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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (131557)	5/5/2004 3:02:17 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

"[A]t least a stalemate"???..it WAS a stalemate before we pulled out. It was the kind of stalemate where we didn't leave and they didn't stop killing us. I'm not much for those kinds of stalemates. As far as a plan to cut "the Ho Chi Minh Trail through supposedly "neutral" Laos, deny the Cambodian sanctuaries from which the NVA and Viet Cong were operating, and then maybe S. Vietnam would have stood a chance of surviving...," why do you think that "plan" would have worked? We couldn't cut the trail IN VIETNAM, why would we think we could have "cut it" in Laos or Cambodia? I was on the "trail" in lots of different places. It wasn't one trail, it was a system of countless paths, tracks, big trails, and other passable routes that a man with a bicycle, a pack or simply a bag of rice and an AK-47 could travel. The supply system was mostly a whole bunch of sweaty men and women carrying supplies on their backs. Stick your finger in that dike in one place and it would leak somewhere else. And sometimes you couldn't keep your finger in the dike. We went into one place where they had a big trail deep in the jungle and a long way from anywhere. It was far beyond artillery range and a long way from any chopper bases. We were there for 4 days before they pulled us out. It was bad in there and I thought we weren't going to make it out at all. They put an entire division in after they'd pulled us out. For the next two weeks they didn't have enough medivacs to get out the dead and the wounded from that place. They finally got what was left of that division out and sent them back to the Delta, and the Army never went back in there again. The thing is Hawk, that it's easy to say things like we "could have" done this or that in Vietnam but the realities on the ground is sometimes so far removed from our idea of how things were that we don't know how little we know. We should be more humble when we think about the capabilities of other peoples. When a proud people are determined to resist foreigners THEY WILL RESIST. You can do things like retreat into enclaves. You can do things like cut back on their ability to resupply with weapons or to secure more deadly weapons. You can catch some and kill some. But what you CAN'T do is make them stop killing you and you can't make them stop getting better and better at it. And yes, they played a smarter game than us. That's because the day we put the target on ourselves for goals that we couldn't achieve and which didn't have much utility for us if we could have achieved them, we painted ourselves the color "dumb." You see, a "stalemate" IS a loss when you're the one who's dying.