Enduring Myths: The Confused Legacy of Viet Nam Note: This article was originally published in 2006. By R. J. Del Vecchio It's been 31 years since the dramatic scenes of helicopters taking Americans and desperate Vietnamese off rooftops in Saigon were first played on television around the world. Yet that war remains an intensely controversial subje...
By Col. Andrew R. Finlayson, USMC (Ret.)*
“Amateurs talk about tactics; professionals talk about logistics.”
An old military proverb
Copied below is an excerpt from Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky. This brief excerpt is filled with falsehoods and false assertions as is typical of Chomsky, yet Chomsky is still praised http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/noam-chomsky-continues-inspire in the media http://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ for his supposedly astute observations on foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Vietnam War. Chomsky’s list of interviews http://www.chomsky.info/interviews.htm would make any vainglorious egoist salivate.
The famous American intellectual, historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., once wrote of Chomsky, “Chomsky, it soon becomes evident, does not understand the rudiments of political analysis. Indeed, despite occasional pretenses of reasoned discussion, he is not much interested in the analytical process" Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. “Three cheers for Professor Chomsky: But Not Just Now” Chicago Tribune 23 Mar. 1969:P4 Print cf. http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/schlesinger.pdf
The prominent linguist, Paul Postal, once wrote of Chomsky, “After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false. He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake.” Postal, Paul The New Yorker 31 March 2003 cf. http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/200chomskylies.pdf
The problem with dealing with the Chomskys of the world is that they can make false statement after false statement, but those who seek to correct their lies are forced to provide voluminous documentation to support their refutations. Otherwise the argument becomes a rather childish "he said, she said” back and forth that resolves nothing.
Each endnote in this article explains the factual basis for refuting Chomsky’s claims and provides links to supporting documentation that the reader may access. However, readers should not be misled. Although Chomsky is clearly on the fringes of far left ideology, the basics of his arguments are echoed in the arguments of many on the left in what is called the “orthodox” view of the Vietnam War.
In 1954, there was a peace settlement between the United States and Vietnam This statement is demonstrably false. The Geneva Accords signatories were France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Neither the United States nor South Vietnam was signatories. South Vietnam wasn’t even invited to attend, although they did. cf. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/genevacc.htm, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD0391846Furthermore, the United States released a statement that “it would view any renewal of the aggression in violation of the aforesaid agreements with grave concern and as seriously threatening international peace and security”, and Ngo Dinh Diem, Premier of the Government of Vietnam stated that since the Government of Viet Nam had not been a party to the agreement they were not obligated to honor it. cf. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/genevacc.htm, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch006.asp#4, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/diem-says-south-vietnam-not-bound-by-geneva-agreements. The United States regarded it as a disaster Contrary to Chomsky’s claim, the United States praised the agreement and stated, “In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to insure that they are conducted fairly.”It further stated, “With respect to the statement made by the representative of the State of Viet-Nam, the United States reiterates its traditional position that peoples are entitled to determine their own future and that it will not join in an arrangement which would hinder this. Nothing in its declaration just made is intended to or does indicate any departure from this traditional position.“Perhaps what Chomsky is referring to here is the 1956 elections that were supposed to take place according to the Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference, which no country signed. Pham Van Dong, a high ranking communist at the conference admitted that the communists never expect there to be any elections. Some scholars misquote Eisenhower to support the point that the US wouldn’t support elections because they knew that Ho would win, but Diem was very clear that elections “monitored” by communists were out of the question. cf. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch006.asp#4, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch027.asp, https://www.vvfh.org/uploads/Turner-Myths.pdf, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1954-geneva-indochina.html, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent11.htm, refused to permit it to go forward Since the United States was not a signatory to the Geneva Accords it had no power or authority to “refuse to permit it to go forward” as Chomsky falsely claims. cf. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/genevacc.htm, and established a client state in the South, which was a typical client state, carrying out torture, brutality, murders Rather than creating a client state, as Chomsky asserts, the United States sought a treaty with the nations of Australia, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain and the United Kingdom to agree to the mutual defense of Southeast Asia and the Asian signatory parties to the agreement against communist aggression. cf. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/usmu003.aspThe United States also signed agreements of support with the governments of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and provided economic and military aid to all three governments long before the Geneva Accords as well as subsequent to them. cf. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch008.asp http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch009.asp, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch010.asp, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch008.asp, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch009.asp, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch031.asp, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch032.asp, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/inch034.asp.
By about 1960, the South Vietnamese government had probably killed seventy or eighty thousand people. R. J. Rummel is a recognized expert on democide, the killing by a government of its own citizens. Rummel estimates between 361,000 and 720,000 civilian casualties of the South Vietnamese government for the period from 1960 to 1975. Given an average of between 24,000 and 48,000 annual deaths, Chomsky’s “seventy or eighty thousand” dead in 1960 alone is wildly off the mark. Furthermore, the Chomsky’s of the world never mention the civilians killed by the communists; 50,000 alone in the land reforms in the North, another 500,000 in the North after the reforms, 216,000 in the South during the war and as much as 1.2 million after the war. cf. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM, http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF The repression was so harsh that it stimulated an internal rebellion, which was not what the North Vietnamese wanted. Ho Chi Minh established the communist Viet Minh in 1945, near the end of WWII. By 1947 they were committing acts of terror in South Vietnam and establishing a political infrastructure in preparation for taking control of all of Vietnam. The DRV has now admitted that they committed to an invasion of the South in 1959. As Jeffrey Race wrote, the idea that the Viet Cong were an indigenous rebellion “is not supported by historical evidence”. cf. http://indochine54.free.fr/cefeo/auxilia.html, https://www.vvfh.org/uploads/Turner-Myths.pdf pp. 47,48, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent14.htm, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent11.htm They wanted some time to develop their own society. But they were sort of coerced by the southern resistance into at least giving it verbal support. The idea that North Vietnam was coerced into supporting supposedly independent South Vietnamese guerillas is bizarre. It conflicts with all the known evidence.Ho Chi Minh established the Viet Minh in 1945. Once he had consolidated power he immediately began purging his ranks of any nationalists and anti-communists to ensure that only communism would rule Vietnam. Some were murdered. Others were turned over to the French for bounties. His organization completely subsumed the VNQDD (the true Vietnamese nationalist movement) within 24 months of him assuming power. The VNQDD then migrated to South Vietnam and took up arms against the communists. cf. http://www.vietquoc.com/history.htm, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent14.htm, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent4.htm, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/816037.pdf , https://www.vvfh.org/uploads/Turner-Myths.pdf, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent11.htm
By the time John F. Kennedy became involved in 1961 This statement is curiously worded. It sounds as if Chomsky thinks Kennedy decided to get involved in South Vietnamese affairs. To the contrary, Kennedy took office in 1961 and, as President of the United States, was obligated to deal with problems that existed prior to his election., the situation was out of control The situation in Vietnam in 1961 was not nearly as bleak as Chomsky paints it. To be sure, there were manifest problems, as there are when any new government is formed in a country embroiled in turmoil, but the Diem government had been firmly in control of South Vietnam since 1956 and its biggest problems were being caused by the communists from the North, not the various internal factions that constantly vied for political power and prominence. cf. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent1.htm, http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001166374.pdf, http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001167501.pdf, http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001166436.pdf, http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001166419.pdf. So Kennedy simply invaded the country This is a blatant lie. The US provided military advisors to South Vietnam beginning in 1950 and continuing through the years of French rule. When South Vietnam became an independent nation, the US continued to advise and train the South Vietnamese Army. The US did not send combat troops to Vietnam until February 1965. The US sent both advisors and combat troops at the request of the South Vietnamese government. cf. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/us-military-assistance-advisory-group-arrives-in-saigon, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/kennedy-agrees-to-send-instructors-to-train-troops, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/us-sends-first-combat-troops-to-south-vietnam, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/kennedy-announces-intent-to-increase-aid-to-south-vietnam, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent1.htm. In 1962, he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, using planes with South Vietnamese markings What Chomsky is referring to here is Operation Farmgate, a covert mission by the US Air Force to train the South Vietnamese Air Force and support the South Vietnamese Army operations against the Viet Cong with reconnaissance as well as offensive and defensive air support. They did not indiscriminately bomb South Vietnam, as Chomsky implies but did provide air support for South Vietnamese Army combat operations against the Viet Cong. cf. www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA391818, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/operation-farm-gate-combat-missions-authorized,http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-operation-farm-gate-missions-flown. Kennedy authorized the use of napalm, chemical warfare, to destroy the ground cover and crops The US used napalm in Vietnam both to reduce ground cover and to attack enemy forces. The US also used chemical defoliants in Operation Ranch Hand to reduce ground cover that enemy forces used for concealment, particularly roadside cover that could be used to conceal ambushes. Neither napalm nor chemical defoliants are prohibited weapons under international law when used against enemy troops or uninhabited areas or to reduce an enemy’s access to cover. The use of napalm was prohibited by the US after 1968 and herbicide use ceased in 1971. cf. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/int/convention_conventional-wpns_prot-iii.htm, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/operation-ranch-hand-initiated, http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/jul-aug/buckingham.html, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/napalm-war.htm, http://www.policymic.com/articles/66101/what-exactly-are-chemical-weapons-a-military-insider-explains-what-these-killing-tools-actually-do, http://www.opcw.org/about-chemical-weapons/what-is-a-chemical-weapon/. He started the process of driving the rural population into what were called “strategic hamlets,” essentially concentration camps The Strategic Hamlet program was proposed “by R. G. K. Thompson, head of the newly arrived British Advisory Mission”, not by Kennedy or any of his advisors. The US military was opposed to the program, because they felt it would divert ARVN resources from the task of driving the Viet Cong out of South Vietnam. Diem adopted the program enthusiastically despite US reservations. It involved the construction of fortified hamlets, villages entirely surrounded by ditches, earthworks, bamboo stakes, fences and sometimes barbed wire, to protect the citizens from attack. It also involved training the villagers to fight the Viet Cong and keep them out of their hamlet. cf. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3208.pdf, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent4.htm, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a215569.pdf, where people were surrounded by barbed wire, supposedly to protect them from the guerillas who the U.S. government knew perfectly well they supported. The idea that every rural Vietnamese citizen supported the Viet Cong is laughable. The Vietnam War was much like the American Civil War. Brother fought against brother, family against family, neighbors against neighbors. Communist cadres infiltrated the entire of South Vietnam. One side fought for tyranny. The other side fought for freedom. cf. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent11.htm, http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001166413.pdf, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&dat=19630922&id=YrwqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=rWUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7237,4538354, http://1997-2001.state.gov/www/about_state/history/vol_i_1961/m.html, http://1997-2001.state.gov/www/about_state/history/vol_i_1961/n.html, http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/International_security_affairs/vietnam_and_southeast_asiaDocuments/575.pdf
This “pacification” ultimately drove millions of people out of the countryside while destroying large parts of it. The Strategic Hamlet Program did not drive peasants out of the countryside. Its purpose was to build secure hamlets in the area where the peasants lived and worked their farms. It did relocate them in the general area where they had lived, but it created resentment among the populace. Their homes were burned once they were moved, and they lost their ancestral lands where their forebears were buried. There were later programs that did drive the peasants into the cities, but that was more a result of the war coming to their areas than any pacification efforts. When war comes, peasants leave. The Viet Cong stayed and fought – and died. cf. http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-0419102-103048/unrestricted/Pinard_thesis.pdf, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA324682, http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/International_security_affairs/vietnam_and_southeast_asiaDocuments/575.pdf Kennedy also began operations against North Vietnam on a small scale. Chomsky’s claim is ambiguous at best. Does “operations against North Vietnam” mean combat operations inside North Vietnam? Or does it mean operations in South Vietnam against North Vietnamese forces? And who does Chomsky consider to be North Vietnam? Does he refer to the conventional forces often called the NVA? Or does he mean the Viet Cong? (Likely not.) Or is he referring to PAVN, the North Vietnamese name for all their forces, conventional and guerilla? Without more specificity, it’s hard to know what Chomsky is referring to and therefore hard to rebut his claim.As 1962 began, there were 700 US advisors in Vietnam. By the end of the year, that number had increased to 12,000. The Navy SEALS were formed early in 1962 and came to Vietnam to train their South Vietnamese counterparts. They did not engage in combat operations until after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Special Forces soldiers (now known as Green Berets) first arrived in Vietnam in 1957. They worked as trainers and advisors to South Vietnamese counterinsurgency forces until 1965 when they assumed a combat role. As discussed in endnote 17, the Air Force was involved in covert combat operations in 1962, but those were exclusively in South Vietnam. The US Navy served in a strictly advisory and intelligence gathering role until 1965. cf. http://navyseals.com/2482/trivia-tuesday-vietnam/, http://www.history.army.mil/books/Vietnam/90-23/90-231.HTM, http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/stream/faq45-25.htm That was 1962.
In 1963, the Kennedy administration got wind of the fact that the government of Ngo Dinh Diem it had installed in South Vietnam Diem was not installed by the United States. He was offered positions under Bao Dai in 1945, in Ho Chi Minh’s government in 1946 and in the French government in 1947. He turned them all down. The Emperor Bao Dai appointed him Premier of the Republic of South Vietnam in 1954 and he lost to Diem in a referendum in 1956. The US supported him, because he was the best person available. cf. https://www.vvfh.org/uploads/Turner-Myths.pdf, http://www.viettouch.com/philately/scst_baodai.html, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent13.htm was trying to arrange negotiations with the North. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were trying to negotiate a peace settlement. So the Kennedy liberals determined that they had to be thrown out. Diem staunchly resisted any attempts to negotiate with the communists. In 1955 he announced that he would never negotiate with the communists. He never did. Diem’s handling of the Buddhist crisis brought on his coup. The Kennedy administration did not stop the coup or alert Diem once they became aware of it, but it was not their initiative.In 1963 Diem’s brother, Nhu, reached out the North Vietnamese and proposed settlement negotiations, according to some South Vietnamese generals. However, this is widely seen by scholars as an attempt to offset the growing news of efforts by the Kennedy Administration, principally Averill Harriman, to depose Diem. Neither Diem nor his brother Nhu went through with the negotiations. cf. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/diem-refuses-to-negotiate-with-communists, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/vn01.pdf, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/vn02.pdf, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/vn03.pdf, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB444/, http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/south-vietnamese-buddhists-initiate-fall-dictator-diem-1963, http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB284/2-CIA_AND_THE_HOUSE_OF_NGO.pdf The Kennedy administration organized a coup in which the two brothers were killed and they put in their own guy, meanwhile escalating the war Contrary to Chomsky’s assertion, the coup did not originate in Washington. It was not even the first attempt by South Vietnamese to depose Diem. To be sure, there was widespread dissatisfaction within the Kennedy administration with Diem’s performance and some members of the Administration actively encouraged dissent within the South Vietnamese military leadership.However, when the news of a coup first surfaced and up to mere days before it was accomplished, there was a great deal of ambiguity within the administration regarding the appropriate course of action (to support or not to support the coup). After the coup had occurred, the South Vietnamese generals, not Kennedy, decided whom to put in charge. They decided on a two tier government, with the former Vice President of Vietnam, Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ, in charge of half of it. cf. http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB284/2-CIA_AND_THE_HOUSE_OF_NGO.pdf, http://hnn.us/article/1717, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent7.htm, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent6.htm, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent6.htm.
Then came the assassination of President Kennedy. Contrary to a lot of mythology, Kennedy was one of the hawks in the administration to the very last minute. Kennedy was no hawk. He sought for ways to extricate the US from Vietnam, grudgingly approved requested troop increases and was considering withdrawal shortly before his assassination. The greatest evidence that Kennedy was not a hawk is that despite being surrounded by hawks that constantly urged him to commit US troops to various conflicts, Kennedy seldom approved their plans. In fact, it has been written that JFK “drove his hawkish advisers crazy” because he wouldn’t succumb to their arguments. cf. http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/experts/was-jfk-going-to-pull-out-of-vietnam/, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/w6LJoSnW4UehkaH9Ip5IAA.aspx, http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/08/what-if-kennedy-had-lived, http://govt.eserver.org/gulf-war/jfk-lbj-and-vietnam.txt, https://www.bostonreview.net/us/galbraith-exit-strategy-vietnam He did agree to proposals for withdrawal from Vietnam, because he knew the war was very unpopular here This comment prompts this writer to ask what planet Chomsky is living on. In 1963, polling on the Vietnam issue was uncommon. In 1965, public support stood at 60.1%. Public support for the war peaked in 1966 and then began a gradual decline. It wasn’t until 1971 that opinions against the war exceeded those who supported the war. cf. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/learning_history/vietnam/vietnam_pubopinion.cfm, http://www.virginia.edu/cnsl/pdf/Turner-how-political-warfare-caused-America.pdf, http://www.people-press.org/2013/10/18/trust-in-government-interactive/, http://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpapers/2002/IPR-WP-02-42.pdf, but always with the condition of withdrawal after victory. Here Chomsky makes a counterfactual assertion. Kennedy had, in fact, decided to withdraw from Vietnam even if it meant that the US commitment would be viewed as a failure. In a November 14, 1963 press conference he stated unequivocally “that is our object, to bring Americans home”. In fact, the Pentagon Papers state that “A formal planning and budgetary process for the phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam was begun amid the euphoria and optimism of July 1962”. That process didn’t end until five months after Kennedy’s assassination. cf. http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM263.html, https://www.bostonreview.net/us/galbraith-exit-strategy-vietnam, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9519, http://media.nara.gov/research/pentagon-papers/Pentagon-Papers-Part-IV-B-4.pdf, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/06/06/papers_reveal_jfk_efforts_on_vietnam/?page=full Once we get victory, we can withdraw and let the client regime go. Chomsky’s last statement is blatant character assassination. Nowhere in the record does Kennedy express such an attitude toward the Vietnamese people. It is part and parcel of the long-claimed “racist” attitude of America toward “brown people” that pervades the communist apologia.
Footnotes
by Col. Andrew Finlayson, VVFH Founding Member
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, there were seven ongoing communist insurgencies in SE Asia - Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines all had active communist insurgencies. Three of those insurgencies were successful in 1975 (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). When one considers the question of whether or not the successful communist insurgencies lived up to the promises they made to their respective populations to provide peace, social justice and economic well-being, it is instructive to look at the records of those seven countries with communist insurgencies and see how they fared over the past 40 years.
Peace
Many in the West thought that once the communists came to power and all of the US and allied forces left Vietnam, a new era of peace and harmony would exist. At least that is what the communists promised. Unfortunately, it was not to be. The communist government of the united Vietnam fought two wars with their neighbors, China and Cambodia, and tensions still persist with China over the East China Sea. A little known fact that is often overlooked by some in the West is more SE Asians died in war and the results of war in the 14 years after the last American left Vietnam than during the years when US forces were in South Vietnam. Although exact figures for the number of SE Asians who died after the communist victories in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia vary, even the conservative estimates are mind-boggling. There were 65,000 executions in Vietnam between 1975 and 1982 (Desbarats and Jackson, “The Cruel Peace,” Washington Quarterly, Fall 1985: also US Dept. of State Bulletin, Sept. 1985). The UN High Commissioner on Refugees estimated that 250,000 people fleeing Vietnam by boat died at sea. Another 165,000 died in Vietnam’s infamous “re-education camps” (Desbarats, Jacqueline. “Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation,” The Vietnam Debate, 1990).
According to Lt. Gen. Le Kha Phieu, the commander of Vietnamese forces in Cambodia, the Vietnamese military suffered 55,000 deaths between 1978 and when the Vietnamese ended their occupation of Cambodia (Reaves, Joseph. “Vietnam Reveals Cambodian Death Toll,” Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1988). There are no accurate figures for the number of Cambodian deaths suffered in the war, but it is safe to assume they suffered heavier casualties than the Vietnamese.
Although the claims of the Vietnamese and Chinese differ widely on the casualties produced by their 1979 war, a conservative estimate provides a range of Chinese military deaths at 7,000 to 26,000 and approximately 30,000 Vietnamese military deaths, with an additional 100,000 Vietnamese civilian deaths (Zhang Xiaoming, “China’s 1979 War with Vietnam,” China Quarterly, No. 184, December 2005, pp. 851-874). The Communist Lao government continues to this day to inflict casualties on the Hmong minority in that country with the figure of 100,000 killed since 1975 (Rummel, Rudolph. Statistics of Democide, University of Hawaii; also, “Forced and Forgotten” Lawyers’ Committee on Human Rights, 1989, p. 8). And, according to the Yale Genocide Program, the communist party in Cambodia killed approximately 1.7 million of that country’s citizens when it came to power, one of the most horrific genocidal crimes ever committed.
By Paul Schmehl, Independent Researcher
Millions of words have been written about the Vietnam War, or as we prefer to call it, the 2nd Indochina War. Many thousands of those words have been about why the war was lost. There are as many opinions about why the 2nd Indochina War was lost as there are writers to express them. A search on Amazon.com for “Vietnam War History” returns 5,315 results
Some say it’s because we never should have been there in the first place, or because it was a civil war. Others say it’s because a bunch of peasants in sandals beat the greatest military in the world with determination and grit. Still others say it’s because it was a war for independence and any outsider would have been thrown out just as the French were.
Many of them want to teach us the lessons they think we should learn from the war yet few of them recognize or accept the facts when they are presented to them. Or they want to ignore them or interpret them to fit their preconceived notions about the war.
Many brave men and women have served this country. More than a few have given their lives in those efforts. Most of them served with honor and courage. Too many of our politicians, on the other hand, have no principles and stand for nothing. At the first sign of trouble, rather than making their case for why we need to stand and fight, these cowards will turn and run and abandon the battlefield.
Dr. William Lloyd Stearman, Founding VVFH Member
A poll taken on this 40th anniversary would no doubt reveal that most Americans believe we should not have fought in this small obscure country half a world away, and do believe that the war there was unwinnable and that our huge expenditure of blood and treasure there was totally in vain. Most people are nonplussed at hearing that we got into World War II because of what is now Vietnam. In the 1930s, we somewhat tolerated Japan’s rampaging all though China. However, when Japan invaded what is now Vietnam, we saw this as a threat to Southeast Asia and took the strong measure of promoting a boycott of critical oil, scrap iron and rubber deliveries to Japan. Japan, then realizing a now hostile US would try to prevent its planned invasion of Southeast Asia, sought to disable our fleet at Pearl Harbor as a preventative measure. Japan then proceeded to use its new-found base to invade and conquer most of Southeast Asia. President Eisenhower must have had this mind when he was asked, at April 7, 1954 press conference, about “the strategic importance of Indochina [Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia] for the free world.” He then described the “falling domino” principle whereby “the beginning of a disintegration [in Vietnam] would have the most profound influences” leading to “ the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the [Malay] peninsula and Indonesia.” He added that Japan, Formosa [Taiwan], the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand “would also be threatened.” (He could also have added India.)
Eisenhower’s “domino theory” was pooh-poohed by a number of people in the U.S., but, given the parlous unstable conditions in Southeast Asia, it was taken seriously by leaders there as well as in Australia and India and by leaders in Hanoi and (then) Peking. For example, China’s famed Marshal Lin Piao stated in September 1965 that the defeat of “U.S. imperialism” in Vietnam would show the people of the world “that what the Vietnamese people can do, they can do too.” In the late 1960s, Indonesian leaders Suharto and Malik (not great friends of the U.S.) told U.S. officials that our first introduction of U.S. combat troops (Marines) in Vietnam in March 1965 helped embolden them to resist the October 1, 1965 Communist coup supported by China, which came very close to succeeding. (The two later told columnist Robert Novak the same thing.) Had this coup succeeded, the Philippines would have soon been threatened which could well have triggered our intervention under a 1954 treaty. Then we would have been facing a far more threatening adversary than in Vietnam. The 1965 introduction of US Marines apparently had a generally bracing effect in Southeast Asia. For example it also encouraged the British defense of Malaysia against a Communist invasion from Indonesia. By the end of the Vietnam War, even the victorious Communist side that lost over two million dead was too weakened to pose a threat to any country save nearby Laos and Cambodia. The war also bought precious time to enable the countries of Southeast Asia to strengthen their positions. In essence, we basically got into the war to prevent the toppling of dominoes in Southeast Asia and we succeeded. One could say that this was a strategic victory while the loss in Vietnam was a tactical defeat.
Was the war in Vietnam truly unwinnable? After “Vietnamization” had removed all U.S. combat troops from Vietnam, Hanoi, on March 30, 1972, launched its “Easter Offensive” with largest conventional attack of the war consisting of the equivalent of 23 divisions equipped with hundreds of Soviet tanks, long-range artillery, rockets and surface to air missiles. The brunt of the fighting fell on the South Vietnamese ground forces with massive U.S. air support as well as naval and logistical support. The only American ground forces left were advisors and forward air controllers. South Vietnam forces eventually moved from the defensive to counter offensives and by mid-September 1972 were clearly winning. The Communist forces had lost about 100,000 killed in action, twice as many as the U.S. had lost in the entire war. Sometime after Hanoi’s final 1975 victory, a former top commander in the South, General Tran Van Tra stated in the Party organ Nhan Dan that his troops had eventually reached the verge of defeat. Had the war continued some months further, the South could have emerged victorious by evicting all enemy forces from Vietnam. Facing defeat, Hanoi saved the day by offering substantial concessions sought by Henry Kissinger in previous negotiations. With the best of intentions, Kissinger took this bait and the resulting negotiations process brought South Vietnamese military operations to a halt. The 1973 Peace Accords broke down. The U.S. drastically reduced aid, and then Congress banned all U.S. military operations in Indochina sealing Vietnam’s doom.
William Lloyd Stearman, PhD, Senior U.S. Foreign Service officer (Ret.)National Security Council staff under four presidents, director NSC Indochina staff, Jan. ’73 to Jan. ’76, Adjunct Professor of International Affairs Georgetown University (1977 to 1993), author of memoir An American Adventure, From Early Aviation Through Three Wars to the White House (Naval Institute Press, 2012
)Recently I've been studying the Pentagon Papers and the events surrounding their release. In that regard I read a New York Times op-ed written by Daniel Ellsberg that purports to tell the story of what compelled him to release national secrets to the media. More than any other single event in American history, Ellsberg's perfidy opened the floodgates of government distrust and the media's lack of respect for national secrets. He is the progenitor of Wikileaks and especially of Edward Snowden.
Ellsberg's op-ed is an obvious example of self-serving justification for an act he knew was wrong. In point of fact, he himself decided he was willing to risk a life in prison to expose what he believed were lies being told to the American people. But were they? There were certainly things documented in the Pentagon Papers that could be viewed as lies by an unsophisticated or biased observer. What Ellsberg characterizes as lies are decisions made by Presidents against the advice of some of their advisors. Ellsberg agreed with the dissenting advisors and so believed they were right and the Presidents were wrong.
A generation of presidents, believing that the course they were following was in the best interests of the country, nevertheless chose to conceal from Congress and the public what the real policy was, what alternatives were being pressed on them from within the government, and the pessimistic predictions they were receiving about the prospects of their chosen course.Here Ellsberg casts those who disagreed with the President in the role of being correct in their (and, of course, his own) opinions and naively suggests that open government means airing every disagreement inside an administration publicly. Good leadership means considering advice from advisors who will often disagree among themselves over a particular course of action. It also means making decisions based on that advice and your own best judgment. It is inevitable that some of those advisors will be upset because their preferred course of action was not taken. It's equally inevitable that, given the egos involved, some of them will look for opportunities to "prove" that they were right and that the President followed the wrong advice.
That is the reason we consistently see "tell-all" books after advisors whose advice was not taken leave office as well as hagiographies by those with whom a President agreed.
Although Ellsberg himself admits that "a generation of Presidents" believed that the course of action that they chose was "in the best interests of the country", he nevertheless characterizes them as lying simply because they chose a course with which he disagreed. One can only surmise that if Ellsberg would have agreed with their decisions, he never would have characterized the process of decision-making as lying. Yet despite the fact that five consecutive Presidents followed the same general policy, because Ellsberg disagreed with that policy he felt that it was necessary for him to commit a traitorous act to expose them.
Throughout the campaign of 1964, President Johnson indicated to the voters -- contrary to his opponent Barry Goldwater -- that no escalation was needed in South Vietnam. He sometimes added, almost inaudibly, ''at this time.''While Ellsberg is certainly entitled to his opinion, his opinion did not justify revealing government secrets to the public. As he points out and history confirms, had Johnson revealed to the public what his advisors were telling him, the public would have demanded escalation in Vietnam. Since Ellsberg "thought" that escalation would not have won the war, one would assume that he would be happy that the President "lied" to the public. The irony of this contradiction seems to escape him completely.
As the Pentagon Papers later showed, that was contradicted as early as May 1964 by the estimates and recommendations of virtually all of Johnson's own civilian and military advisers. I believe he worried, not only in 1964 but over the next four years, that if he laid out candidly just how difficult, costly and unpromising the conflict was expected to be, the public would overwhelmingly want escalation on a scale that promised to win the war.
To this end, Congress and the voters might compel him to adopt the course secretly being pressed on him by his own Joint Chiefs of Staff. From 1964 through 1968, the Joint Chiefs continuously urged a litany of secret recommendations, including mining Haiphong; hitting the dikes; bombing near the Chinese border; closing all transportation routes from China; sending ground troops to Laos, Cambodia and the southern part of North Vietnam; possibly full-scale invasion of North Vietnam.
I think that this escalation would not have won the war.
Setting aside Ellsberg's concerns for a moment, what kind of President would conceal his true desires because he believed they were out of sync with the desires of the American people? We have previously discussed the incompetence of American leadership with regard to the war. Certainly that would have been grounds for going public with what he knew but without revealing state secrets.
Both Kennedy and Johnson handled the war ineptly, not only ignoring the advice of the military experts but moving in a direction that they were repeatedly warned would not achieve the desired result. But this is not lying. It's incompetence. Johnson in particular behaved despicably toward the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ignored their advice completely and placed his trust in McNamara, a man who had no military knowledge at all. This too is not lying but incompetence.
Remarkably, Ellsberg himself recognized that the ongoing disagreements within administrations were debates, but because of his personal beliefs he characterized them as lies rather than normal disagreement within advisory groups.
I first learned of these debates in 1964 and 1965, when I was special assistant to John McNaughton, the assistant defense secretary. I read all the documents of that period that were later included in the Pentagon Papers, and I heard from McNaughton of his discussions with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and President Johnson. I strongly regret that at that time, I did not see it as my duty to disclose that information to the Senate.Because he spent time in Vietnam, Ellsberg apparently became convinced that his limited view of the conflict was an accurate one and decided that he knew better than five Presidents what the correct course of action was. So, desperate to gain what he viewed as a fair hearing for his beliefs, which he believed were superior to those of five Presidents, he decided to violate his oath and reveal state secrets to the world. For this traitorous act he is celebrated as a hero by many of the misguided fools that believe themselves to be wiser than the men chosen to lead the nation.
But then I was in Vietnam for two years from 1965 to 1967. I saw that our ground effort in South Vietnam was hopelessly stalemated, and I did not believe that increased bombing of the north would ever cause our adversaries to give up. Therefore I came to the belief in 1967 that we should negotiate our way out.
So my concern in releasing the Pentagon Papers was not simply, or even primarily, to get out the truth. I thought I would probably go to prison for the rest of my life. I wouldn't have done that just to set the record straight. I released the papers because I foresaw prolonged war and eventual escalation, including incursions into Laos and Cambodia, the mining of Haiphong and the bombing of Hanoi. I wanted to avert these events, but they all occurred.Ellsberg's ego wouldn't allow him to accept the fact that he was not the President. He felt he knew better than the men who had a much broader knowledge of Vietnam, of secret negotiations, of plans he knew nothing about, of issues with which he was completely unaware. All that mattered was that his views be aired, even if he had to go to prison. Even what he perceived as the truth didn't matter! This is a man with a massive ego. This is a man for whom no other view than his own is valid. it's not surprising then that his oath meant nothing to him when weighed against his superior opinions.
The greatest irony of all is that the Pentagon Papers reveal that basic US policy toward Vietnam was consistent across five Presidencies and that all of the claims of the antiwar movement were false.
Former POW/MIA Affairs Chief Gave Congress Outline of U.S. Government's Road Map To Betrayal Of America's POW/MIA
The following article is taken from a statement by Bill Bell (pictured right) which he gave before the Vietnam Subcommittee on Trade of the Committee on Ways and Means in the U.S. House of Representatives on June 18, 1998.
Prior to 1989 our government's most important issue concerning Vietnam was the achievement of a viable settlement in war torn Cambodia.
Subsequent to the withdrawal of a politically acceptable number of Vietnamese forces from that country our focus shifted to the accounting for our missing and dead from the Vietnam War.
At that time the policy of the Bush Administration dictated that the recovery of missing American servicemen was a matter of the "highest national priority".
This high priority supported a strategy of strict reciprocity at the national level, and a high quality investigative effort on the ground in Vietnam. This proactive, yet cautious approach to addressing the important POW/MIA issue precipitated Vietnam's realization that no matter how difficult the effort, our persistence and perseverance would not diminish and only genuine cooperation would be acceptable by our government.
These are some selected quotes from intelligent people, leaders of our country.
On Cambodia:
Some will find the whole bloodbath debate unreal. What future possibility could be more terrible than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now? Anthony Lewis "Avoiding A Bloodbath" New York Times March 17, 1975
If we really want to help the people of Cambodia and the people of South Vietnam, is it not wiser to end the killing? Since most credited analysts of foreign policy admit that the Lon Nol regime cannot survive, won't the granting of further aid only prolong the fighting and, with it, the killing? Representative Bob Carr Congressional Record March 13, 1975
It is hard to predict in an exact sense what would happen if the United States reduced its commitment to Lon Nol. . . . There is a possibility that more moderate politicians would take over in Phnom Penh, and that the insurgents would be content to negotiate with these people. An actual insurgent attack and takeover of Phnom Penh is far from a certainty, as an assault on a city requires large expenditures of resources which the Khmer Rouge would not be likely to want to make. Michael Harrington "Limiting Aid to Cambodia" Congressional Record August 12, 1974
I say that calling the Lon Nol regime an ally is to debase the meaning of the word as it applies to our true allies. . . . The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is not guns but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now. Representative Chris Dodd Congressional Record March 12, 1975
It is time that we allow the peaceful people of Cambodia to rebuild their nation . . . (T)he Administration has warned that if we leave there will be a "bloodbath." But to warn of a new bloodbath is no justification for extending the current bloodbath. Representative Tom Downey Congressional Record March 13, 1975
By Mike Benge, POW, VVFH Founding Member
The only similarity between Francis Ford Coppola’s film set-in South-East Asia and Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” set in Africa is that both had rivers winding through them and both had major characters named Kurtz. And, oh yes, Coppola copied Conrad’s style of telling stories within a story. Coppola’s 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” makes a mockery of the geography of Vietnam and Cambodia by depicting the Mekong River as running through the jungles of Northwest Cambodia. Captain Benjamin L. Willard’s, played by Martin Sheen, odyssey portrays him powering up one river and drifting down another in his relentless quest to find the reclusive Colonel Kurtz (Marlin Brando) in the heart of Cambodia and assassinate him. (Senator John Kerry would have been a great advisor for this portion of the movie, given his claimed expertise and fantasy in navigating this area in Cambodia – A figment of his imagination. What Coppola produced was an epic messy abortion regurgitated from the hallucinatory nightmare in his mind – the Vietnam War.
Anthropologist Dr. Gerald Cannon Hickey – Gerry to his friends – was the most knowledgeable scholar on the Montagnards of the Central Highlands in Vietnam. One day Gerry received a phone call from Francis Ford Coppola’s production manager, who wanted to hire him as a consultant on that portion of his film pertaining to Montagnards. Gerry had no patience for the likes of Coppola and wanted nothing to do with his brand of movie madness; besides that, he was in the middle of writing yet another book on the Montagnards. He knew that I was on sabbatical from USAID, which had broken its contract to fund my Master’s Degree at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos, and suggested they contact me for the job, adding, “Mike knows more about the Montagnards than you’ll ever need to know.”
They took Gerry’s suggestion and offered me the job at a salary much higher than what I was making with USAID, and sweetened the pot by providing a Crown Toyota and a chauffeur to drive me to and from the set each day. I lived near the University only a few miles away from the shooting location. I decided this would be a good break from my intense Master’s research. At first, I was intrigued by what was going on, but I soon realized it was more make-believe than any semblance of the reality of the Vietnam War, and many of the film’s so-called expert advisors were as phony as a $3 bill.
My first encounter with this was at a humongous evening outdoor picnic-style buffet with lighted lanterns given in honor of Martin Sheen, who decided not to come to the party. I was following Coppola through the line as he described one scene involving the Montagnards. As Captain Willard is floating down a river in a boat, as, he drifts around a bend and looking through field glasses a scene evolves with a group of Montagnard men dancing around a woman giving birth. As they circle around, each, in turn, pushes on her abdomen in a ritualistic aid to help force the baby out. I asked Coppola, “Where in the hell did you get this idea? The birth of a Montagnard child is a private affair attended only by women.” He replied that his personal pilot had seen this when he was a helicopter pilot stationed in the Central Highlands. “Bullshit!” I retorted. He then told me to turn around and ask the pilot, who was standing right behind me. He was pretty impressive, a big guy, standing at least 6 foot 3 or 4, buff, and didn’t seem all that pleased with my comment. I thought to myself,” Holy shit!” Not backing down one iota, I quickly asked, “Where were you stationed?” He replied, “Pleiku.” I then asked, “What were you doing?” He replied, “I was an Army helicopter pilot.” By then Coppola was standing beside me, when I said, “I’ve three questions for you.” Coppola was listening intensely, either to what I was asking, or perhaps just waiting for a clue to what would provoke his pilot to take a poke at me. I then asked, “What was the name of the base you flew out of and what aviation company was stationed there? He hemmed and hawed, and finally said, “I can’t, a don’t, remember.” To which I emphatically said, “Strike one!” I then turned to Coppola and said, “Everyone who was there knew the name, Camp Holloway – about 4 kilometers (2.5 mi) west of Pleiku – for it was named after Chief Warrant Officer Charles E. Holloway, who in December 1962 became the first helicopter pilot killed in action. Camp Holloway was the home of the U.S. Army’s 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion.” I turned back to the pilot and asked, “If you flew out of Pleiku, what was the most distinctive visual landmark from the air?” He couldn’t seem to remember that either. I then forcefully said, “Strike two!” Again, I turned back to Coppola and told him, “The landmark was Pussy Peak. Every pilot who ever flew in Vietnam knew that. The Vietnamese called it “Dragon Mountain” (a contraction of Dragon's Mouth Mountain - Núi Hàm Rồng in Vietnamese) and the Montagnards called it Chu H’Drung. The American name came from the fact that it was shaped like a woman’s torso, with two ridges coming down taking the shape of legs cut off at the knees, with a triangle patch of trees nestled in the crotch of the mountain. It was the major landmark for the dogleg flight pattern from Saigon to Hue. I then addressed the pilot once more, “I have one last question, remember it’s ‘three strikes and you’re out.” “What was the name of the Montagnard tribe in Pleiku that was supposedly conducting this ritual?” Again, he seemed not to remember, so I prompted him with, “Was it the Cao Đài, the Hòa Hảo, or the Nung?” (None of which were Montagnard tribes in South Viet Nam, the later was a tribe for North Vietnam.) He thought for a while and then with a stammer he emphatically replied, “The Hoa Hao, that’s it, they were called the Hoa Hao.” I ardently told the pilot, “Strike three, you’re out of here!” Turning my back on him, I said to Coppola, “Your pilot is a liar. The Hoa Hao is a religious sect, not a Montagnard tribe, and I doubt if he was ever in Vietnam. If so, he was a REMF and got his story out of a gin bottle in some bar in Saigon.” The crowd at the buffet had grown quiet, listening to our conversation and waiting for Coppola to explode; but for some reason, he didn’t. Surprisingly, giving the devil his due, Coppola dropped the scene from the movie, nor did the pilot deck me and he kept flying for Coppola. This was my introduction to Coppola’s delusional world.
By Paul Schmehl
Whenever discussing the Vietnam War, one of the topics that comes up is that the OSS worked with Ho during WWII, Ho requested help from the US by sending both letters and telegrams to President Truman and Ho quoted the American Declaration of Independence in his own declaration of independence.
While all these things are true, they often lead to a false conclusion. It is argued that because the US ignored Ho, he turned to China and Russia for help with his nationalist movement. Nothing could be further from the truth, but that doesn't stop people from arguing it. Ho was a committed communist and skilled deceiver, as our lengthy treatise establishes thoroughly. He had no intentions of turning Vietnam into an American-like republic. His assignment, as a member of the Soviet Comintern, was to establish communism in Indochina. To that end, he established the Indochina Communist Party in 1930 and worked assiduously to strengthen it to seize power when the opportunity presented itself.
The vacuum created by the end of World War II provided his opportunity, and he seized it.
It is also claimed that Truman ignored Ho Chi Minh's entreaties because he wanted the French to re-establish their colony in Indochina. However, the text of telegrams sent to the consulates in Saigon and Hanoi by the Secretary of State and Acting Secretary of State demonstrate that the Truman administration was not fooled by Ho's claims of nationalism. Ho's entreaties were ignored because they were known to be deceitful.
In February 1946, the US Secretary of State of the Truman administration sent a telegram to the Ambassador to France asking to be kept up to date on whether "Leclerc the intransigeant and uncompromising colonial-minded and d’Argenlieu the conciliatory and moderate" had the support of the French government. [1. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d21]
In his response two days later, the US Ambassador indicated that it was his belief that the French government was inclined toward “a liberal and progressive colonial policy in Indo-China” [2. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d23]
Ten days later, the Assistant Chief of the Division of Southeast Asian Affairs cabled the US Secretary of State and stated, “It seems certain that Annamese plan desperate resistance to French.” [3. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d24]
Two weeks later, the Consul of Saigon cabled the Secretary of State that “there were additional incidents last night including the sacking of house of one of the signers of a “motion” calling for Vietnam independence and cessation of hostilities. He himself was severely beaten by the military.” [4. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d30]
On August 9th, the Chief of the Division of Southeast Asian Affairs cabled the Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs and informed him that “Recent developments indicate that the French are moving to regain a large measure of their control of Indochina in violation of the spirit of the March 6 convention. The evidence, as set forth below, suggests that the French are attempting to gain their objective by manoeuvres designed to confine and weaken Viet Nam. In the event that Viet Nam decides to resist these encroachments, which is by no means unlikely, widespread hostilities may result.” [5. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d65]
The March 6 agreement to which he refers is the modus vivendi signed between the French and the Viet Minh government (Ho Chi Minh), and the reason for the rising animus was that the Viet Minh felt that they should have the right to Cochinchina, including the Mekong Delta, Saigon, and Cholon, and the French disagreed. They were willing to recognize Ho’s government but did not what to give up the rich, fertile lands of the South.
He closed with this: “In conclusion, it is SEA’s view that the Annamese are faced with the choice of a costly submission to the French or of open resistance, and that the French may be preparing to resort to force in order to secure their position throughout Indochina. It may not be advisable for this Government to take official notice of this situation during the Peace Conference,56 but the Department should be prepared, SEA believes, to express to the French, in view of our interest in peace and orderly development of dependent peoples, our hope that they will abide by the spirit of the March 6 convention.”
So, in 1946, the US was opposed to the French reoccupation of Indochina (at that time Annam, Tonkin, Cochinchina, Cambodia, and Laos.
On September 11, the Ambassador in France cabled the Secretary of State and reported that he had met with Ho Chi Minh, who had requested assistance from the US in his failing negotiations with the French. He wrote, “The principal point on which they failed to reach agreement concerns Cochin China: the French representatives insist that Cochin China be an “independent” entity in an Indochinese federation, while the Viet-Nam representatives insist that one central government in Indochina must dominate the whole country. He said that he and his party aspired to Viet-Nam “independence” in an “Union Franchise”. He said that they would like to receive some “help” from us, but did not specify what he meant by that. He took occasion to say that he was not a communist.” [6. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d72] Ho was, of course, a paid Comintern agent at the time and lied to the US Ambassador.
On September 17, the Ambassador reported that Ho had signed a modus vivendi with the French. [7. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d75]
One of the elements of that agreement was that all fighting in Cochinchina would stop. It did not, of course, and this became the second diplomatic agreement that Ho violated. In point of fact, Ho violated every international agreement he signed. He refused to agree that the armed forces in Cochinchina would disarm.
In October, State cabled Saigon asking for an explanation of Ho’s flag, particularly the use of a gold star in the center of a red field since that clearly hinted at communism. [8. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d76]
In December, the Secretary of State cabled various missions abroad informing them that the nature of the government in Vietnam was communist. [9. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1946v08/d92]
So, before the end of 1946, the US was already aware that Ho and his government were communist, not nationalist, and US policy proceeded accordingly.
In January 1947, the Secretary of State cabled the Embassy in France asking them to convey US consternation with French attempts to “place US in partisan position” and asked that they contact the French Foreign Office and request a retraction. [10. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1947v06/d66]
So, even after becoming aware that Ho was a communist and his government was communist, the US still refused to take a partisan position regarding the unrest in Annam, Tonkin and Cochinchina.
On January 15, 1947, the Ambassador cabled the Secretary of State to update him on affairs in Indochina. He wrote regarding Ho’s government, “the small Communist group which now dominates, and which is composed, he says, of a coterie of Moscow-trained young men.” [11. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1947v06/d72]
By January 15,1947, the US was well aware that Ho and his government were Soviet-trained communists.
FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES – TRUMAN - 1946 100
851G.00/7-746: Telegram
The Acting Secretary of State to the Consul at Saigon (Reed)
SECRET WASHINGTON, September 9, 1946— 2 p.m.
Intelligence reports of uncertain reliability state USSR (a) anxious to see Ho Chi Minh succeed unite three Kys under Viet Nam for possible eventual weapon against National Govt China and (b) has instructed French Communists manoeuvre reliable French Officers to Indochina, for training cadres future Viet Nam army. Keep Dept informed indications subservience to Party line by Ho and other leaders, relative strength Communist and non-Communist elements Viet Nam, and contacts with Communists other countries.
Inform O’Sullivan.Sent Saigon. Repeated
Paris59 for info.
CLAYTON
— — — — — — — — — —
59 As Telegram 4680
FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES – TRUMAN - 1946 108
851G.00B/10-946: Airgram
The Acting Secretary of State to the Consul at Saigon (Reed)
SECRET WASHINGTON, October 9, 1946.
A.29 Reference Department's telegram Number 241 of September 9 and Consulate General's telegram Number 374 of September 17.
Department would appreciate information on the origins and significance of the use of a gold star in the center of a red field as the Vietnam flag. The flag of the Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Union forces in Malaya (an organization undisguisedly controlled by Chinese Communists) was red with three gold stars in the upper right corner. Three stars were used to symbolize the three races in Malaya. Although the MPAJU has been disbanded, the Communist movement in Malaya is still known as the three-star movement. The official Vietnam explanation of the Vietnam flag would be especially interesting in view of Ho Chi Minh's denial of Communist orientation on the part of his government, since the Vietnam Government must, certainly realize that the use of a gold star on a red field will inevitably lead nationals of other countries to form conclusions which the Vietnam Government would apparently not wish them to form
ACHESON
— — — — — — — — — —
FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES – TRUMAN - 1949 54
851G.01/5-1149: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Consulate at Hanoi1
SECRET WASHINGTON, May 20, 1949— 5 p.m.
Reur informative tel 36:2
In talks Xuan and reps his govt you may take fol line as representing consensus informed Americans: In light Ho's known background, no other assumption possible but that he outright Commie so long as (1) he fails unequivocally repudiate Moscow connections and Commie doctrine and (2) remains personally singled out for praise by internatl Commie press and receives its support. Moreover, US not impressed by nationalist character red flag with yellow stars. Question whether Ho as much nationalist as Commie is irrelevant. All Stalinists in colonial areas are nationalists. With achievement natl aims (i.e., independence) their objective necessarily becomes subordination state to Commie purposes and ruthless extermination not only opposition groups but all elements suspected even slightest deviation. On basis examples eastern Eur it must be assumed such wld be goal Ho and men his stamp if included Bao Dai Govt. To include them in order achieve reconciliation opposing polit elements and "national unity" wld merely postpone settlement issue whether Vietnam to be independent nation or Commie satellite until circumstances probably even less favorable nationalists than now. It must of course be conceded theoretical possibility exists estab National Communist state on pattern Yugoslavia in any area beyond reach Soviet army. However, US attitude cld take acct such possibility only if every other possible avenue closed to preservation area from Kremlin control. Moreover, while Vietnam out of reach Soviet army it will doubtless be by no means out of reach Chi Commie hatchet men and armed forces.
1 Repeated as 84 to Saigon and 1713 to Paris and in 379, May 24, 5 p.m., to New Delhi, 286 to Bangkok, and 636 to Manila.
2 May 11, p. 25. [0524]
Recently I received the below email from Del. Del is R. J. DelVecchio. He was a Marine combat photographer and wandered all over I Corps photographing Marines in combat, resting, taking care of Vietnamese civilians in MedCap operations and grieving over the loss of their buddies. Some of his photographs are featured on our website. Del is one of the founding members of VVFH and the author of Whitelist, Blacklist: Myths of the Vietnam War. He administers a personal charity caring for crippled ARVN veterans living in Vietnam. He was on another of his self-financed trips to Vietnam when he wrote this.
On the way to Hong Kong I got to watch the movie about Chris Kyle, which I had heard many good things about. And they were all true, it's an outstanding movie about war, what happens to people in it, the terrible costs of it. And it makes you immensely proud and thankful that we have men and women who will put on the uniform and go in harm's way to defend us and our way of life.
But when I think of the thousands of wonderful Americans who died in Iraq, and the much larger number who came home with terrible wounds on their bodies and some in their minds, and what has happened since, mostly I am angry.
I am angry that our politicians still haven't learned the simple lessons of Viet Nam, the simple lessons of war. 1- don't send Americans to fight and die unless you have a clear goal in mind that you are fully committed to achieving 2- don't send them unless you have a damn good understanding of what it will take to reach that goal 3- don't send them if you aren't going to give them 100% of what is needed to achieve the goal and maybe I should add 4- and don't betray their sacrifice of blood and lives by backing away from doing whatever is required to keep whatever gains they bought with that blood.
What is Iraq today? A broken state, a nightmare of sectarian ferment, with large chunks being run by maniac fanatic murderers, including cities we paid for in swimming pools of blood, while minorities that have lived there literally for millennia have been subject to horrific oppression and even genocide.
Why did this happen? In part because we left a sectarian jerk in charge, but in large part because we yanked all our troops out of there and left the fragile state on its own, ripe for the ISIS conquest. And the "JV Team" turned out to be all too competent, all too ferocious, and we didn't begin to do much about them for too long, and still haven't done, aren't doing, anything like what it will take to smash them as they need to be smashed.
So by lack of serious, thoughtful, looking ahead kind of leadership we have made a waste of all our blood and treasure there, and told the world we cannot be trusted to do anything right, and that it's probably smarter to cozy up to Vladimir Putin than the USA. How utterly sickening.
And it looks like we'll follow up by abandoning the Afghans to the Taliban, bringing on another waste of our blood and billions, and condemning a lot of people, women in particular, to a life of horror and misery. Great.
What will it take for this nation to regain any respect in the world, and be able to do any real good against such clear sources of evil? I just don't know, but I am sure it'll start with a change in the White House in 2017 if it can change at all.
Del
A recent letter to Lt. General “Mick” Kicklighter, head of the government funded Vietnam War 50th Commemoration Program, demands recognition for the “peace-activists” who supported the North Vietnamese communist victory over South Vietnam. (One awaits a letter to the Holocaust Museum from the Nazis claiming there could be no Holocaust Museum if not for their efforts in slaughtering six million Jews). Given the popularity of America-bashing among leftists today, no doubt Kicklighter will attempt to appease and ask forgiveness for the oversight in recognizing the usual suspects—Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Marilyn Young, Rennie Davis et al as freedom loving patriots, ignoring the cruel irony of honoring people whose efforts assisted the loss of an American ally to a brutal communist tyrannical dictatorship—freedom not being among the largess it provides its servants. The leftist’s efforts are organized in the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee (VPCC--Why do communist/leftist organizations always call themselves committees? )
American leftists are drawn to the Vietnam War like silverfish to the bottom of the flower pot. The assumption, supported by the facts of the war, is that they are horribly afraid that those facts will be self-evident in any commemoration of the war and cause them to die in the shame they so richly deserve. The light of truth causes them to scurry around blindly. Some unassailable facts:
North Vietnam in 1959 was a communist nation (whose mentors and suppliers had murdered and caused the death of 75 to 100 million people around the world up to that date) which decreed in the 15th Plenary their intent to conquer the nation of South Vietnam.
South Vietnam existed as a struggling democracy with a central government about as popular as the Obama administration. (Take either side).
America chose to lend support (favored by Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ and Nixon) to the South Vietnamese battle against the North Vietnamese-supported Viet Cong guerillas. When the depth of support, including the building of a major road system to transport troops and ammunition from the communist north to the free south, revealed a greater threat, America jumped in with both feet. (It was SEATO, not the Gulf of Tonkin which authorized our involvement).
The Russians and Chinese, global leaders in exporting communism, poured tons of armament and billions of rubles/yuan into the bunkers and coffers of the communist north.
And the majority of the signers of the letter demanding recognition of their anti-war efforts chose the Communist Side in the conflict. Vocally supporting the enemy killing American and South Vietnamese soldiers and innocent civilians in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It bears repeating—Fonda, Hayden (Mr. Jane Fonda), Ayers, and the rest supported the defeat of America and her allies in South Vietnam.
A few of their ramblings on behalf of the murdering invasion forces of North Vietnam:
Fred Branfman (visiting Hanoi with Zinn and Hayden) “……..if the war continues we hope you will grow up and become valiant combatants and will be able to down U.S. planes.”
Rennie Davis met with the North Vietnamese in Paris where “The Vietnamese….stated they would be interested in having any information…concerning development of new weapons by the US…Such information would be especially helpful...before such weapons were used on the battlefield.”
Bernadine Dohrn (wife of Bill Ayers) bragged of talks with the NLF in Budapest (NLF were the Viet Cong).
Daniel Ellsberg said “We (the U.S.) weren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.”
Jane Fonda once actually proffered that (In Hanoi) if you knew what communism was, you would get down on your knees and pray you were a communist.
Todd Gitlin wrote a “freedom song” which included “And before I’ll be fenced in, I’ll vote for Ho Chi Minh, or go back to the North and be free.”
Which brings up another fact about the American left—none of them went back to Vietnam to live, work or teach their drivel after their efforts “helped bring the war to an end” with the communist North invading and conquering South Vietnam. Maybe the fact that there was more killing after the ‘war was ended’ than during the ten years of American involvement deferred their travel plans. Or maybe their racist tendencies (Democracy is fine for Caucasians, but the people of Vietnam are not sophisticated sufficiently to know it and want it—many leftists of the era wrote this sentiment) kept them safely on American land enjoying the fruits of others labor.
And the hero of the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee—you guessed it, John Kerry. The man who spent about three hours in combat, collected three purple hearts for scratches one might get going over a barbed wire fence, and lit out for the U.S. to testify about his moral superiority to his former ship mates in front of Congress. If you follow Kerry’s “Vietnam War” history, you won’t need to know anything else about the VPCC platform and agenda.
The request to be honored in the program honoring the veterans of the Vietnam War indicates the paucity of honor (and common sense) among them. The American left did NOTHING to stop the war in Vietnam. They contributed only to the final slaughter and internment of countless Southeast Asians by supporting communism and the liberal U.S. congress decision to abandon our allies. They contributed directly to the horror of the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese boat people fleeing the brutal communist invaders.
It is an obscenity only the liberal/left could conceive—a request to be honored and remembered alongside the Americans who fought and died with their Vietnamese brothers-in-arms to prevent the very thing the Haydens and Fondas, the Ayers and Dohrns demanded and supported with violence and hatred of the American way. The recognition they deserve is that of communist supporters and useful idiots. Let us hope they receive it.
[For a near complete list of the anti-war left’s more inane and insane comments and proclamations, see Roger Canfield’s “Comrades in Arms—How the Americong Won the War in Vietnam Against the Common Enemy—America.”]
Phillip Jennings is a Vietnam combat veteran and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War.
Paul Schmehl, Independent Researcher
Whenever Vietnam is mentioned in an opinion article, we always sit up and take notice. It is not at all uncommon for the history of Vietnam and the lessons of Vietnam to be invoked in reference to other conflicts. In fact Vietnam is the fulcrum from which all false arguments about war are launched. We are told we should not forget the lessons of Vietnam, but the lessons are often based upon falsehoods and misrepresentations that make the lesson unhelpful.
Such is the case with a recent article published by CNN. Writing about the recent Paris attacks, the author invokes the specter of Vietnam to "prove" how badly America has handled foreign policy.
It helps to look at history -- not to find equivalencies but understanding, taking the long view that recognizes appropriate contexts. We make bad decisions about foreign policy -- and war -- when we fail to take into account the historical setting, which is, well, almost everything.So much untruth packed into such a short space!For example, we lost 50,000 American soldiers in Vietnam because our policy-makers failed to look at the wider historical context, ignoring the traditional animosity between China and Vietnam -- a conflict in which it was highly unlikely that the "domino effect" would ever be relevant. It wasn't, and we created mayhem in the region.
Pushed to the limit, we simply withdrew in 1975, with our tail between our legs. And where is Vietnam today? The U.S. is currently the largest single importer of Vietnamese goods and Vietnamese are the eighth-largest student group studying in the States. Of course, it took almost four decades for that kind of healing to occur.
First, we certainly wouldn't argue that it doesn't help to look at history. The problem is, it actually needs to be history to be helpful. We lost more than 58,000 men and women in Vietnam because we faced a determined enemy who was willing to sacrifice over 1.4 million of its own citizens to conquer an independent nation.
Citing the animosity between China and Vietnam, which exists to this day, as proof that US policy makers failed to understand history is so profoundly ignorant that it takes one's breath away. China provided billions of dollars in materiel and support to North Vietnam and tens of thousands of military advisors. Whatever differences there were between China and Vietnam, they were set aside during the 2nd Indochina War to pursue a common goal - the defeat of South Vietnam and the spread of communism.
What US policy makers failed to understand was that their enemy was not a rational actor that would respond to stimuli the way Americans would respond.McNamara's graduated escalation policy had little effect on the North Vietnamese and the bombing pauses were used by the North Vietnamese to regroup, resupply and reinforce their defenses. We are making the exact same mistake today in the war with ISIS.
The idea that the Domino Theory was fraudulent has been a central point of the communist propaganda campaign from the beginning. Many Americans have fallen for it. But we have addressed it in detail here and shown that not only was it legitimate but the dominos did not fall precisely because the US intervened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Furthermore, the claim that the US "created mayhem" in the region ignores several things. First, the North Vietnamese began the first steps of their conquest of South Vietnam in 1945, left troops behind in 1954 in violation of the Geneva Accords and began escalating the war in 1959, long before the US inserted combat troops. They had been creating mayhem for quite some time.
By the time the US got involved militarily, North Vietnam had been actively committing atrocities and terrorist activities in South Vietnam for almost 20 years. By 1959 they had also invaded both Laos and Cambodia and began establishing bases in both countries. After the US left, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese, tens of thousands of Laotians and 1.7 million Cambodians were killed. The mayhem created in Indochina was a direct result of North Vietnamese communist party policies, not US policy, and continued long after the US left Vietnam.
Finally, claiming that the US was "pushed to the limit" and "withdrew in 1975" again displays profound ignorance of the 2nd Indochina War. The US began removing combat troops from Vietnam in 1969 and by the time the peace treaty was signed in 1973 we did not any combat troops in Vietnam. North Vietnam, consistent with all their previous deceits, violated the treaty before the ink was signed, but they were so weakened by US and South Vietnamese forces that it took another two years before they could again invade in force.
There are certainly lessons that need to be learned from Vietnam, but we will never learn them until we finally acknowledge the truth about Vietnam. That will not happen until communist propaganda is no longer used to justify arguments about Vietnam that have no relation to the history of the conflict.
Counterpunch is a leftist, communist commentary site. It's sometimes worthwhile to visit the site to see what the enemies of America are thinking. This article is a perfect example of the muddled thinking that passes for "logic" among communists. Of course their goal isn't truth, so anything can be made to seem logical if one doesn't think too hard.
Source: Vietnam, Fifty Years After Defeating the US
Begin with the title. The US was not defeated in Vietnam. South Vietnam was. The US military left Vietnam in 1973. South Vietnam fell in 1975, two years later. When an article begins with a lie in its title, it's a good bet that the writer is pushing an agenda rather than exposing the truth.
The article closes with this
We could also learn the lesson of the war — and not treat it as a disease called “the Vietnam syndrome” — the lesson that war is immoral and even on its own terms counter-productive. Recognizing that would be the beginning of health..One has to wonder what the writer thinks about WWII. Was it immoral to defeat Germany, which was exterminating millions of people through starvation and murder and had invaded numerous countries? If that's your standard of morality, one has to ask. How many people would have to die before you would be willing to go to war? Would you even fight for your own life? Or would you simply lay down and die rather than fight evil?
One thing is certain. A LOT of good Americans were willing to give their lives to put a stop to Hitler's rampage. A LOT of others were as well, many of whose countries had not (yet!) been invaded. When it comes to moral bearings, those people seem a great deal more honorable than those who argue that war is always immoral.
Of course the communists have never shied away from killing. They've killed millions in countries they've conquered, including Russia, China, Vietnam and Cambodia. The killing doesn't stop when they take over, however. That's just the beginning of the slaughter. Doesn't it seem odd that they always accuse their enemies of committing the crimes that they themselves commit routinely as a matter of policy?
This is not to say that America or its leaders are perfect by any stretch of the imagination. I recently pointed out some of the gross malfeasance of our leaders during the Vietnam War. But the idea that America is evil and engages in wars to hurt other people is a recent claim that originated with the North Vietnamese propaganda machine and was repeated faithfully by their fellow travelers, the core of the antiwar movement in the US.
Now they're angry because (they claim) the history of the war is being somehow covered up or hidden by the Pentagon's 50th Anniversary Commemoration.
Remember, this was the bad war in contrast to which World War II acquired the ridiculous label “good war.” But the Pentagon is intent on undoing any accurate memory of Vietnam.On the contrary, the antiwar crowd has held the stage almost exclusively for the past 50 years. They have beaten the drums of "America is evil" and "communism is good" for so long that they actually believe the nonsense. While we can't depend on the Pentagon to tell the truth about Vietnam, we certainly can't depend on proven liars to tell it.
Leaders of the US antiwar movement traveled to Vietnam, Cuba, Russia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and numerous other places to get their marching orders and to assist the communists in fine tuning their propaganda.[1. https://www.vvfh.org/research/research-files.html - open the antiwar folder and download or view Peace Protest Leader Says He Met Vietcong - Activists.pdf] Now it's all unraveling as archives all over the world get opened up and researched. For example, the fiction that the Viet Cong was an indigenous revolutionary movement has been completely obliterated by the North Vietnamese records proving control of the southern forces from the beginning.
It's time for Americans to learn what really happened in Vietnam rather than the grossly distorted version promulgated by agenda-driven communists and their sympathizers. That's why we exist, and that's what we intend to do.
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.”
Goethe, “Faust”
If there is truth in Goethe’s quote, author Mark Bowden believes in his heart that the American efforts in Vietnam were at best immoral and at worst verging on genocidal. In his new book Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam (Atlantic Monthly Press, 610 pp.), Bowden casts the U.S. Marine Corps as the moral mirror of the tens of thousands of communist troops sent by a tyrannical, oppressive cadre of thugs in Hanoi to perpetrate a bloody, maniacal attack on the peaceful citizens of Hue, South Vietnam.
Hue was the second largest city in South Vietnam, a picturesque town on the Perfume River in the northern part of the country. It was safe, peaceful, and prosperous prior to January 31, 1968, the beginning of the TET holiday, even in the midst of the war. Roughly thirty days later, the city lay in ruins, with as many as ten thousand citizens dead. Schools, churches, historical buildings and thousands of homes were rubble. This was the inarguable result of the invasion by the North Vietnamese Army, aided by the local Viet Cong.
The book begins with the inspiring and heart-warming story of a young girl in Hue as she becomes a tool of the communists, assisting them in smuggling arms into the city. As you read, keep in mind that she is living in a free land, attending good schools, and surrounded by a loving family and friends. She apparently set all this aside and chose to aid and abet an invading army who will destroy the city and slaughter its citizens.
Bowden’s factually challenged and sloppily edited (including paragraphs repeated verbatim in separate chapters) diatribe against the actions of the U.S. and South Vietnamese military during the battle is an almost laughable attempt to give the communists – a number of whom he interviewed — a chance to tell “their side of the story.” Almost laughable because it is difficult if not impossible to find humor in the greatest atrocity in the Vietnam War, namely the communists’ systematic murder of thousands of noncombatants, buried alive in mass graves or executed with a shot to the back of the head. In the most staggering and shameful comparison in the book, Bowden speculates that twice as many citizens were probably killed by U.S. and ARVN artillery and bombing, with absolutely no factual basis for that statement.
Yes, and hunting accidents probably killed innocent people the same day the Manson family slaughtered Sharon Tate. Let’s let the Mason family tell their side of the story.
Apologists for the communists know no bounds when it comes to manufacturing moral equivalencies which condone atrocities. Make no mistake, people like John Kerry, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda and now Mark Bowden forgive and explain away communist evil if it serves the cause of denigrating the American war effort. It is meaningless to condemn acts of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong brutality if in the next breath the exact condemnation is used to describe Americans.
In Hue, for example, U.S. forces fought under strict rules of engagement that limited destruction and unintended civilian casualties. The communists had rules of engagement too — to slaughter and intimidate with inhumane acts against the helpless civilians on the death lists they brought to Hue, as well as anyone who looked like they might give the revolution a hard time in the future. The “crimes” committed by the people of Hue included allegiance to the government in Saigon, teaching children, healing the sick, managing the city government, being Catholic, being a child or elderly, and other such capital offenses.
Bowden is clearly impressed with the enemy. He fawns over North Vietnamese discipline and prowess. He’s “impressed with the enemy’s skill and resolve.” The “marines” (a term Bowden refuses to capitalize, an affront to me and every other Marine) on the other hand are described with terms like petrified, shaking with fear, crying, bawling like babies, bewildered, worn out, scared, mutinous, terrified, frightened, and unnerved. He presents vaguely substantiated accounts of random Marine cruelty toward civilians, such as an alleged instance of deliberately running over a woman with a tank, and an officer supposedly attempting to shoot an unarmed teen civilian until stopped by an enlisted troop. His descriptions are slanderous, libelous and cowardly given the Marines depicted are likely deceased by now.
Bowden also repeats the highly discredited idea that the communists weren’t really defeated because they were not actually trying to win. All North Vietnamese planning documents for TET, which Bowden somehow missed in his diligent research, assumed that once the communists showed up in South Vietnamese cities the populace would rally to their side, pick up arms and drive out the Americans and their running dogs. But in Bowden’s account all the attackers, from the NVA grunt to the highest Red official, repeat the losers’ propaganda mantra—we never meant to capture and hold Hue anyway. The implication is that the NVA could have whipped the Marines, if they wanted to. Tell me another one.
Bowden, best known as the author of Blackhawk Down, writes combat scenes as well as any writer of the day. He has an innate understanding, it seems, of tactics, combat mind-set, motivations and weaponry. However, he also promotes the relentless false left-wing Vietnam War history taught in so many U.S. universities, as well as in communist countries. He believes, for example, that the Vietnam War was a purely domestic civil war, a communist trope devised in Moscow to discredit western intervention. And he inadvertently slips up when he admiringly describes a North Vietnamese soldier as having acquitted his skills after spending six years fighting in Laos. The good people of Laos would be surprised to learn they were engaged in the civil war in Vietnam.
Finally, nothing is quite so distasteful as attributing vast strategic wisdom and patriotism to North Vietnamese soldiers, while belittling the U.S. troops for their supposed lack of understanding and indifference to the reasons for their deployment to the battlefields of Vietnam. First, the North Vietnamese peasantry had absolutely no choice whether or not to join the parade to the slaughterhouse of South Vietnam. They did what they were told or were executed.
However American troops by and large understood why we were in Vietnam, whether or not they agreed with Johnson administration policies. Histories such as Bowden’s downplay or ignore the basic humanity, Judeo-Christian ethics and fundamental morality of the American forces. From birth, these young men were told that America’s destiny and obligation as a great power was to help others to be free. They heard it in President John F. Kennedy’s call to arms in his 1961 inauguration speech, and they lived it in the streets of Hue.
Phillip Jennings is an investment banker and entrepreneur, former United States Marine Corps pilot in Vietnam, Air America pilot in Laos, and founding member of VVFH. He is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War and other books.
A Critical Review by Nicholas Warr
Despite its recognition as a New York Times bestseller, the receipt of many awards, and the recognition and praise from the literary world Mark Bowden has received since the publication of Hue, 1968, this book is filled with way too many misconceptions, flaws, critical omissions and dozens of outright errors and falsehoods to be taken seriously. In my opinion, this book gets nowhere near the status of “factual history.” While it brings forth many valid events of the battle, it also pushes a regurgitation of anti-war, anti-American rhetoric.
At this point, you, the reader, may ask, “Who is this guy, and how can he possibly make these statements?” Let me illuminate you.
My callsign was “Charlie One Actual.” I was a Marine 2ndLieutenant assigned as the platoon commander for 1stPlatoon, Charlie Company, 1stBattalion, 5thMarines (C/1/5). I was there, in the middle of the battle from the initial assaults on 13 February 1968 to the bitter end in early March. I saw what happened, up close and ugly. I know there was plenty to criticize about our high-ranking leadership’s decision-making, but Bowden got most of the important points wrong. In fact, this book reads more like anti-war, anti-American leftist revisionism than factual history.
Although I counted nearly 80 significant errors, omissions or outright falsehoods in this book, I will focus on the three I feel are the most egregious.
- S. Marines of all ranks are force-fed USMC history during our training. We learned that every single combat campaign in France during World War I, the South Pacific during World War II, and during the Korean War could have easily become catastrophes if not for the gut-wrenching courage and determination of just one United States Marine. That was true during the second phase of Operation HUE CITY, the battle for the Citadel Fortress.Lance Corporal Paul Cheatwood was that one Marine, who, on the 16thof February 1968, after four terrible days of all-out urban warfare with not an inch of progress, risked everything to save his fellow Marines, and in the process secured a critical beachhead. A squad of Bravo Company Marines had finally crossed phase line green, occupying the first house across that bloody street, but were being systematically shredded by a horrendous enemy crossfire from two enemy machine gun nests. Although his job as a mortarman required him to stay behind to provide supporting fire, Paul took the initiative and crossed that street under heavy enemy gunfire; he then successfully destroyed both of those enemy positions, single-handedly, suffering many serious wounds in the process, saving that critical beachhead and all who were in that pivotal house. Yet, there is not one single word in Bowden’s book about Paul Cheatwood’s heroism.
This exclusion is symptomatic of the entire book, in which the enemy are often described in glowing terms as brave soldiers fighting for their country against the invading Americans, in a rather blatant attempt to establish a moral equivalence between American and ARVN forces, in comparison with the VC and NVA. This is pure anti-war rhetoric, and Bowden has bought it all, hook, line and sinker. Using just one appalling example, he quotes (without any commentary) an NVA soldier, who claimed that the Marines were very difficult to fight because they advanced by using human shields of Hue civilians; this is not only utterly false, it is a turnaround of the actual history, since the NVA on several occasions did use human shields in their attacks on the Marines. Bowden’s book does a terrible disservice to Marine Corps history on many fronts, but this hateful smear of the courageous Americans who fought in Hue goes completely beyond the pale.
Bowden also either inadvertently or purposely besmirched the reputation of the U. S. Marines serving in Charlie Company, 1stBattalion, 5thMarines. His book claims that on the morning of 13 February, Charlie Company was “several blocks back” from Alpha Company’s position on point, when Alpha came under attack in fact, we were one block back from phase line green where the enemy awaited us in force, and less than a block west of Alpha’s position at that time. Bowden further states that it took us “several hours” to go on the attack, claiming that we started our attacks at around 4:00 pm, when, in fact, as soon as Alpha pulled back and they were replaced by a platoon from Bravo Company, we were ordered to move up and move out, on the attack; our first fight against the NVA waiting for us that morning on phase line green took place at around 1100 hours.
The official USMC Unit Diary records confirm Charlie One’s tragic losses during that single day. Five of my Marines were killed outright, and another twenty-two were badly wounded and medically evacuated on 13 February 1968.
Bowden claims that our battalion commander spent the remainder of February 13thtrying to get his men back to Mang Ca (adjacent to the 1stARVN Division Compound along the northern wall of the Citadel, which was nearly a mile behind the “front line”) in one piece. Although Alpha Company did pull back to Mang Ca after being devastated by the initial enemy rocket attack, the Marines of Charlie 1/5 and that Bravo platoon on our left flank pulled back just one block from phase line green and spent the night in houses on the north side of that street.
Bowden did not do his homework, let alone perform focused, effective research on this battle, which is considered by historians to be critically important in Marine Corps history. Yet, because of all the awards and recognition, it gives me great pain to know that this is the book that our children and grandchildren will refer to. This is the book that young Marines will read in training. This is the book that attempts to look at every angle – the enemy, the anti-war movement, the complicated beginnings and the inglorious end of the war – yet this is also the book that allows critical learning and many truths to be lost to history.
Mark Bowden should offer an apology to all of us who fought in this historic battle and especially to the Cheatwood family.
References:
Recently published, detailed reviews of Mark Bowden’s book, Hue, 1968, here:
http://nicholaswarr.com/critical-review-hue-1968-mark-bowden
PBS has responded to VVFH's demand that they correct the errors in the Burns/Novick documentary, The Vietnam War. Here is what they wrote.
November 28, 2017
R.J. DelVecchio
Executive Secretary
Vietnam Veterans for Factual History
Dear Mr; De! Vecchio;
Paula Kerger asked me to respond to your November 7, 2017 letter regarding the recent broadcast of Ken Bums and Lynn Novick's film, THE VIETNAM WAR.
As you know, the film generated a tremendous amount of attention, from the public, members of the military community and veterans, nearly all of which praised the film's respect for our soldiers and its balance. Maybe more poignantly, not a day goes by when I do not hear from veterans of the war about how thankful they are for the film, helping them speak about their experience with family and friends, something they had rarely done before.
Ken and Lynn went to great lengths to include diverse voices in the film. We did the same in our outreach across the country, meeting with veterans' groups, Vietnamese-Americans and those who opposed the war, as well as with a wide-range of historians and military experts. The film was extremely well received at the Air Force and Naval Academies, the Army Command and General Staff College, as well as at the Pentagon.
Nearly 34 million people watched some portion of the film. And all ten episodes of the series have been streamed more than 8 million times (over 600,000 times in Vietnam), a record for streaming on PBS.
Much of what is covered in the film is of course unsettled history and I appreciate that there may be. areas: where you disagree with the filmmaker's emphasis, and aspects of the narrative that you think deserved more attention. We appreciate your feedback and believe 'The Vietnam War' has provided a timely opportunity to continue the discussion around this important topic.
Sincerely,
Jennifer R. Byrne
Vice President, Corporate Communications'
Do you believe that "nearly all" of the veteran community "praised the film"? If not, why not consider joining us in our efforts to correct the record.
The Last Days in Vietnam is an Oscar-nominated documentary covering the very end of South Vietnam, in April, 1975. Rory Kennedy’s dramatically sad and horrific documentary is both difficult (for a Vietnam Veteran at least) to watch and a chronicle of American compassion and angst. The fall of a democratic society to Communist tyranny should be lamented by Americans, who sacrificed greatly in their defense. It is a film of pathos, frustrating and yet strongly uplifting at times as American soldiers, diplomats and newsmen risk their careers and their lives to save Vietnamese friends from the invading North Vietnamese Army.
Uplifting, unless you’re Associate Professor Christoph Giebel of the University of Washington, Seattle. In a review of the film posted to the website of Vietnam Scholars Group (sic) by Professor Giebel, the film is “dangerously simplistic,” and “much more of a commentary on current US culture—steeped in nationalistic discourses of exceptionalism, thoroughly militarized, and narcissistic—than a reflection of its actual quality.” In fact, the film “is the worst attempt at documenting the war (he) has seen in a long time.”
Aside from the obvious fact that the film is not attempting to document the war but the final American evacuation from the war, Professor Giebel’s statement that the first twenty five minutes of the documentary “quickly abandon all pretense of historical accuracy or balance” quite adequately describes his own (following) rant about the Vietnam War.
[Background: In the spring of 1975, two years after U.S. combat units had left Vietnam, twelve divisions of the North Vietnamese Army invaded South Vietnam. The U.S. Congress refused to re-enter the war, although it had pledged to do so in the event of massive violations of the Paris Peace Agreements. Although many South Vietnamese units fought valiantly and brilliantly, they were no match for the Russian-armed North Vietnamese troops and heavy weapons. In April, 1975, the North Vietnamese overran Saigon and took over the country. The Americans were slow to evacuate thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked with them and who were in mortal danger from the Communists. Panic and anger overtook the final days of the war.]
Giebel posts six “main issues” with the documentary:
1. “US centrism and exceptionalism”
Of course the “notion” of the U.S. aid cut is anything but debunked. The U.S. congressional records are replete with discussions, debates and resolutions concerning the aid cut. A history professor teaching anything contrary is irrefutably wrong. Giebel’s use of the term “trotted out” also indicates a disdain for historical documentation which, easily accessed, refutes his position.2. “Complex US debates reduced to literal “abandonment” “
Giebel’s “issue” here is illusory but seems to be that America did not abandon the South Vietnamese —it was more complex than that and not just the result of anti-war protestors and a liberal/Democrat US Congress. Which, of course, was exactly what it was. His final statement is “Congressional sons- of-bitches and the anti-war protestors did not and (sic) cold-heartedly stabbed ‘South Viet Nam’ in the back.” Which, of course, they did.Giebel goes on to muse, “I will not speak to the adventurous notion that Congressional appropriation (not assembling, shipping, delivering, distributing), on April 17, of emergency military aid, in violation of the Paris Agreement, would have made a lick of difference before April 30.” He would have been better off to stick with his gut feeling. By that comment he makes it known to all that he has scant knowledge of America’s military might or system (he thought we would get on the phone and order bullets? Rush delivery, I suppose) or the ability of an American air force to obliterate a Communist army strung along miles of South Vietnam highways, with no air cover and little mobile anti-aircraft weaponry. Every military pilot in the U.S. would have volunteered for those missions. Giebel is just childish in his belief that the North Vietnamese Army was somehow immune to this fate in the face of air and naval gunfire attacks. (Yet he was more than likely a voice of screaming rage when the Americans bombed Hanoi into submission and a peace treaty in December of 1973.) In every engagement in the course of the war when Hanoi gathered massive weaponry and soldiers, they were wiped off the map.
3. “False and manipulative framing along US propagandistic, Cold War rhetoric:”
And what is this manipulative US propaganda? Giebel says: There never was a South Vietnam and therefore there was never an invasion of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.His statement, breathtaking in its ignorance, can only be viewed in light of the Communist (for which Giebel, at the very least, is a first class apologist) methodology of erasing history which does not support their actions and propaganda. Giebel goes far beyond the oft “trotted out” claim that the war was a Civil War, ignoring the Communist North Vietnam bloody and brutal conquest of vast areas of Laos and Cambodia (as if the Confederate Army had invaded Mexico and Canada during the US civil war).
Under Giebel’s view of the world, there was/is no South Korea. In reality, the only difference between South Vietnam and South Korea is that the U.N. forces did not abandon South Korea after stopping the Communist attempts to take over the southern half of the Korean peninsula. Existing as a struggling democratic country in 1973, with U.N. and Peace Treaty defined borders, South Vietnam had a democratically elected government, and the individual freedoms known only in Western societies, facts Giebel simply ignores.
4. “One-sided misrepresentation of the Paris Agreement (sic)”
Just when one would think Giebel could not posit a more blatant untruth about the war, he does. He cites the violations of the 1973 peace accord and the “much more aggressive violations of the ceasefire by the ARVN (South Vietnamese).” Of course, fairness being a Communist apologist’s prime concern, he allows that the “revolutionary (North Vietnamese) side violated the Peace Agreement as well, albeit initially in a reactive manner.” The statement is so stupid—there is no other word for it— that a rebuttal is superfluous. Suffice it to say that the ARVN never perpetrated an attack onto North Vietnamese soil. Period.5. “One-sided representation of war-time violence.”
Is there a need to even respond? Communists slaughtered an estimated 50,000 of their own people within weeks of taking control of the country after defeating the French in 1954. Proportionately, their slaughter of village leaders in South Vietnam during the war would be the equivalent slaughter of 20,000 mayors and council members of U.S. towns. The disagreement about the Communists burying men, women children alive during their occupation of HUE after Tet ’68, is over the number, not the act. Most Western accounts put the number at 3,000 to 4,000. The Communists say they buried alive less than a thousand. Giebel’s statement in his review is that the West, primarily the U.S and their South Vietnamese ally, claim to “have perpetrated no violence, no one else suffered.” The statement is ridiculous and worthy of inclusion in no review above the sophomore year in high school level. Of course. there was never such a claim.6. Finally, “Racist/orientalist reductionism of the Vietnamese actions, motivations, and feelings.”
Giebel believes that the West has “long-standing racist notions...that ‘the natives’ are easily swayed by, and can be kept under control through, fear, ‘shock and awe’ and the threat of violence.” That our view was one of “the superstitious, emotional, child-like Little Brown ‘commie.’It is, in fact, a basic foundation of the apologists for the Communist takeover of South Vietnam that the people of South Vietnam were too uneducated, too unsophisticated, to understand the difference between a Communist regime and one based on democratic principles, that the one million South Vietnamese military casualties were the result of American propaganda and coercion. That given the open choice, the South Vietnamese would have chosen to live under the already exhibited brutal Communist government from the North. That they preferred thought police, restriction of movement and expression, labor camps, and the oppression of government bureaucracy to a chance for freedom and choice. But with the invasion North Vietnamese forces and the abandonment of our ally by the Democrat U.S. Congress, they got the Communists.
It is ludicrous to believe they freely chose their own enslavement.
Giebel has written at least one other “apology” for the Vietnamese communists. Entitled “Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism,” the first two chapters of the book are devoted to explaining and justifying the lies and misrepresentations Ton Duc Thang, North Vietnam’s second president, made in order to become a national hero and Communist leader. Communists and their apologists have no compunction to base power or truth, or history, on fact. It is a dubious, at best, requisite for a professor of history at an American University.
I once visited Professor Giebel’s class to freshman at the university. On the board was written—“The greatest danger to world peace is American hegemony.” It was no surprise, at a later date, to find he was a signed-up supporter of Bill Ayers—probably the most dangerous and traitorous of the anti- Vietnam War protestors.
Professor Giebel teaches history at a major American university. In my opinion, he shouldn’t. (On a campus which once refused to allow a memorial to Pappy Boyington, one of the greatest Marine Corps aces in World War II, perhaps there is no surprise.) Perhaps there is a place for teaching a European leftist (Giebel was born in Germany) view of American history. But it should be called what it is.
I invite Professor Giebel to debate a real Viet Nam War scholar and will gladly volunteer to arrange a public forum for that event. Taxpayers should be made aware of what their children are being taught.
Phillip Jennings is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Viet Nam War and the author of two books on the war.
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
At the height of the Vietnam War, Ralph White tried to join the U.S. Marine Corps but was turned down because of an eye injury he had sustained playing tennis. As the fighting drew to a tumultuous close in April 1975, however, 27-year-old White was in Saigon, acting true to the leatherneck motto “Semper fidelis” – only by civilian means.
By cajoling, twisting arms and cleverly bypassing red tape, White found an ingenious way to rescue 112 Vietnamese employees of Chase National Bank and their family members: he simply adopted all of them in the presence of U.S. justices of the peace on emergency duty at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat Airport. In the face of an impending defeat of the United States’ South Vietnamese ally, this American civilian who had wanted to be a Marine achieved a small but remarkable victory.
Four days later, on April 30, Soviet-made T-54 tanks completed the communist conquest of South Vietnam by bursting through the gate of the presidential palace in Saigon. Inside, newly appointed South Vietnamese President Duong Van “Big” Minh offered to transfer power. North Vietnamese Col. Bui Tin replied, “There is no question of your transferring power ... You cannot give up what you don’t have.”
To me, a German, these words sounded identical to the terms the Allies imposed on my country in 1945 when I was still a child: unconditional surrender. The irony was that while at the end of World War II a manifestly evil government was forced to surrender this way, the opposite was true 30 years later in Saigon: a totalitarian regime with deeply inhumane features bullied a much more humane – though faulty – opponent into capitulating unconditionally, and the world cheered.
Having covered Vietnam for West Germany’s largest publishing house over a period of five years, I concluded that the wrong side had won. There was no reason to rejoice. Yet when President Gerald Ford proclaimed at Tulane University in New Orleans that the Vietnam War “is finished as far as America is concerned,” one week before South Vietnam was finally crushed, he received a standing ovation.