Dispelling Vietnam Myths

The Rapid City Weekly News has a good piece on retired Colonel Dale Friend, a Vietnam veteran who wants to dispel some myths about Vietnam.

One of those beliefs is that the United States lost the war:

he is strongly opposed to the belief that America lost the war. Friend points out that the last American soldier left Vietnam on March 29, 1973, but Saigon didn’t fall until April 30, 1975.

That's a good point. I've never believed we lost the war militarily; if we did, it was politically. The Johnson administration fought the war with one hand and another three fingers tied behind their back with his idiotic policy of "graduated response" and eventually lost the will of the American people to back the effort.

Nixon didn't do nearly as well as he might have, but the mood here in America was so sour and the enemy so emboldened by 1968 that the war was almost unwinnable. He did at least step up the bombing enough to make for a semi-honorable withdrawal. But after we pulled out and Congress yanked the financial support of South Vietnam, the Chinese and Soviet-supplied communist North was bound to win.

Another problem he has was the gross misreporting of the Tet Offensive:

The Tet Offensive, in which North Vietnamese troops staged an attack in early 1968, has long been portrayed as a major victory for the North. But Friend points out, and most historians now agree, that it was in fact a huge loss for the North Vietnamese in terms of the amount of soldiers killed and the loss of Viet Cong combatants in South Vietnam.

“It was reported as an overwhelming success for the communist forces and a decided defeat for the U.S. forces,” Friend wrote of Tet, named for a Vietnamese religious holiday. “Nothing could be further from the truth. The Tet Offensive succeeded on only one front and that was the news front and the political arena.

One bright spot he points out again concerns a myth:

The Domino Theory, which stated that America had to fight in Vietnam to prevent countries from falling like dominoes, has been criticized in most history books for decades.

“The Domino Theory was accurate,” Friend writes. He feels countries such as The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand remained free of communist rule because of American intervention in Vietnam.

“If you ask people who live in these countries who won the war in Vietnam, they have a different opinion than the American news media,” he wrote.

While the media has been desperate since the beginning of the Iraq war to paint Iraq as "another Vietnam," Friend points out some similarities that I've noted before, ones that the media doesn't necessarily want you to notice:

“They have the same problem we had in Vietnam,” Friend said. “One of those problems is, ‘Who’s your enemy?’”

He said some of the “myths” that anger him about Vietnam are being repeated in reports about Iraq. “I think the media is giving us the same bad rap we got in Vietnam,”

The "mainstream" media worked very hard to accomplish an American loss in Vietnam, and they have likewise been working for an American loss in Iraq. They have predicted such a loss since even before we went into Iraq, and have remained invested in creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When U.S. military forces go into action with the backing of a resolved president and a committed people, it is invincible. But as Vietnam showed, and as Iraq might show, if the America-hating Leftists in this country can succeed in souring the general population against a military effort, even the most powerful army the world has ever seen cannot succeed.