

Well, that ends my long-overdue analysis of this controversial and fairly recent US conflict….

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.