Losing the Vietnam War

[SoDesuKa]

I lost the link to a survey that said most Americans think we lost Vietnam because we didn't try hard enough to win it. It's therefore no surprise that Americans think the Vietnam War is an unpleasant memory. The sooner we forget about it, the better.

However, I don't agree that there were policies we could have pursued that would have yielded a different outcome. The war was lost because the Vietnamese didn't buy what we were selling. Americans think everybody should jump at the chance to live like we do. Our experience in Vietnam shows that that is not the case.

How many times we are going to fight Vietnam-style wars because of the same ethnocentric assumption? We can't put Vietnam in the past if we're still making the same mistakes we made 40 years ago. Are we winning in Iraq? We're not. We're bogged down there and the rest of the world knows it. How long will this new war drag on before the country is as divided as it was in 1968?

[madrchsod]

1. this time the left is behind

getting the troops home and stop the killing.this time we don`t blame the troops- we blame the people who put them there.
we basically won every major battle in Nam and they lost an estimated over 2 million soldiers and unknown civilian dead. yes they didn`t buy what we were selling..it cost us over 50,000 dead and god only knows how many wounded to find that out

[Erika]

2. We Never Belonged In Nam

They were never a threat to us or wanted us there. The damage we did to their society is sickening. There was no point to us being there, just like in Iraq. But the Bushies better take notice, no Republican is going to kill another 55,000 American kids.

[Yupster]

3. Two notes on Vietnam's War

1. The only way we could have hoped to win it would have been an invasion of North Vietnam. Without doing that, we allowed the enemy to decide when to ratchet up or down the pressure at his convenience. There's no doubt we were not willing to invade N Vietnam.

2. The most interesting year of the war to study is 1974. The US had left. The North Vietnamese launched a series of offensives especially in the north of South Vietnam. Some significant cities fell. The South Vietnamese brought up their reserves from around Saigon, and ........ surprise, beat back the North Vietnamese assault, and retook the lost ground. I think this was quite a surprise to both the North Vietnamese and Americans.

Vietnamization was put to the test and it passed it.

Then next year the North Vietnamese again attacked, and this time the South Vietnamese armed forces collapsed like a house of cards.

What was the difference between 74 and 75 where the same units that fought the North Vietnamese to victory in one year, completely fell apart the next?

[K-W]

4. There was absolutely zero hope of winning it.

North and South Vietnam were never seperate countries. The entire common thought of the war is utter myth. Invading North vietnam would have done nothing except possibly pulling China into the war.

[hughee99]

5. North and South Korea weren't seperate countries

Until 1953. The closest we could have hoped to come to "victory" would have been a stalemate situation similar to that. Even then, that war hasn't officially ended yet, and we still have troops there, so it's not really much of a victory at all.

[Yupster]

7. Yes of course

What we were going for was a stalemate just like Korea where South Vietnam was independant and able to defend itself.

That's why I think the year 1974 is so interesting, because for that year, it looked like Vietnamization had worked, and we had achieved our goal. Then next year it was a complete splat. Worth study to me.

[K-W]

9. Vietnamization was never going to work.

There was no South Vietnam. There was a government that existed soley because of our support and a rural population that just wanted the violence to stop and if anything was sympathetic to the government of the north.

It was only a matter of time until the American bought south vietnamese army succombed to the nationalist forces from the north and south. Vietnamization was just a PR ploy in the US, I dont really believe anyone in the pentagon thought the South Vietnamese government was going to last very long at all.

We were playing for a permanant US friendly government in south vietnam and we lost. We lost long before we pulled out. It became clear long before then that we would never have the support of the people in South Vietnam. At that point the war was simply about trying to save face, and for some people about the stupid domino theory.

[Yupster]

11. But what happened in 1974 then?

How did the South Vietnamese Army hold without us if it was worthless?

That's very interesting to me.

It couldn't hold. It didn't exist. Yet it held and fought very well for that year.

Then it collapsed the next year.

On edit, I guess another question is that if Korea was the model for what we wanted in Vietnam, then why did one work and the other fail? What was the important difference?

[K-W]

12. Wow, it held out for a year...

I dont understand your point. It only held out for a year, when it had the full support of the US government. If it fought so well, I would expect it to have survived a bit longer.

[Yupster]

14. Well my interest is

if it held out a year, why didn't it hold out two years?

If an army doesn't want to fight, it doesn't hold against the attacks it was under in 1974, and then counterrattack successfully. Obviously there was quite a bit of fight in that army.

An example of an army that doesn't want to fight is the Iraqi Army. It collapses at the first sign of pressure. Armies that don't want to fight fall apart when defeated.

The Soth Vietnamese Army didn't do that. They were knocked back, reinforced and hit back successfully.

So what happened to it all of the sudden to lead to such a swift collapse?

[K-W]

15. I dont buy your narrative.

The US didnt just pull out completely. They removed US troops while still providing air support, material support and advisory support. The south vietnamese army was trained, supplied, and supported by the US military. So the US pulled its ground troups out to cut US casualties. The South Vietnamese fought and in a very short period of time they were completely overun and defeated.

I dont understand where you get this version of history that has the South Vietnamese army as some amazing fighting force for a year and then just getting run over. That just isnt how it happened. They fought and lost, but of course it took some time to happen.

They fought with US support, treaded water for a while, never had anything resembling a major step forward, and eventually, as US support faded out and time went by they were soundly defeated.

[Yupster]

20. But we pulled out last fighting troops out

in 73. In 74, the North Vietnamese hit hard and didn't gain squat.

And yes, in 1975, the South Vietnamese army did just get run over. Most of us here are old enough to remember it. First there was a retreat from the Central Highlands. Then Hue was threatened and no defense was even attempted. Cities like DaNang and Hue which were fought over furiously just the year before were given up without a fight as the South Vietnamese Army just melted away.

Then the question day after day was where the SV would make their stand, and the answer was no where. They just melted away. The North Vietnamese couldn't even chase them fast enough.

I think my narrative is correct.

The year 1974 was full of furious battles between the two sides with the NV's attacking repeatedly, and then the South Vietnamese counterrattacking so that by the end of the year, the territry was right where it started.

Then the next year, the NV's attacked again and this time the SV's completely collapsed.

[T Town Jake]

16. What happened was that...

...all formal military aid in the form of financial assistance and equipment to Saigon was pretty much cut off in late '74. In the wake of Watergate and Nixon's ignominious resignation, Americans had tired of a mess over in Vietnam that seemed intractable and was linked in most people's minds to the entire collapse of confidence in governmental honesty and efficacy.
Additionally, the South Vietnamese lost the assistance of our formidable air power, something they'd always counted on and that Nixon had promised to back them up with when the Paris Accords were signed in early '73.
But the entire effort was really lost much earlier - when Thieu refused to submit to honest, free, & fair elections.

[Yupster]

18. Thanks for answer

So did the South Vietnamese Army not have our equipment, and ammunition aid in 75 and they did have it in 74? That would certainly give a reason for fighting so differently.

Same with air power. Was there a significant difference in our air support from 74 to 75?

[T Town Jake]

21. My pleasure...

...as to your follow up questions, what happened was this: the terms of the Paris Treaty called for large scale American financial aid to both South AND North Vietnam. The idea was that we would assist both sides in their efforts to rebuild their "separate" war-ravaged nations. But these appropriations where contingent on Congressional approval. During the Spring and Summer of 1973, the North Vietnamese where caught red-handed committing massive violations of the terms of the treaty they'd just signed a few months earlier, and Nixon resumed the bombing of NVA sanctuaries in Cambodia & (I believe) Laos. In August of '73 Congress cut off all further appropriations for any further U.S. air strikes anywhere in Vietnam.
In the meantime, the Nixon administration was becoming further and further enmeshed in the Watergate scandal, and being distracted because of it. Congress balked at the amount of aid appropriations the embattled administration had requested for South Vietnam, and pretty much walked on any aid to the North (as had been promised by treaty), also.
Tiring of the whole mess, they appropriated only piddling amounts.
The South Vietnamese basically fought their heroic resistance during the 1974 incursions from the North "from inventory," meaning that they used up the supplies and financial aid they'd received the previous year to beat back the NVA assaults. By early '75, there was not much left in Saigon's arsenal to wage another successful defense against the NVA's renewed assault. And, a few months later, the entire South Vietnamese government collapsed in the face of yet another offensive from the North.
I've left out tons and tons of important details, of course, but that's pretty much the long and short of it as far as the final collapse of the South Vietnamese government is concerned.

[Yupster]

22. Very interesting, and

makes sense of what seemed too weird.

Now an opinion question though.

Was a Korea like end to the war possible as late as 1975 if we had kept our commitments to the South?

Just your opinion of course, but you seem the most informed.

[T Town Jake]

23. Just IMHO...

...I think the answer is: it depends. Had the South Vietnamese government had both the full financial & military supply resources that they'd been promised per the terms of the treaty that basically ended American involvement in the war AND the backing of American air power that they'd been informally promised by the Nixon administration as an incentive to sign off on the Paris Accords in the first place, they certainly could have survived, in all probability, the ongoing NVA assaults for many years.
The problem for Saigon, however, was never so much the North Vietnamese - against whom they had been well-fortified with American support for years - but rather the corruption of the regimes that had ruled in the South since the 1954 accords (which basically saw the end of French colonization in Indochina). The often-chaotic and definitely-corrupt Diem government was overthrown in a military coup in 1963 (Just 21 days before the assassination of President Kennedy, BTW).
Thieu came on the scene shortly afterward - and his government was pretty much as corrupt as the one it had replaced. There was a rot at the core of the South Vietnamese government that all the American support, blood, and treasure in the world could never compensate enough for to overcome. Had Thieu, say about 1969, made serious & substantive efforts to root out the corruption in his government and started the transition to a legitimate Democratic state, South Vietnam might well be a sovereign country to this day (1969 is important in this narrative because it's the year we began to cut our losses and gradually withdraw; "Vietnamization" began in earnest that year).
Taking all of these "ifs" and obvious missed opportunities on the part of the Thieu government and putting them together, I'd have to say that, yeah, there is a good chance that South Vietnam could have survived in the long haul - but just barely, and nowhere even close to the healthy rigor of the South Korean model. And when you factor in the fierce determination of the North to reunite the country, it becomes an only by their fingernails consideration, historically. Everything would have had to have lined up for the South Vietnamese government perfectly every year, year after year, and time after time, for them to have made it to the end of the Cold War and the suspension of Russian material support to the North. But the North only had to have things line up "perfectly" once to succeed militarily - which is why Saigon is now called Ho Chi Minh City.
Thanks for the compliment, BTW.

On edit: bolded the word "once."

[Yupster]

24. Came back this morning to

read your response.

Appreciate the good info.

I've always been interested in history and the things I like to look at the most are "why things didn't work." I've spent most of my reading time on the Civil War, and haven't looked into why Vietnamization didn't work, and the year 1974 just stands out as an anomoly. I think it makes a lot more sense now.

[T Town Jake]

26. Like you, I find the "story of failure" in history...

...often just as compelling and fascinating as the "successes." There is an excellent book I think you might be interested in, "Epic Retreats: From 1776 to the Evacuation of Saigon by Stephen Tanner. It chronicles seven of the most famous (or infamous, depending upon your point of view, I guess) military retreats and catastrophes in the last two centuries. It also analyzes some of the larger causes surrounding each and every situation; how the defeated party got to that point, the victor's tactics, etc., etc. It's a very interesting read, and well-written so it really holds your interest instead of just droning on about facts, dates, figures like a lot of history works sometimes tend to. It has a fairly recent publication date (2000), so you should be able to find it pretty easily. If you get the chance to read it, I think you'd find it very enjoyable.

[Yupster]

27. I'll check my

local libraries.

[diamond14]

28. TRUTH in Vietnam PHOTOS....war-profiteers, sucked the American economy dry

drug-running, nixonian reTHUGlican politicians STEALING all our money for jobs, education, stealing supplies from our troops like today's halliburton, nixon taking bribes (and it wasn't just Watergate for nixon, just like bush*, nixon had so many more scandals ready to burst out that nixon simply took the easy way out, claimed a 'tiny' third-rate burglary, and left to keep his retirement, secret service and presidential trappings...he was a crook, like bush*, and sent our troops to DIE, like bush*....nixonian war-criminal extraordinare, henry kissinger, nixon's Secretary of State, stated: "Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy"....

Here's the TRUE story of Vietnam, another insane and useless war, just like Iraq....tons of money was made by WAR PROFITEERS, tanking the US economy, and KILLING our young men and women for GREED....


April 14, 1975....Vietnamese citizens, who colluded with the USA, flee Saigon grabbing onto a US helicopter...most who helped the USA were abandoned by USA, as pawns in our big military war-profiteering madness...


USA had NO MORE USE for the Vietnamese who helped by turning against their own country and supporting American imperialism....



"Air America" helicopter saves a few lucky Vietnamese turncoats while most were killed, Saigon April 29, 1975


American Marines, Saigon evacuation of American soldiers, and Vietnamese Collaborators....USA rescued very few and left most to be killed, after using and abusing them....



Americans flee Nha Trang, April 1975....use them and abuse them, and leave them to be KILLED....



mostly Americans and American personnel were allowed onto the helicopters, April 29, 1975 after landing on a US Carrier....USA left all our "friends" to be KILLED....



Vietnamese tank enters the Presidential Palace in Saigon, April 30, 1975 with no resistance...taking back their government....



Vietnamese troops run across the tarmac of Tan Son Nhat air base in Saigon as smoke billows behind abandoned U.S. Air Force transport planes on April 30, 1975. Millions of American Dollars here for the war profiteers...while the Vietnamese were supposed to defend themselves with no training to fly jets (much like today's Iraqi collaborators)....

[diamond14]

30. (graphic !) Vietnam PHOTOS...American soldiers cut off heads, etc.

John Kerry told the truth about the WAR CRIMES in Vietnam....and the little shown truth will one day show the same atrocities going on in Iraq....(killing POWs, torturing POWs, sodomizing young boys is only the "tip" of the WAR CRIMES in Iraq)....

American Soldiers beheading Vietnamese, and proud of their trophy heads


American Soldiers burning civilians homes and thowing their food processing baskets into the fire to starve the civilians



Children gathering crops, murdered by American Soldiers



Babies with Vietnamese Farm women, raped and killed by American Soldiers as they gathered their crops



Civilian farming Villages were burned to the ground by American Troops..



American Soldiers dropped NAPALM on whole villages of innocent civilians. Napalm is a horrendous mixure of flaming plastic mixed with HOT tiny pieces of metal that imbeds into a human's skin and killed them in a flaming plastic molten metal, burns to the bone


Note: for Iraq, rumsfield order napalm dropped on civilians again...when the American pilots reported this, rumsfield blithly said: we don't call it 'napalm' anymore....we have a new name, and a new improved version of 'napalm'....since it's no longer called 'napalm', we didn't violate the law banning 'napalm'....


A baby in Tu Du Hospital suffering from the consequences of
Agent Orange being dropped on Vietnam 30 years ago

During the war about 10% of Vietnam was intensively sprayed with 72 million litres of chemicals, of which 66% was Agent Orange. Some of this landed on OUR own troops and soon after the war ended American veterans began complaining about serious health problems. There was also a high incidence of their children being born limbless or with Down's syndrome and spina bifida. The American veterans sued the defoliant manufacturers and this was settled out of court in 1984 by the payment of $180 million.

The TCCD dioxin used in Agent Orange seeped into the soil and water supply, and therefore into the food chain. In this way it passed from mother to foetus in the womb. In Vietnam the dioxide remains in the soil and is now damaging the health of the grandchildren of the war's victims.

A report published in 2003 claimed that 650,000 people in Vietnam were still suffering from chronic conditions as a result of the chemicals dropped on the country during the war. Since the war the Vietnamese Red Cross has registered an estimated one million people disabled by Agent Orange. It is estimated that 500,000 people in Vietnam have died from the numerous health problems created by these chemical weapons.

Note: for Iraq...Commander-in-Chief bush* has deliberately chosen Depleted Uranium as his poison...since his father GHB used Depleted Uranium so effectively during the 1991 Gulf War, there are 11,000 DEAD American Soldiers, and 325,000 American Soldiers on PERMANENT MEDICAL DISABILITY from Depleted Uranium, and vast areas of Iraq is radioactive for thousands of years...continue to deform babies, alter DNA, and destroy lives in Iraq..bush1's war only KILLED 467 American Soldiers during the war...but the radiation just keeps on killing...like Agent Orange, OUR soldiers are KILLED by OUR OWN POISONS....and never counted in the costs....

[jimshoes]

6. Some of those in power today

cut their war teeth in viet Nam. They would have loved for the whole Viet Nam experiment to continue ad infinatum. This is what Ike was trying to tell us in 1960 about the Military Industrial Complex. These folks live to make wars. Its a business plan. Define or create an enemy and fight it/them. Make scads of money.

[K-W]

8. I honestly believe that some poeple see Orwell's 1984 as a good example.

Of how a society can be run by them.

[wuushew]

10. America has always suffered from a perverse sense of ethnocentrism

other than World War 2, America has never responded to a threat against her sovereignty. Even the war of 1812 was partially caused by American land greed and desire to annex Canada. Given our inherent population and economic power in is no small wonder that we proselytized our own sense morality ill regardless of the cost. The American citizenry is often willing to encure horrendous losses in order to make our perceived enemies more like "us". After all people that think and share our values cannot possibly harm us,</sarcasm>. This is why people put up with the unfounded hope of the installation of a "democratic" puppet state in Iraq.

Vietnam is not an entirely appropriate comparison. For while Saddam was reviled by a great majority. The Vietnamese supported to a great degree the principals of communism and national liberation. This fact has allowed a more successful propagandizing and justification for a wide variety of international interventions.

Communism the previous bogey man has been replaced by terrorism. The public is all too willing to take unsanctioned action toward a variety of peoples in which their opinions have no forum within the American political process.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

13. Simple. The will of the Vietnamese people, to achieve national

self rule free of the West, with Communism or any other means serving as the vehicle, was much stronger than the will of America to achieve the policy goal of preventing another domino from falling.

To the tune of millions dead and untold maimed on their side versus one year's highway deaths on our side, and we were the ones to declare "peace with honor" and fly off the roof of the Saigon embassy in helicopters.


The sad reality is that the two goals were not necessarily at odds. My understanding, from Stanley Karnow's book, is that in his early days, Ho Chi Minh sought support from wherever he could get it and his primary cause was national self determination, not Communism. That there was a possibility of an alliance with and/or support form the U.S. But of course the reflex of the American administrations was to side with their white European brothers the French in the conflict, and the rest, they say, is history.

Now, the question is, does the will of self determination of Iraqis determined to try and be free of Western as well as home grown tyrants exceed the American will to achieve shrubco's goal of controlling that country, for whatever ends, which would appear to require ruthlessly crushing its people?

Clearly, body counts are not the meaningful scoreboard in war, in Vietnam or in Iraq. I have no doubt that there are some scenarios in which the South could have "won" the Civil War by winning a series of battles making the prosecution of the war appear so costly to the North that they would have been unwilling to pay such a cost. Doesn't mean that the North couldn't have forced their way to victory, but it's all about will and cost.

You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
Ho Chi Minh

[T Town Jake]

19. You're right...

...Ho was much more a Nationalist than he ever was a communist. He often approvingly quoted our very own Declaration of Independence. Right after WW I he sought an audience with President Wilson to discuss the postwar situation of Indochina (as it was then known) as it regarded his people, but was turned down. During WW II he was basically an ally fighting against the Japanese occupation of his country. When the war ended he once again approached the United States looking for support for a free, unified Vietnam, but we were more interested in making sure our French allies got their colonies back than trying to work with a Vietnamese Nationalist with communist credentials, so we spurned him again. The seeds of what grew into the huge, ugly war in Vietnam where planted right there - needlessly so, IMHO.

[sandnsea]

17. Laos, Cambodia, N Vietnam,

They don't know the truth about how much we actually did over there. I don't think most people know millions of people died. How can anybody think we didn't try hard enough when we bombed the majority of three countries and killed 4-5 million people? Americans just don't know.

[vetwife]

25. President Kennedy said," That war can't be won over there "

Then he was killed ! He knew it was unwinnable. It was wrong and Kennedy knew it. IF Bush were president, we would still be in Vietnam..Well in a way we are. His swift boat liars are putting the vets back there and Iraq is more like Vietnam than his so called comparison of the liberation of France. They are throwing grenades not roses.

[Eloriel]

29. Guerilla wars can't be won except unless if the invader

commits genocide (example: British and American settlers vs. Native Americans). This is shown by millennia of military history.

We may seem on the verge of that in Iraq, but the prospects aren't good for any final "victory" for the U.S. Of course, the "U.S." isn't officially responsible for Iraq any more, so I guess it won't be our loss. Or so the Bush Admin thinking probably goes.

Edit: This obviously was one of the lessons we should have learned from Vietnam and apparently did not.