Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
Quote Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger View Post
I agree. The US did not achieve its political goals in Vietnam, and everyone knows that battlefield victories are only a means to a political end.

However, when threads like this pop up, I think its important to set the record straight. Too many people know little more than what they saw in Apocolypse Now or what they were told by a less than informed (or objective) media. Watching Dan Rather's coverage on youtube and comparing it to what was actually going on in the engagements he was involved in is both sad and quite laughable. The hysteria and recrimination of the media coverage during that conflict - which marked a distinct departure from the likes of Earnie Pyle - has come to define war reporting ever since.

So today we get the classic archetype of the young, black, unwillingly drafted, drug-addled marine trekking through some jungle plotting to surprise his CO with a grenade in his tent for making him leave camp and massacre a village full of innocent children, all the while in constant fear of an unseen (and often tree-bound ) guerilla warrior - a master of the jungle - the dreaded Viet-Cong.

In reality, moral was quite high throughout the conflict, even remaining remarkably resilient during the final withdrawal years. The vast majority of those who served on the ground were volunteers, which naturally meant that most of those killed were not draftees. In fact, blacks, or any other minorities were not disproportionately represented. Drug use was a far smaller occurrence in rear areas than in the States, and practically nonexistent in combat areas - as was the media-induced "epidemic" of fragging.

And who could forget My Lai? As John Kerry would say, American troops were nothing less than the second coming of the horseman of Genghis Khan. Young, strung out American boys pulled from their cushy suburban lives and forced to fight in such a senseless conflict must have taken out a lot of anger on the helpless civilians around them, who of course could never be trusted. It all plays out like a great Hollywood story - which, of course, it is. There are only two documented cases of war crimes committed by American personnel in Vietnam. In both cases, the men were court-martialed and found guilty. And while the LA Times tried to make a big deal out of the 1994 declassified working group files, the numbers turned out to be a fraction of those seen in WW2 and Korea.

The most disappointing aspect of the "Vietnamization" of American culture for me, however, is that people don't even know how it was fought. Its really an interesting case study for the military history enthusiast. The tactics and strategies employed by both sides, some successfully and some not so much, are fascinating. It was hardly a bunch of guys running around screaming in a jungle.

While constantly played up in popular culture, the Vietcong was not the most significant threat to American forces, and had largely played itself out after the failed, and rather pathetic, Tet Offensive was rather easily crushed - despite the media coverage. The NVA - an organized and fairly traditional military - launched many offensives during the war which were soundly defeated by American troops in large scale, set-piece battles.

American politicians and even top military brass deserve all that comes their way in terms of derision, but American troops performed quite well in actuality - certainly living up to their performance in WW2 and I would say superior to that of the Korean adventure, which puts them at a solid 7 in terms of 1-10.

(Note, the preceding was for wider discussion purposes only. Please don’t take it as a lecture on Vietnam, as I know you’re well read in military history.)


Sorry for the double post, but to clarify my position on some of the points you raise here:

It isn't purposeful when comparing war scenarios to delink success in the field and success in the larger war. It is often the case in war that an apparent tactical victory becomes an obvious strategic defeat, so much so that to continue to refer to that battle as won becomes a mockery of the idea of winning. At every turn, at every stage America was defeated in Vietnam. To say that we 'won' at this spot, and handily turned back this offensive is meaningless in the proper context.

So I don't dispute the effectiveness of our forces where they were used. There was no military force in Vietnam the equal of our own, not by a substantial margin, and that fact is completely irrelevant. Any reasonable set of goals you could concoct for our forces in Vietnam we failed to accomplish. Such is the very definition of defeat.

I actually wrote a fair amount on the declassified documents back in '94 and '95, generally with the theme that they revealed nothing of consequence. As one would expect. As far as I'm concerned incidents recorded show a field force with exceptional discipline relative to the size and type of deployment. On a unit by unit basis there's simply no comparison with the type of force we sent to war in the 40's and 50's; the army in Vietnam was vastly superior. What changed was the nature of communication from the field to the populace back home, and that change contributed signficantly to our ultimate defeat because of the unavoidably swaybacked nature of our political leaders and their incessant intervention in the conduct of the war.

So, having said all that, our dispute is really just a matter of definition. We're working from the same facts, you're just taking the more 'bottom up' perspective of individual battles being a success or failure, while I'm more of the mindset that a 'top down' perspective eliminates success from being associated with any of our military work in Vietnam. If you refer back to the Phillipines campaign we entered that war with a relatively clear goal, worked to accomplish that goal, and spared few efforts along the path to victory. The occupation was not easy, but by the time it was over our primary purpose had been accomplished.

When comparing the two campaigns with the still unfinished (But IMHO inevitably failed) action in Iraq one must hope that we can somehow imitate the success of the Phillipines campaign far more than the 'success' of Vietnam, which was all I meant to imply in my first post.