PBS - The Vietnam War

[Martinjmpr]

Here's another good question on an interesting topic.

How and why did Westmoreland stay in charge for so long????

During the early stages of the war he was always saying (and the political leaders believed) the end was "just around the corner." No need to change leaders when the whole operation will be ending soon, right?

Westmoreland was basically "kicked upstairs" after Tet and replaced by his own deputy.

[JohnTRourke]

During the early stages of the war he was always saying (and the political leaders believed) the end was "just around the corner." No need to change leaders when the whole operation will be ending soon, right?

Westmoreland was basically "kicked upstairs" after Tet and replaced by his own deputy.

Yeah I knew that and everyone agrees that Abrams had the chops and "saved" the army. But 4 years of idiocy? I mean are they just believing each other's BS? stroking each other off? Westmoreland had naked pictures of LBJ? 1 or 2 years I get, but after that, I don't get it.

[Rhino0427]

Yeah I knew that and everyone agrees that Abrams had the chops and "saved" the army. But 4 years of idiocy? I mean are they just believing each other's BS? stroking each other off? Westmoreland had naked pictures of LBJ? 1 or 2 years I get, but after that, I don't get it.

I think you need look no farther than Afghanistan to see the Vietnam mentality in practice to this day. I was there in '03-'04 and left thinking "I don't know what the Hell we're trying to do here. I just hope my son doesn't end up fighting my war." He was 6 at the time and is now 18 and wants to be in the military after college. The way things are going, he may get the exact same hootch I slept in.

Vietnams and Afghanistans happen when the military promises to win a political war. Vietnam was a civil war that we went over to fix and never developed an idea of how to win or even what "winning" looked like. So like a blind man in a dark room, we flailed about getting Americans killed and not really accomlishing anything.

Don't get me wrong. Afghanistan started as a "good war". However, as soon as we defeated the Taliban and brought some measure of peace, we should have claimed victory, came home to parades and left that hellhole of a country alone, never to be thought of again. However, we decided to build a peaceful, stable, harmonious democracy in a county that has NO interest in doing that. So, 16 years later, my son may get the "priveledge" of fighting my war. Sounds a lot like what happened in SE Asia.

[Aloha_Shooter]

I don't believe any of McNamara's self-serving claims. He did more damage to the Defense Department than any single individual in history with the possible exception of Bradley Manning.

Different perspective of Vietnam from https://www.peakingat70.com/lets-talk-america/:

The Fallacy of Inevitability

The war was unwinnable. This is the underlying motif in every episode, the main message of the entire series. And it is a fallacy. The theme begins with episode 1, Déjà Vu which ends with the devastating loss by the French at Dien Bien Phu, but never tells us why the base is there in the first place or that the North Vietnamese and Chinese communist were attacking in Laos in an attempt to widen the war. Déjà Vu is meant to be an omen that what happened in 1954 will inevitably reoccur in 1975. Burns hammers at this point through the following nine episodes, sometimes subtly other times blatantly, through four American presidents, through edited clips showing only their fears, skepticism, pessimism and duplicity.

The theory of the unwinnable war rests on the fact that the war was not won. Because it happened this seemingly gives one arguing from that perspective the right to claim inevitable, but a change in any precursor might have produced a very different history.

And if politicians didn’t see the possibility of winning the war, thousands, perhaps millions of American and South Vietnamese soldiers did. In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, it became common to hear American veterans say, “We were winning when I left.”

Camp Eagle (101st Abn Div basecamp) sat close to Highway 547, the main road from the populated coastal lowlands to the mountains and jungles of the A Shau Valley. The first firebase west of Eagle was Birmingham. Through the spring of 1970 Americans only went to Birmingham via 547 in armed convoy. By late summer of that year the trip was often made by two guys in a jeep. Or recall Hue during the Tet offensive of ’68. Two and a half years later we would sightsee in Hue and the surrounding villages, and because it was peaceful GIs not on duty were not allowed to carry their weapons.

Imagine also, at each step along the way, that the American “anti-war” movement, with many of its leaders having ties to the international communist movement, had not garnered its high degree of influence over the American media; and imagine too that JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Ford were not continuously reacting to public pressures created by the incomplete and slanted narratives these groups produced.

After Saigon fell one of the voices in the Burns documentary declares, “The Vietnamese people could finally live normally.” What?! Hello!!! Also said, “…no blood bath.” How many people have to be executed for a documentarian to label an action “a blood bath”? I guess 60,000 murders in the first 90 days after the fall does not qualify. If one adds in the number of people who died in the gulags of re-education, does that push it into the category of blood bath? Some 1.5 million South Vietnamese men and women were treated to these communist camps—approximately 10% of the population of that country. Many were tortured. Many were starved. Many were worked to death.

1.7 million of 6 million Cambodians died after “the war was over.” Not a bloodbath, Mr. Burns? Francois Bizot, in his 2003 book The Gate “…understood the true nature of the Khmer Rouge long before other outsiders. Decades later, his frustration remains: ‘What oppresses me, more still than the unclosed eyes of the dead who fill the sandy paddy fields, is the way the West applauded the Khmer Rouge, hailing their victory over their brothers in 1975. The ovation was so frenzied as to drown out the protracted wailing of the millions being massacred…’”

Burns show American veterans returning to Vietnam years after the war, hugging and reconciling with North Vietnamese soldiers who had opposed them on the battlefield. The occasions are joyous, friendly, healing. All-well-in-good, BUT what about showing Americans reuniting with ARVN soldiers who were their allies? That’s not shown. And it’s not shown for a reason. ARVN vets are still second class citizens in Vietnam. There are numerous accounts of U.S. charities attempting to aid these men, many of whom still suffer physically from war wounds. Communist cadre always take a percentage of whatever is donated. Sometimes they take it all. Medical equipment meant to help these men is diverted to hospitals for communist party members. Americans who have pushed for fairness have become persona non grata.

Conclusions

From the very first fallacy of accepting communist propaganda portraying Ho Chi Minh as a nationalist, then repeating it in multiple variations to make it a “fact,” this series has been intellectually dishonest; slanted toward a fake left-wing narrative for what purpose I do not know? Just a quick reminder: a true nationalist does not murder all his nationalist allies because only his sect of nationalism is acceptable.

With all the promise and potential, with all the wonderful presentations, the incredible photography and the moving musical scores, the slanting by choice of material and by massive omission renders this series not history but propaganda.

From where I stand, the Left has accomplished its goal of making SW Asia another Vietnam with the same kind of treasonous backbiting, mythological storytelling, and outright lying propaganda. There were a lot of good reasons for being very careful about going into either Afghanistan or Iraq and some of our reasons for going into Iraq later turned out to be based on bad intelligence but as Del Vecchio says about Vietnam and soldiers saying we were winning when they left, we were winning in Afghanistan and Iraq before the Democrats took over Congress and before Obama got in the White House.

I don't accept the myths created by Burns or Sheehan (IIRC, Stearman saw that Sheehan was undermining the war effort with slanted reporting from the moment he set foot in Saigon). Vietnam was a tragedy for both the US and the Vietnamese people but it's not made any better by the Left's propaganda.

[Martinjmpr]

I don't believe any of McNamara's self-serving claims. He did more damage to the Defense Department than any single individual in history with the possible exception of Bradley Manning.

Different perspective of Vietnam from https://www.peakingat70.com/lets-talk-america/:

I don't accept the myths created by Burns or Sheehan (IIRC, Stearman saw that Sheehan was undermining the war effort with slanted reporting from the moment he set foot in Saigon). Vietnam was a tragedy for both the US and the Vietnamese people but it's not made any better by the Left's propaganda.

Yeah, even people like LTG Davidson, who were neck-deep in the war, agree that it was unwinnable. I mean, what would "winning" have even looked like? There was ZERO chance that the North would stop their incursions into the South, no matter what, and if we had invaded and "conquered" both Cambodia and Laos, so what? We would have just ended up being the new French, and had the same difficulties that they did.

Ditto with invading and occupying North Vietnam (which was never an option anyway.) We would have just become a new version of the French, dealing with a pissed off populace and endless insurgency.

A two-state solution, a la Korea in 1953, could not work in Vietnam because the South Vietnamese never had the military power or the political will to prevent the North from sending in troops along the Ho Chi Minh trail and operating out of safe havens in Cambodia and Laos. In Korea it worked because Korea was a peninsula and it was much, much more difficult (damn near impossible) for North Korea to infiltrate people into the South in any strength.

Potentially, the US had the military power to occupy Cambodia and Laos, but there was no political will to do so, and in any case, for how long? As long as the North Vietnamese were willing to fight one day longer than us, they could not lose and we could not win.

And the South Vietnamese never were able to set up a government that cared more about the people than it did about aggregating power and money to itself. That was the core problem right there. The communists may have been bastards but at least they had a plan, all the South had was a bunch of kleptocrats who spent their time fighting internal enemies and figuring out how best to loot the treasury. It's hard to fight an insurgency when you spend more of your time fighting your fellow countrymen.

[Martinjmpr]

I think you need look no farther than Afghanistan to see the Vietnam mentality in practice to this day. I was there in '03-'04 and left thinking "I don't know what the Hell we're trying to do here. I just hope my son doesn't end up fighting my war." He was 6 at the time and is now 18 and wants to be in the military after college. The way things are going, he may get the exact same hootch I slept in.

Vietnams and Afghanistans happen when the military promises to win a political war. Vietnam was a civil war that we went over to fix and never developed an idea of how to win or even what "winning" looked like. So like a blind man in a dark room, we flailed about getting Americans killed and not really accomlishing anything.

Don't get me wrong. Afghanistan started as a "good war". However, as soon as we defeated the Taliban and brought some measure of peace, we should have claimed victory, came home to parades and left that hellhole of a country alone, never to be thought of again. However, we decided to build a peaceful, stable, harmonious democracy in a county that has NO interest in doing that. So, 16 years later, my son may get the "priveledge" of fighting my war. Sounds a lot like what happened in SE Asia.

Sadly, I have to agree with this as well. Once we destroyed the Al Quaeda bases and put the Taliban on the run, we should have handed the keys back to Karzai and said "it's your baby now. But BTW if terrorist groups ever start setting up bases here again, we'll flatten them without a second's hesitation. Bye."

I was talking to my Dad about this and he used an analogy that I thought was appropriate: "Winning" in Afghanistan is like trying to nail jello to a wall.

[Gman]

Just use Jello shank nails.

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

[Duman]

"I don't believe any of McNamara's self-serving claims. He did more damage to the Defense Department than any single individual in history with the possible exception of Bradley Manning."

What are you basing that on? I'm not a fan of McNamara, or anyone else.

[Aloha_Shooter]

What are you basing that on? I'm not a fan of McNamara, or anyone else.

My opinion is based on the his use of "wunderkind" to let academics override professional military judgment in military operations and targeting, the budgeting system McNarama devised that still shapes (hampers IMO) the way DoD builds its budgets, and the way he had Washington micromanaging Vietnam. Others may of course have a different opinion, this is mine.

[Duman]

That's fair. Good points.

McNamara did a lot to improve the effectiveness of the air corps during WWII, but the same metrics didn't apply in Vietnam. When defining victory is like nailing Jell-O to a wall, the wonks with numbers likely will have out-sized influence.