Lessons of Vietnam

Thank you for your article. I have two things to mention to you in the article.

1./ You write:
"It should not have been hard to find Nguyen’s unit, which was stationed on a riverbank right next to a South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) camp. But the ARVN and NVA units — which were on opposite sides of the war — had a tacit agreement not to attack each other's home bases.

Both would venture out on operations against other units, then return to their camps and leave each other alone.

“One night some of our soldiers caught a lot of fish,” recalled Nguyen, who is now a retired army colonel and a respected military historian. “We started singing, and got a little noisy. So the Saigon soldiers tossed a grenade at a safe distance, at the edge of our camp, to remind us to keep it down.”

If senior commanders were made too aware of the NVA presence, and it worked up the chain to U.S. commanders, Nguyen explains, the ARVN troops would be obliged to attack them..."

I don't think the colonel, a historian, that you interviewed in the article told you a true story. Basically the above story never happened. He has a purpose to tell you so to destroy the reputation of the South Vietnam Army officers who couldn’t answer him in this article.

He tells you that he is a military historian, so it is very easy for him to specify the exact location, name of the South Vietnam Army unit stationed in that area. It means that on your article, the colonel would specify name of the battalion, regiment, and division of the South Vietnam Army stationed in that area. Why didn’t the historian specify all of those information?

He should have all those information in his hand because after the Vietnam War ended 1975, more than 300,000 South Vietnam Army officers and government officials were either executed or put in jails for 5 to 17 years by the North Vietnam government. 100% of the South Vietnam Army officers had to write down countless times what they did, where they were during the Vietnam War. All of the information were collected by the North Vietnam Army officers and public security units. So if you asked him a question, the colonel (a military historian) would give you exact the location and the unit of South Vietnam Army that he mentioned in this article. I want to remind you that many South Vietnam Army officers who used to station in that area you mention in the article are still living in the U.S. and I don’t think that they would agree with that colonel at all.

2./ However, the following story is correctly by all historic means: “These counterinsurgency reformers adopted a rough storyline to explain the U.S. failure in Vietnam. In Vietnam, they argued, the U.S. relied for too long on a “search and destroy” strategy, trying to seek out the main forces of the NVA and destroy them in battle. It ignored the problems of security and prosperity in the countryside, allowing the Viet Cong to increase its political and military hold on the villages of South Vietnam.
It was only in 1967, and increasingly after the Tet Offensive in 1968, that the U.S. turned to a strategy of pacification and counterinsurgency, known as “clear and hold.” When it did, it was successful, according to these counterinsurgency reformers. By 1971, the Viet Cong had almost entirely lost its hold on South Vietnam’s countryside. But the U.S. then retreated from Vietnam, and the ARVN was finally outmatched in a main-force struggle against the invading NVA in 1975.”

I've read an account of Rober McNamara's visit to Vietnam where he has been asked by a Vietnamese official if he ever read history. Because if he did he could have known that the Vietnamese people would've have never allowed themselves to be a cold war surrogate of the Chinese whom they've been fighting for a thousand years. The Vietnamese have been simply fighting for freedom from foreign occupation first by the French, then by Japanese, and finally by the Americans. No military tactic can ever defeat a people fighting for freedom even if it takes a thousand years. This is the lesson that the Americans should learn from Vietnam in its current war in Afghanistan. The Americans must simply convince the Afghan people that they're not there to occupy Afghanistan but just to rid it of Al Qaeda which is a threat to American freedom. So the Americans need not meddle with local Afghan economic, social, and political affairs. They can simply let the Afghan people be and just go after Al Qaeda with whatever force necessary to defeat them soundly and quickly. From what I read, Afghan villagers are not exactly fond of Al Qaeda but are compelled to deal with them only because the Americans don't have enough forces on the ground to keep them away from the villages.

May I remind readers that the situations in Vietnam and Afghanistan have only some similarity. In Afghanistan it is a nation with multiple different ethnic groups that may or may not be able to coexist, its last functioning government before Karzai was the inept Taleban, the Taleban really only draw support from one ethnic group (the Pashtun I believe), and that the Taleban only came to power through the dislike of the people for the warlords and their desire for order. In contrast Vietnam for all of its existence was populated almost completely by a single ethnic group (admittedly there others as well but the Vietnamese dwarf them by a vast amount), the North Vietnamese government had established a working bureaucracy which was likely considered more trustworthy than the Southern version, and the movement that would ultimately become the leaders of North Vietnam and the Vietcong had a truly national appeal. In my opinion, we should be very careful on how much we apply from the Vietnamese experience onto the Afghani experience.

Why can't the strategy deployed in Japan after WWII be effective in Afghanistan? A decision was made to use atomic bombs on two cities before the Japanese leadership got it? This spared the lives of thousands of americans who would have perished if a ground assault was required. I would consider using strategic tactical nuclear weapons to drive out the enemy. We should also use the threat of more serious use of nuclear weapons against countries that continue to provide direct support to terrorist. If we don't use our superiority in nuclear weaponry now, others (Pakistan/Iran) will develop the capability to attack/threaten the United States or other countries. I would use any weapon against the enemy that would save US military forces. How can you justify sending in troops to die when we held back using our full military resources. (Vietnam)