On Vietnam Veterans Day

Today is Vietnam Veterans Day.

The reason for that is that it was on this day, in 1973, that the last American combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam.

As we now know, they were withdrawn under an agreement, the Paris Peace Accords, that President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed would fail.  That Nixon believed that was cynically assumed, and it turns out correctly assumed, by the first historians of the war, who uniformly regarded the war as an ill though out American disaster. 

Starting about a decade ago, or so, however, revisionist histories, some fairly good and not so much, took the opposite approach.  A statistical analysis of the war conducted by a Marine veteran and expatriate living in Australia fairly convincingly argued that the war had been effectively won by 1968 and that the process of Vietnamization conducted by the Nixon Administration thereafter simply reflected that.  Two books on the early portion of the war when Diem was still the living autocrat in charge in the Republic of Vietnam took charitable views towards the pre 1965 American build up and argued that the war could have been won but for mistakes in that phase.

Then came Ken Burns groundbreaking recent documentary, followed by Max Hasting's new book on the war, which I'm only now just reading. 

Both make clear what the earlier books already had suggested.  The United States failed to appreciate the real situation in Vietnam from the onset, even while the French remained there, and the following intervention was beset by mistakes from the very first.  Worse yet, in some ways, Richard Nixon basically set out to betray the South Vietnam by extracting the United States dishonestly, believing that the North would ultimately prevail.  All that was needed, in his view, was some breathing room to make the departure decent.

Unfortunately for history, Nixon's other activities removed him from the Oval Office so that he was not present to bear the brunt of the impact of his decisions, which came in 1975 with the northern invasion.  The Army of the Republic of Vietnam collapsed in the face of that offensive, but in no small part due to a lack of effective air power.  Having been trained since at least the early 1960s to rely on massive American supplied firepower, without it, it really couldn't fight, and its troops rapidly lost spirit, to the extent they ever had any, and effectively quit.  Thousand and ultimately millions paid the price.

So are the pundits right, that the United States should have never gone in, in the first place?  I'm still not sure.  I find it hard to see a way that the U.S. could have avoided Vietnam, save perhaps for having denied the French any assistance in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  That would have been the approach, to the extent that we can discern one, that Franklin Roosevelt would have taken, as he was universally opposed to colonialism and seems to have been fairly comfortable with independence movements that were heavily communist.  Of course, had Vietnam become a communist state in 1946, it's hard not to imagine that being the case all the way to at least Thailand.

Which is perhaps the point.  Earlier in this blog I posed the suggestion that the Vietnam War ought not to be looked at in a vacuum, but rather as a campaign, and not wholly successful one, in the Cold War.  And that still seems correct to me.

But one fought at great cost that the country has never really gotten over in some ways. 

Making this a good day to remember its veterans.

October 22 , 1968. A Treasonous Act

On this day in 1968, an event that would not come to light until 2016 occurred in which then Presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon called H. R. Halderman, then an aid of his, and ordered him to have intermediaries persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to refuse to participate in the Parish Peace Talks.

Thieu.

It seems likely that Thieu was already of the mind to refuse to participate, in which case Nixon's action, which asserted that, through intermediaries, that he was likely to win the election, which was in fact correct, had no real impact. Still, the action, designed to aid his position in the election, is shocking and far worse than his support of the cover up of the break in of the Watergate Hotel some years later.  It seems that President Johnson was aware of the action and ordered Nixon's campaign staff's phones bugged but he chose not to reveal the story, which makes sense in context. 

Also on this day the still controversial Gun Control Act of 1968 was signed into law by President Johnson. The act came about in the wake of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy.  It's provisions remain in effect today and in spite of the common claim to the contrary about American firearms legislation, it created universal registration, at the manufacturer level and the original retail level, of all firearms.  It also included other restrictions that remain including the necessity of new firearms being transferred only through licensed dealers and a restriction on the age of purchase, which was at two different ages for long guns and handguns.  Ammunition sales were likewise restricted.

On the same day the crew of Apollo 7, all of which had the common cold, returned to Earth.

Phase Three of the Tet Offensive Commences. August 17, 1968

Cẩm Lệ Bridge reopened on August 24, 1968 after having been held by the Viet Cong.

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the third, and final, phase of the Tet Offensive, eight months after the offensive had first commenced, by launching strikes on 27 South Vietnamese cities and towns, 47 airfields and 100 outposts.  This concluding phase would last a month and a half.

The operation was similar to the earlier, better known ones, and involved mass assaults on numerous targets as well as a large number of raids.  Th e fact that this could be done after the massive losses the NVA and the VC had sustained to date was impressive but there is good evidence that by this stage in this operation the Communist forces, which had been surprised by the success of the earlier phases, simply did not know what to do.  The results were similar in that the positions were all retaken by late September and the Communist forces sustained significant losses in the effort.

July 9, 1968. North Vietnam raises its flag above Khe Sanh.

In an anticlimactic footnote to the Siege of Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese Army raised the flag above the outpost that had been abandoned by the United States on July 5.

Khe Sanh bunkers

The entire affair became symbolic for many for the state of the Vietnam War. The US had occupied an interior position, much like the French had at Dien Bien Phu, and then held it against what turned out to be a giant feint in order not to suffer the same humiliating defeat that the French had earlier.  In the meantime, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive and the combined impact of everything made the NVA and VC look to be a much more potent force than they really were.  Having said that, the NVA assault on the Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh was an impressive feat involving moving a large number of men, including artillery, through the jungle without being detected.

The siege commenced on January 21, 1968 and ran all through the Tet Offensive and into the Spring with President Johnson ordering that the base not be allowed to fall after the base was quickly surrounded.  Air support to the surrounded base was massive.  Ground fighting on the neighboring hills was sometimes intensive. 

The 1st Cavalry advancing in Operation Pegasus.

In March of that year Operation Pegasus was commenced, over Marine Corps objection, to relieve the base, which the Marines asserted was not in need of relief.  By mid April the 1st Cavalry Division had reopened the highway and declared the base no longer surrounded.  On April 15 the Marines followed on the Army's Operation Pegasus with Operation Scotland II to clear the area around Khe Sanh. That operation continued into February 1969, but in the meantime the Marines withdrew from Khe Sanh in July, 1968.

Marine Corps memorial service for fallen American and South Vietnamese servicemen on June 19, 1968 the day the abandonment of the base commenced.

Operation Charlie, the withdrawal from the base at Khe Sanh was commenced on June 19, 1968 and was conducted at night.  Hill 689, near Khe Sanh, was occupied for a few days after Khe Sanh itself was evacuated.  On this day, the NVA occupied Khe Sanh. While the military declared the ongoing occupation of Khe Sanh pointless in the conditions that followed Tet, the Press was not kind to the US military after the occupation was learned of. Less well known is that the Khe Sanh plateau continued to be patrolled by the Marines, lending credence to the changed American view on the importance of the base, if not the overall American assessment of the strategic situation in 1967 and 1968.

Khe Sanh was actually reoccupied in 1971, a fact that's rarely noted, by the ARVN and the US in Operation Dewey Canyon II and subsequently used for a jumping off point for the ARVN in the 1971 Operation Lam Son 719 offensive.  That latter offensive turned disastrous for the ARVN in Laos and the base was abandoned for good on April 6, 1971.

And fifty years later, in France (on May 13, 1968) . . .

French labor unions called a general strike in support of the students of the Sorbonne.  Of course, French labor unions will call a strike on about any occasion, but this was a serious matter. . . even if it did have the effect of making the weekend a three day one.

It wasn't a day off for diplomats. The peace talks between North and South Vietnam, and the United States, commenced in Paris.