Vietnam
Those-who-are-informed can rest easy. Another controversial piece of recent history has been put to bed. Ken Burns has spoken. Not that I am knocking Ken’s effort. The series is well researched and a large cross section of relevant voices are heard. However, as with almost all political and historical analysis produced by our species since writing evolved beyond inventory control, there is a meme in play. A perspective. A set of intellectual filters. That meme would be that the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake.
Before engaging in analysis of that meme, I will, as any good analyst should, identify my intellectual filters. I served in Vietnam. Immediately after the concocted Tonkin Gulf incident, the Destroyer Escort (WWII vintage bucket of rust) on which I served was sent to patrol the coast. I did two tours on her. I then volunteered to go ashore, spending 13 months with the First Marine Regiment. I am very proud to have been a member of the most storied unit in the Corps, the best organization I have ever been in or around.
Lest you get the wrong idea, I am not a certified warrior. I was never wounded. I never walked point. I was never involved in heavy combat. I have no idea how I would have performed in a hairy firefight. I spent most of my time in a bunker full of maps and communications gear coordinating fire support. When I was in the field, I was the FO for the headquarters company. My job was to call in artillery fire. The major stress was trying to figure out where the hell I was, so I could call in the right coordinates. I would have given my entire worldly fortune (such as it was) for a portable GPS device, if such a thing had existed in 1967
We will start with some context. The 20th Century spawned two truly pernicious secular religions–fascism and communism. As a direct result, something over 200,000,000 people were shot, bombed, gassed, worked to death in slave labor camps, starved (due to conscious policy and/or regime ineptitude) or tortured to death in the cellars of the Gestapo and the predecessors of the KGB. We will never know the true number. But it was certainly history’s largest annihilation of human beings caused by conscious human action. It was as if political leaders turned the plague and Spanish flu loose as a political strategy.
Fascism pretty much ended with WW II. A pale form persisted in Spain and some parts of South America for awhile, but it soon faded from the world stage. There are a few fringe supporters to be found in the fever swamps of the web, but they are not a threat to take command of any country.
Communism persisted and grew after the war. It was conceived as a world conquest (Comintern stands for Communist International). Russia rapidly, ruthlessly and efficiently absorbed Eastern Europe. Mao prevailed in China. Almost half the world’s population lived under communist rule by 1950.
Stalin was not satisfied with the extent of his empire in the 50s . He attempted to subvert governments all over Western Europe; he sponsored a regime in the north of Korea; and he and Mao sponsored so-called wars of national liberation in the colonies and former colonies of European imperial powers. The response of the West was a policy titled “containment”. The war in Vietnam, like the war in Korea, was a war of containment.
I would assert that Stalin and Mao were worth containing.
Because the Jews have done a good job of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, we remember fascist atrocities. The victims of Stalin’s purges, famines and gulags, and the victims of Mao’s forced collectivization and industrialization, have not been given proper voice. Accounts of the horrors exist, but have never gained much traction in popular culture. There are few monuments and no museums (of which I’m aware) dedicated to their suffering. But the fact is that Stalin and Mao killed a lot more people than Hitler did.
One grand example is Stalin’s purge of the Red Army prior to the War. He killed over half the officer corps and almost all the generals. Little or no attempt was made to detect disloyalty. Victims were chosen at random. The objective was terror, pure and simple. As a result, millions of soldiers were killed and captured when Hitler invaded. Many of those captured were worked to death or died of malnutrition/non-existent medical care. Those who survived were killed by Stalin when they returned to Russia.
In our well intentioned efforts at containment in Vietnam, tragic mistakes were, indeed, made. Ike, JFK, LBJ, Tricky Dick, and their advisors blundered in many ways. Many of the blunders were the result of failure to study the history and context of the situation, simple hubris, and crass political expediency. Ho was a communist, and his movement would not have survived had he not received continuous and massive support from Russia and China. Russian pilots piloted Russian planes shooting at American pilots. Russian supplied the SAM batteries and Russians operated them. But Ho was also a nationalist, appealing to a people who had genuine grievance against the French. We might have weaned him away from his patrons. He might have been the Tito of the East.
The worst mistake was William Westmoreland. He should have retired a colonel. He never understood the nature of asymmetric warfare. I don’t think it occurred to him to try. He kept trying to induce the VC to engage in set piece battles, where he could bring his superior firepower and mobility to bear. When they eventually made the mistake of doing so at Tet, they were destroyed as an effective fighting force in a few weeks. But it was too late. Westmoreland’s briefers had daily told the world that his “body count” strategy had succeeded in rendering the VC far too weak to pull off such an offensive. Walter Cronkite declared Tet a defeat. It was a defeat in the battle of public perception. After that, there was no chance of victory. The war became a holding action, based on the need to save face (warriors were sacrificed to support politicians’ egos).
There was, as Ken’s meme suggests, a tragic mistake. He just misidentified the mistake. The tragic mistake was that we failed to win. Fortunately, the Soviet Union imploded and the Chinese leadership transitioned from communism to state capitalism in order to keep itself in power. Communism was eventually contained.
