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

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (147856)	10/14/2004 3:03:00 PM
From: Bruce L	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

My Brother: Re: Vietnam 1. The NVA won the battle of wills? Yes, they were the better soldiers. Americans, in effect, fought the war for 12 years while the South Vietnamese stood around. When they had to take on battle responsibilities from 1973 on, they were not nearly "tough" enough. 2. The NVA could lay low when their will ebbed? Yes. 3. The NVA could largely determine the times, places and levels of intensity? Yes. Undoubtedly. During the entire conflict from 1960 on, we essentially respected their territorial integrity. They had "sanctuary" in the North. 4. "In the interim" the actions we took incensed the local population? No. After Tet, the U.S. essentially disengaged and stayed in their large bases. (I was there!) South Vietnam was stable in those years and Americans could walk around Saigon and even outlying areas such as Cu Chi in relative safety. 5. It was only a matter of time unil our will eroded to the point where we left? No, our will had already eroded by 1970, as was evidenced by our ceasing active military operations. THE SOUTH LOST, NOT BECAUSE OF AN UPRISING OF LOCALS, BUT BECAUSE MAINFORCE NVA BATTALIONS CAME SOUTH - IN VIOLATION - OF THE PARIS ACCORDS OF APRIL 1973 - AND DEFEATED THE WEAKER WILLED ARVN. NO DIFFERENT FROM THE GERMANS DEFEATING THE FRENCH IN MAY 1940. Bruce

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (147856)	10/20/2004 5:42:37 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

To a large extent my reply would be similar to Bruce L's I disagree that we had no effective way to destroy their will to win. The Viet Cong / NLF had been hit very hard esp. at Tet. But after Tet a large part of the US decided the war could not be won. Such beliefs can be self fulfilling predictions. Absent US support the ARVN had insufficient confidence and determination to fight off the North's conventional invasion, and it was a conventional invasion that defeated the South. An invasion that might have been defeated with American air support and re-supply, without having to re-introduce American ground forces, but by that time America had washed its hands of Vietnam. Many of the NVA were hidden out in the South in jungles. Many of their sanctuaries were in no-fly zones. Sometimes when we went into those areas we got hit so hard we had to pull out. The cost was just too high and we sometimes didn't have artillery fire support near enough to effectively support us. The real sanctuary they had was in the North, and for a number of years in Laos and Cambodia (at first we did very little in those two countries and even later our activities were mostly on a much smaller scale then in South Vietnam). There where parts of South Vietnam where the enemy had a large presence but they where subject to attack to a far greater extent than communist forces outside of South Vietnam. I'm sorry to say that you're simply wrong on this one. We did not "disengage" and stay on large bases. We put our infantry to work on "search and destroy" missions whose goal was to create contact with a hidden and entrenched enemy. In the later years of the war such "search and destroy" missions and other activity to try an actually defeat the enemy declined a lot. Tim