Deliberate Distortions Still Obscure Understanding of the Vietnam War
According to retired Colonel Chuck Kriete, one of his former colleagues on the faculty of the U. As it turned out, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no concept ofvictory and no plan to end the war. When you place your order through Biblio, the seller will ship it directly to you. Although there are reports that Colonel Tu has recently recanted his too-candid comments about American battlefield superiority, other sources corroborate his remark. Harry himself flew out on the last Marine helicopter to leave the roof of the American Embassy at 5:30 a. By the time that realization came, it was almost toolate.
Every taxpayer should mourn his loss. He staunchly defended the honor and the battlefield performance of the American soldier in Vietnam, but he was far from the blanket apologist some of his critics tried to make him out to be. We sometimes tend toforget that for a great part of the war, it was just a back-burner affair thatno one was very interested in. Originally, President Diem had nationalist credentials that were as good as HoChi Minh's, but we denied him those credentials because it wasn't in ourinterest for the South Vietnamese to go north, to try to attack North Vietnam,because we were fighting a war on the strategic defensive. Bookseller: , Washington, United States Facts on File.
Theycouldn't carry the war north. I think initially, at least, he didn't realize the stakesinvolved in the Vietnam War, that it could cost him not only his presidency,but the Great Society. Unbeknown to me, my promotion orders to lieutenant colonel had come through. He knew in1965, he says, that the war was militarily unwinnable. Exceptthat we didn't understand that under the strategic defensive a battlefieldvictory was not attainable. Political weakness in the face of an assertive Congress and a population grown tired of the war prevented Richard Nixon from implementing a program for the protection of Vietnam based on the use of American firepower instead of manpower.
Deliberate Distortions Still Obscure Understanding of the Vietnam War
And in the course of events we obtained those objectives; there is a SouthKorea independent of North Korean control, and it has existed now for almost ahalf century. From 1965 to 1973, 201 Army personnel and 77 Marines were court-martialed for serious crimes against Vietnamese civilians. The debate over the war has made ordinary discourse about it very difficult. Originally from Columbiad an on-line journal now defunct. One was the Viet Cong guerrillas and Communist cadres in the South; the other was the Communist military power in the North.
And one of the anomalies thatcame out of the Korean War is that after the Chinese intervention, we revertedfrom the strategic offensive, whose goal was to defeat the enemy forces andoccupy their territory, to the strategic defensive, which made sense. They saw it as the Second IndochinaWar, so that Laos and Cambodia, for example, were part and parcel of the war. Disclaimer:A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. The Viet Cong did not achieve decisive results on their own. He was born in Covington, Ky. The same is true with Army forces. The city undoubtedly had been hit during the bombing attacks.
Deliberate Distortions Still Obscure Understanding of the Vietnam War
Concluding that someone had to make an attempt to rectify the errors that I found so blatant, I wrote an article of my own that was published in Parameters the following year. In Clausewitzian terms, the nature of the two wars was identical: a group seeking Communist revolutionary ends was fighting against a group trying to prevent the spread of the revolution. Judging the degree of risk inherent in any strategy after the fact is difficult, and one cannot know with certainty how China or the Soviet Union might have reacted in the 1960s to such forceful actions as the Linebacker bombing campaigns or the Cambodian incursion. That's what I found sodisconcerting. Good in Good dust jacket. In a nuclear world, caution is an important survival mechnism, and critics should think twice before advocating that American leaders act more boldly. He was a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Harry Summers, whose book, On Strategy, has become must reading for young officers. Jacket is now in a new clear mylar protector. The war was a limited conflict in which American leaders did not wish to run the risks of a larger war inherent in a more forceful use of air power. Army during the twentieth century. Because of that, he often drew heavy criticism from those who disagreed with him. Again it is a charge that cannot survive the truth. At the very least, as happened more than once in the war, the threat of a collapse in the American rear would necessitate further American commitment and prolong the war, heightening the risk of a collapse of American will.
According to the Army War College's Christopher Brassford, On Strategy played a key role in that process and contributed significantly to the U. Johnston's 1934 article, The Science of War with introduction and commentary by Colonel Wallace P. As a result, American leaders created an illusory picture of the war, portraying the conflict as the result of the aggression of one sovereign state against another. There wasconcern about the war escalating into a nuclear war. At a certain point, you cross athreshold and you incapacitate yourself, basically, if you aren't playing thatgame, so to speak. Summers was an infantry squad leader in the Korean War and a battalion and corps operations officer in the Vietnam War.
Their apologies to the American people for involving the nation in a wider war would have provided little consolation. Although Colonel Gropman recognized that fear of a wider war led to the limitations he deplored, he refused to recognize the wisdom of those fears. Battlefield casualty figures tell another story. For the 1973 Paris agreement see Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied: The United States, Vietnam, and the Paris Agreement Bloomington, 1975 , 322. This was recommended by the Joint Chiefs, General Westmoreland, theSouth Vietnamese Joint General Staff, and Ambassador Bunker, but it fell ondeaf ears in Washington because that model was just unacceptable. Every taxpayer should mourn his loss.
