Vietnam not a Military Defeat

Submitted by arch (United States), Jan 27, 2007 at 14:33

Please take Vietnam off your list of military defeats. Our leftist politicians gave it away. The Vietnam War was a political, not a military, defeat for the US. In 1972, the North Vietnamese kicked off the Eastertide Offecsive, committing 200,000 troops to a three pronged invasion of the South.

I was an F4 weapons systems officer assigned to the 421st Tac Fighter Sq at DaNang AB, South Vietnam. For a time, the weather prevented us from using tactical airpower to counter this attack. We were able to bomb using Loral pathfinder aircraft, but close air support was not possible until the 28th of April. From that day on, we inflicted massive casualties on the NVA.

The South Vietnamese Army defeated the NVA partly because we interrupted the North's supply of fuel and ammunition. Estimates are that the North lost 100,000 troops, half their artillery and half their armor. It was another disaster, similar to Tet. General Giap, the hero of Dien Bien Fu, was releived. President Nixon was furious and directed the DoD to begin Operation Linebacker - a massive bombing of North Vietnamese industry, infrastructure, power, communications, rail and road networks, Hanoi Hanna's transmitter, and any military target we wanted to hit. The Navy mined the port of Haiphong, trapping some Canadian and Australian ships along with the Russians and Chinese.

It was not a McNamara operation to put "pressure" on the enemy. Nixon wanted them destroyed. When the Paris Peace talks broke down on 18 December, Nixon ordered Linebacker II - 100 to 150 B-52 sorties per night on Hanoi and Haiphong. On the 29th, the North was out of air defense munitions and could get no more. They returned to the table and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords in March 1973. We won. However, in Washington the leftists majority was busy undermining the President. The Foreign Aid appropriation for South Vietnam was cut from $1.4B to $700M - not enough to sustain their army. (Senator Kennedy was on the Foreign Relations Committee.) The Senate attached the Case-Church Amendment to the 1975 Defense Appropriations Bill, forbidding the US military to conduct operations in, over or in waters of Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia.

The North Vietnamese could not believe we would not help the South, so they seized a provincial capital and we did nothing. 58,202 American troops, including some of my friends, died in vain. On May Day 1975, Cuban tanks burst through the gates of the Presidential Palace in what has to be one of the most treacherous political acts in history. The same forces at work today.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".