Bình Phước province fell to the NVA/Viet Cong. Only 850 of 5,400 ARVN troops who resisted the largescale invasion of the province survived. Local South Vietnamese officials were executed.
The province borders Cambodia.
Henry Kissinger, who no doubt knew what the US reaction would be, later stated, "Phuoc Binh was the test case. If the United States reacted, there was still a chance for Hanoi to withdraw from the brink."
The US didn't react, to its lasting shame.
Or could we have even realistically done anything?
By 1975 the US had gone to an all volunteer military in an attempt to repair the massive morale damage done to the Army and Navy during the war. The Navy had never used conscripts in the war (it only used conscripts in the later stages of World War Two, and very few), but it had reduced recruiting standards due to the recruiting problems the Navy had experienced and it had sustained two mutinies at the end of the war, although it refused to call them that.
The Army had effectively been destroyed as a fighting force due to the war. Shedding conscript soldiers was helping to address that, but even at that the last draft had occurred on June 30, 1973, and conscript troops remained in the service.
Any intervention, therefore, could not really have been a largescale ground action, but an Naval air one, or an Air Force one out of Thailand, could have been mounted. The American public, however, would have reacted negatively, and massively.
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