Much of America, including yours truly, has been watching the
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series, ‘Vietnam.’ Instead of
clarifying that confusing conflict, the series has ignited fiery controversy
and a lot of long-repressed anger by soft-soaping Washington’s motives.
This march to folly in
Vietnam is particularly painful for me since I enlisted in the US army at the
height of the war. Gripped by youthful patriotism, I strongly supported
the war. In fact, the TV series even showed a pro-war march down New
York’s Fifth Avenue that I had joined. Talk about déjà vu.
At the time, 1967, the Cold
War was at full force. We really believed that if the US did not make a
stand in Vietnam the Soviets and Chinese would overrun all of South Asia.
No one in Washington seemed
to know that China and the Soviet Union had split and become bitter
enemies. As ever, our foreign human intelligence was lousy. We didn’t
understand that Vietnam deserved independence after a century of French
colonialism. Or that what happened in Vietnam was of little importance to
the rest of the world.
Three
American presidents blundered into this war or prolonged it, then could not
back out lest they lose face and risk humiliation. I don’t for a moment
believe that the ‘saintly’ President John Kennedy planned to end the war but
was assassinated by dark, rightwing forces, as is claimed. This is a
charming legend. Richard Nixon, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all feared
that a withdrawal from Vietnam would lose them the next election.
Republicans were still snarling over ‘who lost China’. American Raj: America ...Best
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The current 17-year old US
war in Afghanistan has uncanny resemblances to the Vietnam War. In Kabul
and Saigon, the US installed puppet governments that command no loyalty except
from minority groups. They were steeped in drugs and corruption, and kept in
power by intensive use of American air power. As in Vietnam, the US
military and civilian effort in Afghanistan is led by a toxic mixture of deep
ignorance and imperial arrogance.
The US military understands
it has long ago lost the Afghan War but cannot bear the humiliation of
admitting it was defeated by lightly-armed mountain tribesmen fighting for
their independence. In Vietnam, Washington could not admit that young
Vietnamese guerillas and regulars had bested the US armed forces thanks to
their indomitable courage and intelligent tactics. No one outside Vietnam cared
about the 2-3 million civilians killed in the conflict.
Unfortunately, the PBS
program fails to convey this imperial arrogance and the ignorance that impelled
Washington into the war – the same foolhardy behavior that sent US forces into
Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq and perhaps may do so in a second Korean
War. The imperial spirit still burns hot in Washington among those who
don’t know or understand the outside world. The lessons of all these past
conflicts have been forgotten: Washington’s collective memory is only
three years long.
Vietnam was not a ‘tragedy,’
as the PBS series asserts, but the product of imperial geopolitics. The
same holds true for today’s Mideast wars. To paraphrase a famous
slogan from Vietnam, we destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria to make them safe
for ‘freedom.’
One of the craziest things
about the Vietnam War has rarely been acknowledged: even at peak
deployment, the 550,000 US soldiers in Vietnam were outnumbered by North
Vietnamese fighting units.
That’s because the huge US
military had only about 50,000 real combat troops in the field. The other half
million were support troops performing logistical and administrative functions
behind the lines: a vast army of typists, cooks, truck drivers,
psychologists, and pizza-makers.
Too much tail to teeth, as
the army calls it. For Thanksgiving, everyone got turkey dinner with cranberry
sauce, choppered into the remotest outposts. But there were simply not enough
riflemen to take on the Viet Cong and tough North Vietnamese Army whose Soviet
M1954 130mm howitzer with a 27 km range were far superior to the US Army’s
outdated WWII artillery.
Poor generalship, mediocre
officers, and lack of discipline ensured that the US war effort in Vietnam
would become and remain a mess. Stupid, pointless attacks against heavily
defended hills inflicted huge casualties on US troops and eroded morale.
The monumentally stupid war
mismanagement of Pentagon chief Robert McNamara, a know-it-all who knew
nothing, turned the war into a macabre joke. This was the dumbest command
decision since Louis XV put his girlfriend Madame de Pompadour in charge of his
armies.
We soldiers, both in Vietnam
and Stateside, scorned the war and mocked our officers. It didn’t help that
much of the US force in ‘Nam’ were often stoned and rebellious.
The
January 30, 1968 Tet Offensive put the kibosh on US plans to pursue the war –
and even take it into south-west China. Tet was a military victory of
sorts for the US (and why not, with thousands of warplanes and B-52 heavy
bombers) but a huge political/psychological victory for the Communists in spite
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I vividly recall standing
with a group of GI’s reading a typed report on our company barracks advising
that the Special Forces camp in the Central Highlands to which many of our
company had been assigned for immediate duty had been overrun at Tet, and all
its defenders killed. After that, the US Army’s motto was ‘stay alive,
avoid combat, and smoke another reefer.’
The war became aimless and
often surreal. We soldiers all knew our senior officers and political
leaders were lying. Many soldiers were at the edge of mutiny, like the
French Army in 1917. Back in those ancient days, we had expected our
political leaders to be men of rectitude who told us the truth. Thanks to
Vietnam, the politicians were exposed as liars and heartless cynics with no
honor.
This
same dark cloud hangs over our political landscape today. We have
destroyed large parts of the Mideast, Afghanistan and northern Pakistan without
a second thought – yet wonder why peoples from these ravaged nations hate
us. Now, North Korea seems next.
Showing defiance to
Washington brought B-52 bombers, toxic Agent Orange defoliants and endless
storms of napalm and white phosphorus that would burn through one’s body until
it hit bone.
In spite of all, our imperial
impulse till throbs. The nightmare Vietnam War in which over 58,000
American soldiers died for nothing has been largely forgotten. So
we can now repeat the same fatal errors again without shame, remorse or understanding.
Eric Margolis [send him mail]
is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new
book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the
Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © 2017 Eric Margolis
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