Thursday, October 30, 2014

On Vietnamization

For this post I am curating (and editing) my own work from a previous post for Eric Young's undergrad Social Media class at DSU. I am adding it here keep the posts all together. And because it is important information leading up to the next post, which talks about why we were involved in the Vietnam War in the first place.


On Vietnamization
By Rick Simonson Monday, November 18, 2013 
 
No doubt, most (American) Vietnam combat veterans, recall the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or the South Vietnamese army) as corrupt, lazy and unwilling to fight. 

I vividly recall the sight of ARVN M-16s held over several ARVN troops’ shoulders, one hand on the barrel and the other holding their buddy's hand. Our tracks were lined up six abreast as we rolled slowly behind this company of ARVN troops who looked like they were on a picnic. 

Our platoon was following a fresh, heavily traveled trail that the roan plows uncovered. Most of the battalion was guarding the roan plow ops from strategic locations in or near a Michelin rubber plantation. An NVA division was known to have moved into that area during the previous few days.

Yes I know, this is not 6 abreast.
On the intercom, our platoon
discussed whether or not to shoot
through the ARVN if the NVA popped

up and these ‘picnickers’ didn’t get out of the way. Lucky, I guess, we didn’t find anything significant that day. We didn't have to decide between them and us. It’s one less bad memory to keep me awake at night. 

As it turns out, the ARVN simply lacked proper
motivation. 

According to all reports the corruption they were known for in the press didn’t go away, but the Americans were doing just that ... going away. Entire divisions were being redeployed, either home or to Europe. 

Once the ARVN soldiers realized the Americans were indeed going to go home, the South Vietnamese realized they had a choice between fighting and becoming communist.

So believe it or not, about 1970 or '71 depending on the unit, the ARVN troops for the most part became properly motivated. They actually did form themselves into a moderately disciplined fighting force by 1972. 

The defeat of the NVA’s 1972 Spring Offensive demonstrates this. During one discussion, I heard a voice object to the use of the term “defeat” so perhaps a more accurate way to say it is ... the decimation of the North Vietnamese Army during the 1972 Spring Offensive demonstrates that the
ARVN could fight if properly motivated.

Besides being driven back to their starting point, (give or take) the North Vietnamese lost 100,000 KIA compared to the ARVN’s loss of 25,000.
Were there setbacks? Yes. Did the ARVN have trouble overcoming the enemy? Of course they did. Twenty-five thousand KIA, that’s some darn heavy fighting. 
Glad I wasn’t there for that one. 
Someone else said “with American air power” ... yes and with South Vietnamese air power. We the Americans fight with American air power, too ... so that’s not really a relevant issue.
What happened in 1975? 

The fall of Saigon is a long story that includes corruption, paranoia and politicians with unsound agendas. I will save that for a different chapter (also see PS below). 


But just because Saigon fell two years later does not mean the ARVN was not ready when we left in 1973. It was. 

The U.S. accomplished its objective for sending combat troops to Vietnam.

When Kissinger signed the peace treaty in 1973 it was because the main U.S. objectives for sending combat troops to Vietnam were accomplished. That is ... to shore up the South Vietnamese government, to train and build the ARVN until they became a viable fighting force.

That happened.


Vietnamization was the main strategy that accomplished the task. When the ARVN completed their takeover of the war in 1972, they were a well-equipped 1.1 million-man army that demonstrated in combat their capability to repel a full-fledged invasion. 

The fact that the media claimed Vietnamization to be a failure is a concrete demonstration of the way in which the media tweaked some facts and ignored many others to fool us into believing their defeatist rhetoric. 

Positive news was ignored or twisted to appear negative. 
Negative news was overemphasized. No one objected to the media’s version of history, so that’s the version that went into the history books. To be fair they did not have access to as much information then. We now have myriad of sources to draw upon. In hindsight we have the ability to get far superior data. But the media did have access to enough information if they were willing to pay attention.  But they were hung up on their antiwar agenda and either did not or chose not to pay attention.

Ladies and Gentlemen, U.S. soldiers did not loose that war. The U.S. media lost that war, or at least they made a significant contribution to the loss. The writings of the Communist players are full of their bragging about how they manipulated the U.S. media to their own ends.

Perhaps there should be a monument to Walter Cronkite in Hanoi.

The 58,178 brave American soldiers who died during the Vietnam War do not deserve to have their names tainted with a defeat they did not earn. They fought bravely and the Allies were winning when the Paris Accords were signed ...

A peace treaty is supposed to be the end of a war. The fact that both the North and South Vietnamese broke the treaty numerous times after the Paris Accords were signed, has no effect (or shouldn't have) on the valiant sacrifice of these brave men. 

Early in the War, the North was adamant that there would be no peace treaty. The North signed the Paris Accords because they were losing and they knew it. 
The treaty was their only salvation. They didn’t  admit it, of course. That was part of their strategy. But the Communists were losing and they knew it

General Gaip admitted it many years later.
 
The fall of Saigon, came almost 3 years after the U.S. combat forces left the theater. Other than civilian contractors acting as military and logistics advisers, American troops played no part in defending South Vietnam in the 1975 invasion. 



It is time to set the record straight. Those names on the Wall demand accuracy in our history books. Stop the lies and squelch the myths. The South Vietnamese lost the Vietnam War, not the U.S. ... Especially not the U.S. soldiers. 

PS:

You can blame Congress for not passing the emergency funding in time to save Saigon if you like. But when Saigon fell, there were still millions of unused dollars in the South Vietnamese Government’s U.S. bank accounts.
It wasn’t the lack of funds that caused Saigon to fall...

The South Vietnamese Government panicked at the anticipation of a lack of funds. 

President Thieu's panic caused his fatal decision to withdraw his forces to the III and IV Corps areas. And that, my friends, was the beginning of a very rapid end.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

What others have to say about the Hue Massacres


You read some of what I have to say about the Hue massacres and media coverage of war atrocities in Vietnam. I’m pleased now to present to you some comments and anecdotes by other people on the same topic.

Funeral procession for Hue victims
Mark W. Woodruff in his book Unheralded Victory[i] describes some of the perpetrated by the Vietcong during their brief occupation of the City of Hue.


A quick comment about Woodruff’s book: I am gratified at how many of the discoveries that I made during my research are supported by the material in Unheralded Victory. Or put more properly, I should say gratified at how much my research supports the material in Woodruff’s book, since Unheralded Victories was written before I began my research.

I remember being told about his book a couple of years ago, but I did not acquire a copy until this summer (2014). I am glad, though, that I did not have his book when I was doing my research (or at least during the first 5 years, since my research is ongoing) because now I have independent corroboration of my discoveries.

There are still things I learned from his book and many of my discoveries that are not in his book, but it is nice to know that our research supports each other’s.

That being said let’s look at a few things he had to say about Hue:

The City of Hue, with a population of about 140,000, was not guarded by military troops. The local police were responsible for their security.

So when the 6th North Vietnamese Army Regiment (reinforced) and the Vietcong 416th Battalion captured Hue they didn’t conquer an army to do so. They infiltrated dressed as civilians & had to overcome only the local police to take control. The bloody battles in Hue occurred during the recapture of Hue from the Communists by US Marines, and soldiers of the US Army and the South Vietnamese army.

As a side note, this type of infiltration was a violation of the Geneva Convention. The media gave tons of column inches and a lot of air time to the idea that the South Vietnamese government and the US were violating the Geneva Accords by not allowing nationwide elections in 1956 (even though the US government and the Diem regime were not signatories to the Accords) yet they said very little if anything about Geneva Convention violations by Communist forces.

Back to Woodruff’s narratives from Hue:

“Local sympathizers provided detailed lists of the residents, including where they lived, who they worked for ... [to] the Viet Cong [who] acted on this information, targeting government workers, foreigners, and other ‘reactionaries’”[ii].

“Steven Miller, an American civilian ... was taken by the Viet Cong. They led him away to a field behind a nearby Catholic seminary, bound his arms, and then shot him to death”[iii].

“Dr. Horst Gunther Kyainick, a German pediatrician, and his wife Elisabeth [and Drs. Raimund Discher and Alois Altekoester] thought they would be safe as civilian medical workers and German nationals. ... The four were later found shot to death, their bodies dumped in a shallow grave in a nearby field”[iv].

“Father Urbain and Father Guy, French priests, were similarly led away by the Viet Cong. Father Urbain was ... bound hand and foot [and] buried alive. Father Guy [died with] a bullet hole in the back of his head. In their common grave were the remains of 18 other victims”[v].

“Father Buu Dong had long ministered to everyone within his parish, including the Viet Cong. ... His body was found 22 months later ... along with the remains of 300 other victims”[vi].

Pham Van Tuong’s “‘crime’ [was] being a part time janitor at the government information office. When [the VC] ordered him to come out of hiding, he emerged with his three-year-old daughter, five-year-old son, and two nephews. The Viet Cong immediately gunned down all five of them, leaving their bodies to be found by the rest of his family when they emerged moments later”[vii].

“The Viet Cong came to Phu Cam Cathedral and gathered together 400 men and boys. ... They were last seen being marched away to the south. Two years later, thee Viet Cong defectors led troopers of the 101st Airborne Division to a creek bed in the dense jungle ten miles from Hue. The number murdered was later confirmed at 428”[viii].

“A total of 2,810 bodies were eventually found in shallow mass graves; 1,946 people remained unaccounted for.... [Once liberated] the city’s residents gladly helped to identify and locate any Viet Cong still alive”[ix].

Others reports:

Unnamed VC spokespersons justified the murder of civilians as follows; “We never did it without reason. We advised people who worked with the government to stop. Some of them were very stubborn. We would warn them three times, but some still refused to leave the government side. Since they stayed with the government, it meant they supported the government’s fascist suppression efforts. So they deserved to be punished”[x].

The website http://ngothelinh.tripod.com/Hue.html puts the number massacred at 7600 due to bodies found since the initial 2800 were discovered. The website also quotes from the book The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror, by multi-tour Vietnam Foreign Service Officer, Douglas Pike. 

 
“Apparently it made no impact on the world's mind or conscience. For there was no agonized outcry. No demonstration at North Vietnamese embassies around the world. In a tone beyond bitterness, the people there will tell you that the world does not know what happened in Hue or, if it does, does not care”[xi].

So why were these stories not found in news reports by the US media?



[i] Woodruff, Mark W. (1999). Unheralded Victory: The Defeat of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, 1961-1973. Arlington, VA: Vandamere Press.
[ii] Ibid, p. 44
[iii] Ibid, p. 45
[iv] ibid, p. 45
[v] ibid, p. 45
[vi] ibid, p. 45
[vii] ibid, p. 45
[viii] ibid, pp. 45-46
[ix] ibid, p 46
[x] Pike, Douglas, (1970). The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror. Saigon, Vietnam: Privately published.
[xi] http://ngothelinh.tripod.com/Hue.html, para 3 ... all pictures in today’s blog are courtesy this website.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Guess Who Got the Headlines


In his book Breaking the News: How the media undermine American Democracy, James Fallows asks the question “Why do Americans mistrust the news media”?

I believe the reason stems in part from their flawed coverage of the Vietnam War. The group of Americans known as the silent majority worked hard 8 to 12 hours a day, went home and watched to the news reporters sensationalize the Vietnam War and the antiwar protestors on TV.

Courtesy National Archives
Nixon’s landslide election victory, despite tons of Nixon bashing in the US media, demonstrates that the media was out of touch with mainstream America. Why then did the silent majority remain silent?

Most Americans[i] disagreed with the opinions of the liberal media. But after working 40 to 60 hours a week they were too tired to spend the weekend marching or picketing in support of the administration’s policy in Vietnam. Most of the protestors were either cutting class or protesting between classes. Many were outside (non-student) agitators who made their living inciting political activism.

So, guess who got the headlines?

To be fair, the statement, “Sixty million workers stayed at home yesterday evening and discussed their support for the Nixon Administration’s Vietnam War policy with friends and family members” does not make interesting news copy. 

But the real problem lies in the antiwar, anti-America bias endorsed by the US media.

Courtesy Life Magazine
For instance, ruthlessness and cruelty were reported, or not, depending upon who perpetrated the atrocity. Take the example of the murder of about 350 civilians by a company of Americans in the village of My Lai. The incident received years of consistent, often daily, news coverage. Yet the systematic slaughter of 7600 civilians and government officials by the Viet Cong received little more than a picture spread in Life Magazine following one of the funerals.

Lt. William Calley, the leader of the perpetrators was tried and convicted for the killings. The media speculated that the orders came from higher up and complained that his commanders did not get indicted. The VC murdered thousands under orders, they had huge lists of anti communists to be dragged from their homes, tortured and executed. Mass graves filled with hundreds of people, buried alive with their hands and feet bound, were uncovered and virtually ignored by the US media.  

A search[ii] of Time Life archives for Hue massacres shows one single article, 842 words written on October 31st 1969[iii] about the Hue massacres. The same search also pulls up a 5204-word article about the My Lai massacre[iv], even though My Lai was not part of the search criteria. Notice how that bias lingers even 41 years after the signing of the Paris Accords.


Are you kidding me! 7600 dead only merits one single small article in Time Magazine. At least Life Magazine did some pictures ... of flag draped coffins.

Emmy award winning ABC news correspondent, Jack (Sandbag) Smith, stated, “‘The networks have never given a complete picture of the war.’ With respect to Khe Sanh, Americans were never told about the bravery of South Vietnamese fighting by America’s side, or that the ‘Viet Cong[v] casualties were 100 times ours. We just showed pictures day after day of Americans getting the hell kicked out of them. That was enough to tear America apart’”[vi]


[i] 74% according to a 1972 poll, see Nixon, 
[iii] World: The Massacre of Hue, Time October 31st 1969
[iv] The Nation: The Clamor Over Calley: Who Shares the Guilt? Time, April 12, 1971
[v] Actually it was the NVA that were slaughtered while trying to take Khe Sanh, but the point is still the same.
[vi] Robbins, J. S. (2010), This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet offensive. New York: Encounter Books, p. 250.