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Out of the Mouths of Vietnam War Veterans
My junior year in high school, we studied American History. My teacher was a fully committed liberal democrat in her politics; but when it came to teaching, I had to admit she was as fair and balanced as they came. She was deeply committed to having us learn from as many primary sources as possible. So, in addition to the textbook, we studied newspaper articles and photographs from the different eras, literature written at the time, the full immersive experience.
When it came to studying the Vietnam War, we looked at it from all angles: military, political, the reaction on the home front, the draft pros and cons, fighting conditions, use of nuclear power and other fighting strategies and their effects, as well as where and how and why we got involved in the first place. For the final lesson, she always invited a group of about ten Vietnam War veterans from the local veteran’s hospital in Palo Alto to visit the class and answer questions about their experience. Before they arrived, she cautioned us all to be tactful in our questioning. These men had been through unspeakable trauma and the wrong question could trigger highly emotional responses.
When the veterans arrived, everyone was very quiet for a while. Then one by one, students began asking questions. The men answered quietly, humbly. I don’t remember most of the questions, but everyone did their best to show respect to these men.
Then, after a short time of silence, one young man asked, “What was it like to know you were fighting a losing war?”
The reaction was instantaneous. Up until then, the men had sat almost nervelessly in their seats. Some were slouched or slumped over. Now every one of them began sitting up straighter. Their breath came more intensely and sparks appeared in their eyes. All the students looked at each other worriedly. Had this boy committed the sin of tactless questioning?
“We were never losing that war!”
The veteran who had been the most vocal spat out the words intently. We all stared as the other veterans nodded in agreement. They were all still highly riled up. We students just sat in stunned silence.
Our teacher had been sitting quietly behind her desk, just listening to the proceedings. She sat forward now.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “We were winning the war the whole time?”
Apparently, no one had thought to ask this question before.
The spokesman veteran spoke again. “Yes. The problem was the government kept getting in our way. When we needed to go into Cambodia, suddenly we weren’t allowed into Cambodia. If we needed to chase the enemy in Laos, Laos suddenly became closed to us. But wherever we were fighting, we were winning.”
The other veterans nodded in agreement once more.
I don’t remember the name of the young man who asked the question that day. But I am grateful he asked it. I am grateful for a teacher who wanted us to learn from primary sources. All of us that day learned a truth about the Vietnam War that seldom makes it into the history books.
We were winning.
Published in History
There are people on this site, and people across the country, who are already thoroughly sick of supporting Ukraine. (I’m not one of them). Like Ukraine, Vietnam was a faraway war that cost US taxpayers a fortune. What’s more, very much un-like Ukraine, not only were American troops in country, but we did most of the fighting.
At the time Nixon got us out, we’d had troops over there for 11 years and major forces there for 7. If Trump and others are eager to wrap up Ukraine after a “mere” two years, some of you younger folks may not understand what the Vietnam war was like. Here’s where I differ from your story: we didn’t cut and run because “Congress”, “the politicians”, etc. were sick of the war. They did it because at a certain point, most of the country was telling the Congress they wanted out. That didn’t make it right, necessarily. But it wasn’t imposed on us.
Thought experiment:
Your enemy’s army … regular army, not guerrillas … sits at the end of a 1200 mile supply line. What’s the simplest way to destroy them? Easy answer, right? Cut the supply line.
But in Vietnam, because that supply line ran through Laos and Cambodia … no can do. Because the political leadership allowed the NVA safe havens in, and safe passage through, Laos and Cambodia the NVA had an enormous advantage.
Whether or not we should have been there is a separate issue. Once we were involved, we owed it to the young men risking their lives to give them the best opportunity possible to win. We didn’t do that. Far too much using the military to send messages instead of destroying our enemies wherever they were found.
I’m just curious what General Curtis LeMay would have said:
Because I know that Marines were in Nam as “consultants” years before combat troops arrived on the scene.
It can be easily argued that “most of the country was telling the Congress they wanted out” because they were being lied to. Indeed that one question asked by a child in the OP shows that.
And it’s easy to make the same point about Afghanistan.
We were winning a war that had been planned from the git-go to be a long drawn out and entrenched money making affair for the damn military industrial corporation complex.
Our nation spent a bit over three and a half years fighting and winning victory over the Axis nations.
Yet as far as Vietnam, way down the line in 1968, Nixon promised that if elected he had a magic but secret plan that would end the war shortly.
Yet the war didn’t end until Spring 1975. And even then, the departure was horrendously marred by one Joe Biden being the deciding vote in Congress to keep the funds for the withdrawal down to a minimum.
I do not know what most of the country wanted. I only know what I did not want, and that was to be forced to go to the other side of our planet and kill people who never did me, my family, or my country any harm. I have nothing but total respect for those who either chose or were forced to fight in Vietnam. The ill will that they received from many of our own countrymen when they returned home was disgusting. We never treat our wounded Vets as well as we should. Perhaps I just do not know or don’t have the imagination to intuit, but what would Vietnam look like today had we stayed another 7 to 10 years and lost another 50 to 75 thousand of our youth? How would the world be better?
Let’s ask a similar, but easier to answer, question. It’s easier to answer because there is a direct comparison. What might Vietnam look like today had the US not been involved.
It’s easier to answer because we can look at the experience of next door neighbor Cambodia … where we weren’t.
Communist zealots killed over 2 million Cambodian civilians including everyone with an education … doctors, teachers, lawyers etc.
Thats what future that was avoided in Vietnam. Now maybe you want to argue that 2mm Vietnamese aren’t worth the American casualties. Maybe not. But it’s not like their sacrifice didn’t buy anything.
Why assume that there would have been another 50 to 75 thousand lost? I’ll remind you, the last few years in Afghanistan had NO US deaths. Not until FJB decided to “withdraw.”
That argument of yours is the most ludicrous example of anything – but to use the argument to try and say our being in Vietnam prevented what went on in Cambodia <on edit> from happening in Vietnam is absurd beyond belief.
The USA supported Pol Pot. Look up every single attempt made in the United Nations to stop the guy. Our top officials and DoD supported him.
Veterans that have been in combat fight for each other. They are bonded to each other by sharing hardship, and loss. That is a select club if you like, and the price of admission to that club is very expensive. An expense that has nothing to do with money.
Great story and consistent with my memory although I was Navy in on a carrier in late ’72 just before the “truce.” Went to Hanoi in 2015 and saw the incredible damage the AF and Navy planes did in a War Museum in the old “Hanoi Hilton.” Was a costly mistake by the politicians limiting what the folks on the ground and in the air could do.
For background, no one has called me “younger” for a long, long time
So are you saying that Viet Nam set the standard? That until it gets to that point, no comments please ?
I’d like to think that some of us not-so-youngs are beginning to see a pattern. A pattern of long wars that have no intent of “winning”
Well, no. That didn’t happen in Laos, did it?
This is not true. There were not many deaths, but the figure was not zero.
And Donald Trump decided to withdraw. Biden just continued the plan.
So, invade two sovereign nations with which we were not at war. That’s your proposal.
It’s hard to figure out Neocons. They will blithely invade or bomb other countries whenever they want, and then self-righteously protest when any other great power does so. They will happily justify, and even celebrate, the slaughter of thousands of enemy civilians by our forces, and then accuse others who do the same of “crimes against humanity.”
I just don’t know how to evaluate them. No evaluation is flattering, but there are alternatives.
I wasn’t around myself in a conscious way. I was a very little kid.
My impression, though, is that most of the country wanted out because we lost over 50,000 young American men in a Southeast Asian hellhole of no geopolitical importance.
To contain a Communist threat with which we had allied in World War II, doing it the great favor of devastating the two Great Powers that used to flank it to the east and west.
Not absurd at all. I think it’s apples/apples. Even if I give credence to your allegation, the killing fields were 1975-78…a couple years prior to your alleged US support.
Feh. Trump had a plan to withdraw, if certain conditions were met. The conditions were not met, and in addition to being advised by generals etc that leaving would be a mistake, the withdrawal didn’t occur.
FJB wanted an applause line for a speech on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and in addition to ignoring advice that it would be a mistake, he insisted on the withdrawal anyway, under perhaps the worst possible conditions and with more US deaths than had occurred during the previous 3 or 4 years or something TOTAL.
And of course FJB says he was just finishing what Trump started and he had no choice. He’s FJB! But if you take him seriously, that’s on you.
Afghanistan, under Joe, Biden was Vietnam redo. Our problem is not our military, it is our politicians!
And what “plan” was that? Whatever plan FJB “executed” (would we call it that??) was not the plan we would have seen had DJT been re-elected.
IF there had been a withdrawal AT ALL. As mentioned previously, Trump had set conditions which were not being met, and he also followed advice from the military that withdrawing was not a good idea.
Comrades.
First of all my dyslexia is in full swing today.
I meant to write this: For you to use the argument to state that our leaving Vietnam was the causal factor of what went in in Cambodia is absurd beyond belief.
From the following link and note the dates: https://theculturetrip.com/asia/cambodia/articles/a-guide-to-cambodias-killing-fields
The History of Cambodia’s Killing Fields | Culture Trip
The History of Cambodia’s Killing Fields by Marissa 01 April 2021:
During the Khmer Rouge reign, from 1975 to 1979, an estimated 1.7m to 2.5m Cambodians died from execution, starvation or disease – almost a quarter of the population.
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My comment: We supported Pol Pot in 1978 and 1979. And there are those who think American officials and the CIA had set him up to begin with, or at least looked the other way when he began to accumulate power in the 1960’s.
From Wikipedia: The United States (U.S.) voted for the Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge-dominated Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) to retain Cambodia’s United Nations (UN) seat until as late as 1993, long after Khmer Rouge had been mostly deposed by Vietnam during the 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.SNIP It has also been reported that the U.S. encouraged the government of China to provide military support for the Khmer Rouge.
Also from Wikipedia: In the spring of 1979, Brzezinski says he used the visit of Thailand’s foreign minister to press forward his plans.” Becker has quoted Brzezinski as saying “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.
I was in the USAF from 1969 to 1973. One hundred percent of the experienced NCOs and sub-field-grade officers told me we could win and were winning except for constraints imposed from the top. I was already cynical enough, but this just made my cynicism more solid.
Yeah, as I was laying in a bunker just north of Bien Hoa, desperately trying to pull my steel helment down over my ears, as the mortar rounds fell, I realized I might have made a slight error in raising my right hand (a year before).
It was several years later that I read the below quotation but after I read it three or four times and thought back on my experiences, I realized how true it was:
“A veteran is someone who, at some point in their life wrote a blank check made payable to ‘The United States of America,’ for an amount up to and including their life.”
What infuriates me (and, I suspect all vets) is when those checks are wasted in a place like Abbey Gate.
Well, we won every battle (and, yes, that includes the Tet Offensive of 1968) not to mention consistently killing more of the enemy than we ever lost but the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were reading the New York Times and Washington Post along with the rest of the Northeastern Elites. They gauged that they could wait out the Americans (and Walter Cronkite).
They proved to be correct.
Yup. That’s where it was won. Especially Walter Cronkite changing the minds all across the country.
Anybody know what happened to all those peaceniks that fled to Canada to avoid the draft?
Jimmy Carter declared an amnesty, so once they no longer feared prosecution for draft-related offenses, I suppose a lot of them came home. Don’t know anyone personally who went there.
I’ve run into a few over the years. They were doing quite well as farmers of BC’s #1 crop.