History is not always written by the winners.
Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic
I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
United States Army Oath of Enlistment
The Vietnam Memorial lists over 58,000 dead. Many more sustained serious, life-altering wounds, physical and psychological. If only we had taken off the kid gloves, goes the refrain, we wouldn’t have lost in Vietnam. We didn’t bring to bear the full weight of American firepower, and our “warriors” were hampered by senseless, politically driven rules of engagement.
In one sense the refrain is true. The US didn’t carpet bomb North and South Vietnam with nuclear weapons. That kid glove stayed on. Other than that, the assertion is complete bunk.
Between 1965 and 1972, the US and South Vietnam air forces flew 3.4 million combat sorties, the plurality over South Vietnam. Their bombing was the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, and South Vietnam got the brunt of it. The provincial capital district of Quang Tri, the northernmost South Vietnamese province, received 3,000 bombs per square kilometer. Between 1965 and 1973, the US Strategic Air Command launched at least 126,615 B-52 bomber sorties, again the majority of them targeted to South Vietnam.
In 1969, US units fired 10 million artillery rounds, and over the course of the war they expended almost 15 billions pounds of artillery shells. By the end of the war, formerly scenic South Vietnam featured an estimated 21 million craters, which wreaked havoc on the landscape and largely destroyed its agricultural-based economy. Keep in mind South Vietnam was the US’s ally. North Vietnam, the enemy, also sustained massive casualties and destruction.
Bombs and munitions weren’t the US’s only weapons. An estimated 400,000 tons of napalm, a jellied incendiary designed to stick to clothes and skin and burn, were dropped in Southeast Asia. Thirty-five percent of victims die within fifteen to twenty minutes. White phosphorus, another incendiary, burns when exposed to air and keeps burning, often through an entire body, until oxygen is cut off. The US Air Force bought more than 3 million white phosphorus rockets during the war, and the military bought 379 million M-34 white phosphorus grenades in 1969 alone. The US also sprayed more than 70 million tons of herbicide, usually Agent Orange, further decimating indigenous agriculture and destroying the countryside.
A “pineapple” cluster bomblet was a small container filled with 250 steel pellets. One B-52 could drop 1,000 pineapples across a 400-yard area, spewing 250,000 pellets. “Guava” cluster bombs were loaded with 640 to 670 bomblets, each with 300 steel pellets, so a single guava sent over 200,000 steel fragments in all directions when it hit the ground. Pineapples and guavas were designed to maim, to tax the enemy’s medical and support systems. Between 1964 and 1971, the US military ordered 37 million pineapples. From 1966 to 1971, it ordered 285 million guavas, or seven each for every man woman and child in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia combined.
No other conclusion is possible: the US waged unrestricted (other than not using nuclear weapons) industrial war against the far less well-armed Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army.
Most Americans think the My Lai massacre was an unfortunate anomaly. That delusion is a lingering tragedy of Vietnam. Plenty of villages were burned and leveled, farm animals and crops destroyed, and unarmed and visibly helpless women, children, and old people—generally counted as VC in the often meretricious statistics—murdered. Some of the villages contained Viet Cong, some did not, and that was often not the first concern or even a cited justification for US troops. The slaughter was frequently wanton, or indiscriminate vengeance for American troops killed or wounded, not to fight the enemy.
In 1964, 40 percent of the South Vietnamese countryside was considered under Viet Cong control or influence and was thus a free-fire zone: shoot first, ask questions later. By 1968, according to a US Senate study, an estimated 300,000 South Vietnamese, or over five times the US personnel killed during the entire war, had been killed in free-fire zones. That its rules of engagement prevented the US military from killing anyone in Vietnam is an obscene distortion of reality. My Lai was anomalous only because it was publicized and some of its perpetrators were brought before military justice.
All figures and policies cited are from Nick Turse’s meticulously documented study Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War In Vietnam (American Empire Project) (Metropolitan Books, 2013), which relies primarily on US government archives and sources, and interviews with former military personnel. It’s an excellent book that many Americans should read but few will (it should be required reading for anyone entering the US military or the State Department). Americans would rather stare at their bloodshot eyes and distorted faces in the mirror after a night of drink, debauchery, and dinner discharge than glance at Vietnam.
The war shattered many of those who fought it. There was the inevitable combat violence and horror, and the depravity of murder and destruction inflicted upon innocents. Many turned to drugs, readily available, and many worked the various rackets themselves: drugs, weapons, currencies and military scrip, pimping, and child trafficking.
Over a relatively short period of time, you begin to treat all of the Vietnamese as though they are the enemy. If you can’t tell, you shoot first and ask questions later.
W.D. Ehrhart, quoted in Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War In Vietnam
The quote frames the moral void and the intellectual paradox at the heart of Vietnam: if everyone is your enemy, for who and for what are you fighting? When the devastation and death you’ve inflicted on your ally are greater than what you’ve inflicted on the ostensible enemy, how can you pretend that your ally will not become your enemy? What are you doing there?
A few bought off sycophants within your satrapy will always spout the party line, but out there in the countryside, hamlets, villages, towns, and cities you’ve destroyed, you will be hated and your enemy succored. Common nationality and heritage—and a history of oppression by a string of imperial powers—will inevitably triumph over your money, arms, and feeble “hearts and minds” programs, all designed to cover your imperialistic designs. No one with an ounce of brains and intellectual integrity is fooled, particularly not your own soldiers in the field.
It was almost impossible for those soldiers to question the policies that required them to do what they did, much less oppose or expose them. The risks ranged from ostracism to discipline, court-martial and military prison to death by friendly fire. Any effort would almost certainly have been futile, changing nothing.
But what about the military’s upper echelon? How did it acquiesce to a war that was destroying the country it was ostensibly meant to save, killing the people it was ostensibly meant to protect, clearly and understandably turning allies into enemies, and taking the lives and souls of the soldiers in their charge who had to fight it? Where were they, and where have they been since then as the US government has repeated the same mistaken policies over and over again? Have they supported and defended “the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” bearing “true faith and allegiance” to the same?
There are more civilians killed here per day than VC either by accident or on purpose and that’s just plain murder. I’m not surprised that there are more VC. We make more VC than we kill by the way these people are treated. I won’t go into detail but some of the things that take place would make you ashamed of good old America.
From the dairy of US Marine Ed Austin as quoted in Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War In Vietnam
Next: Betrayal by the Brass: Dereliction of Duty, Part 2
WHEN HONOR WAS MORE THAN JUST A WORD
It’s a day of truthy controversy here at TBP. First the Saker’s piece, now this one.
Ever get the feeling, looking back on the last two hundred or so years of history, that the men, their loyalty, and spirit on this continent (Yes, Canada included but on a smaller scale) have been severely used and misled and then eventually led to their own destruction?
Seems like a theme today.
Can’t wait for the follow-up piece.
Me either, so I guess I’d better get down to writing it.
Every country that goes to war does this but here in the modern west we seem to revel in our own negative actions,and then wonder why our culture is coming apart.
Vietnam was unfortunate. We did not have enough confidence in our way to just let them learn the hard way and wait them out. Maybe we were unsure out system would prevail. It eventually did when the Soviet Union fell. Certainly the French colonialism did not help things.
I was over in the former Saigon in 2008. We rented a room from a couple waiting to rent a room on tourists at the bus station. We stayed in a home were the son was permanently deformed from agent orange birth defects. He could not move. He just lay on the floor all day. It was sad and the war was a terrible tragedy.
Good thing we won. I didn’t have to learn Vietnamese in school. 😉
You state the obvious .We fought the NVA in South Vietnam.We Destory the country we were suppose to protect.If we had fought the war in the North we would have won hands down according to my Father who was combat soldier .We were scared China or Ruissa would come to the aid of the North with feet on the ground thus widing the war so we fought the war in the South.Turns out this idea of containment was a big mistake.
The mistake which sealed the whole mess was allowing the French to reoccupy the country in late summer 1945. Ho wanted to be our friend and we handed them back to their colonial masters.
Today the Central Highlands are the world’s largest coffee plantation and American companies make stuff like Nikes in Vietnam. We could have avoided all this pointless death and waste of fortune and resources by telling France the rules changed in 1945.
The Generals are always fighting the last war (or so).
I fully expect the same tactics to be used here that were used in OEF/OIF, but with no ROE outside gubmint enclaves.
Right, it’s the fault of the French. Americans never destroyed any other country, as we all know.
that’s not what he said-
we could have prevented the french from recolonizing vietnam–
ho chi minh did attempt to be an ally of the us but was rebuffed by uncle sam–
We also promised that we would allow an election in Vietnam in 1956, and reneged when it became apparent Ho Chi Minh would win. We then installed our own satrap as head of South Vietnam’s government.
One thing about Vietnam that makes me sick is the fact we basically turned our back on our own values to prop up and prolong the French Colonial system in Vietnam. I read somewhere Ho Chi Minh started out as a fan of the US and modeled his early resistance movement on the US Constitution, but when he naively appealed to the US for support, he was shrugged off. Can you imagine if we had supported the Vietminh against the French and supported a free and democratic Vietnam from day 1? Had that been successful, a whole lot of blood and treasure need not have been squandered.
Another thing that makes me sick is to read about the corruption and big business dealings of the war, like the French rubber plantations which paid the VC not to attack them and worked out deals to keep US troops off their plantations. And the incredible corruption of the US supply system. One book I read described how you could find enough US gear on the black market in Saigon to outfit a division.
Unfortunately, that type of thing goes on in every war.
By 1954 we were flying transports, flew the paratroopers dropped into Dien Bien Phu, and supplied basically all weapons to French forces.
Thanks, not one in a million understand or ever even heard the truth you told. again thanks
The mistake was that we should have provided the Vietnamese with weapons and let their fight their own damn war. Same thing today with Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
Robert, our hands were tied because we largely observed arbitrary borders that limited our area of engagement. Yes, I know we were also in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand with Mike teams and also bombed there. But we did not go in and remove these areas of support and thus the insurgency was able to regroup in relative safety. It is no accident that a large part of the Ho Chi Minh trail wasn’t in Vietnam. Yes, we brought massive amounts of firepower to bear but never had an actual plan to win. BB and Jake are both right in what they said as well.
I remember those days all too well. We had a joke we called the boat plan. Put all the good Vietnamese on a boat, then kill all the bad Vietnamese. After we were done. Sink the boat.
That picture is telling. VC skulls were a not unknown trophy.
BTW, we actually did win the war. After TET the Viet Cong were decimated. It was Cronkite and his ilk that then lost the war back home.
I’m glad you brought up Cronkite. Many people think the hippy protests ended the Vietnam War. Not true. The politicians tuned out the protests. They didn’t care. It was the news media, such as Cronkite and his ilk that ended the war.
Robert, when you say war is the worst activity of men you are correct. You described the horror of it very well. To say that using prodigious amounts of munitions and employing brutal methods means the politicians fought to win is not true. LBJ,JFK and Nixon clearly did not prosecute that war to win.
To win a war you kill the enemy until they stop fighting. USA did not do that.
“To win a war you kill the enemy until they stop fighting”: no, civilized people don’t do that. They fight against soldiers, not civilians.
Mike, we are not civilized. We fire bombed Dresden. We used atomic weapons against civilians in Japan. I could go on and on with further examples. Total war reaps civilians also. And only total war brings victory. Ask the American Indians. Note, I am not saying that I support this. But it is the reality of war and has been as long as men have sought to kill each other.
In the past, women and children were not usually targeted unless it was an effort to exterminate, not win.
I am sorry Vixen, but that is just not true. Read up on what the Mongols did. Eventually, in Europe, women and children were spared. Not so in Asia, China, America in the internecine Indian wars, Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Even if they were not directly targeted scorched earth tactics would doom them to death by starvation such as Sherman’s drive through the South. I wish we humans were better. But we are not. Look at what is happening in Rhodesia (I refuse to call it by it’s current name) and South Africa now. Are women and children spared? No. They are not.
Truth! Truth! Truth! Let’s cut out the bull shitte. Man the naked ape. Nice post SemperFido
Team Goy #432
I agree with Michael.
I wish I could.
Civilized people ultimately lose wars.
“But what about the military’s upper echelon?”
—– article
What upper echelon?
EVERYBODY reports to somebody even yet “higher up” ….. until you get to the uppermost echelon …. the President.
This is why most of our presidents are fucken War Criminals.
the presidents are. the fall guys. there are higher echelons.
Sadly if this is news to anyone regarding action in Vietnam and the amount of ordanance used , go back to sleep . As for who where and why , there are over 58,000 stories we will never hear . Funny though when the war on terror started beating the drums I knew , WTF HERE WE GO AGAIN ! 6 trillion pissed in Afghanistan and Iraq with nothing to show for it but some heavy hitting HERION on our streets and a bankrupt nation morally and financially . As for those who wore and wear the uniform then as now , thanks for your service sorry it was managed by a government that used you like a Dixie cup . Wow same shit different day !
Again Truth! Truth! Truth!. Beautiful Boat Guy!
Team Goy #432
It’s weird how many different groups, sects, silos, departments and cults are all active in the US at the same time. We have the (now) neocons who want to conquer the world; we have (some of the last) communists who want to enforce their ideology on the rest of the world. We have universal peacers, who want no war; and the MIC, who want unlimited, endless war. We have ethnic interests, who want {their ethnic group} to rule over the rest; we have globalists who want us all one (easily exploitable, ignorant) race. We have everyone and everything, all at once.
With all this “diversity” working at cross-purposes to each other, how could we hope to truly win another war? How could we live with ourselves if we did?
Let’s not leave out 70% of young men 18 to 24 are physically or mentally unfit for military service . UH/OH women look out that elusive equality factor may end up more than you bargained for . Yes I know many women serve proudly and with honor and distinction but please in reality can you see the Paris Hilton types getting drafted …?
I totally disagree with women being in the military. Women’s bodies were not made with the strength of men and can’t endure what men can. If it weren’t for lower standards, no woman would be in the military today.
And you are right
A lot of Vietnamese women managed an SKS or an AK47 . A 90 pound women is as dangerous as any man on full auto or semi
So is a kid with a hand grenade. I stand corrected Boats.
Hate to go there Semper Fido prefer to think about the family that got out of Vietnam and there Grand daughter half American became my daughters Bestie as the girls say these days . The one positive maybe the only positive thing I can draw from our nations debacle
I disagree, as well. Many of the ones I knew joined up essentially to meet men. They fucked and drama-ed their way through their service, spreading VD, and getting people in trouble.
The shenanigans they help create are unbelievable. Sex in port-a-potties and dumpsters. At Monterey, the docs told us about a legendary female known only as “The Record Breaker” for having 7 different STDs at the same time. Sexy videos and pics that get out to the rest of the unit (search youtube- thanks to the interweb, PFC Hayes will live forever!), embarrassing everyone involved. And it’s shameless and disgusting to see them slinging it around to get what they want, frequently to avoid hard work or discomfort.
I had a buddy who went through NCO school in an all-male platoon and his trainers explained they were lucky; had women been there, they would all be dragging. They can’t officially admit it, but it’s known once you introduce women, you get all the guys looking at them, trying to hook up, fighting with each other, and cohesion goes down the drain.
And there’s their natural escape plan whenever the going gets tough: pregnancy. We were about to deploy and our useless female lump popped pregnant 3 days prior to deployment. They even piss tested all the females at the airfield prior to deploying to see if anyone was pregnant.
I had an NCO who was terrified to be alone with our one useless female lump because she had a tendency to remember harassing comments and conversations that never happened.
While we’re at it, I think the homosexuals and trannies have no place there, either. If females cause problems, imagine what these endangered species bring?
And, to be fair, the guys aren’t angels, either. The freaky shit some of the perverts in service pull is unbelievable. I had a buddy who caught a peeping tom while he was taking a dump in a trailer in Iraq. Rape is common, both guy on girl and guy on guy. They constantly catch Colonels with kiddie porn on their govt laptops. One of my buddies told me about an entire squad that came down with crotch rot because they were all sharing a pocket pussy together.
Makes you want to just chemically castrate and dose everyone with saltpetre for the duration.
I doesn’t matter how many bombs we expended on the country. The bombing campaign that would have been telling would have been if we bombed the population centers of Hanoi, which we didn’t do. But we DID do that in German and Japan. Hmm, I wonder what the difference was.
Yup. Bombing empty jungle is highly ineffective.
I believe the root of the failure is this: Political War.
Political War is war created and led by politicians for limited, sometimes non-existent, goals with no intention of actual victory. Consider WWII. We fought that war as a “total” war in which all methods, all weapons, and all territories were on the table. Compare WWII to Korea, which was a bullshit Political War. They even came up with a new name for it, “Police Action” (haven’t heard that one lately, have you?) . Politicians put soldiers’ lives in peril for limited goals, hemmed in by political barriers, and even drew the UN into a pointless war in Korea. In fact, Korea may be the ultimate Political War, since it’s never even been completed! It’s rewarded generations of presidents and military leaders with a scary enemy, a great reason to ask for more funding, and a plum overseas deployment.
Vietnam was another political war. How else can you view a war with an enemy who can step across the border to take a time out before returning when he feels like it? Pure politics.
Ultimately, every single “War” since WWII has been a fake. UnWar. Notice we don’t get real declarations of war on anything in recent memory? We’ve only had 5 declarations of war in over 200 years. Not Panama, not Iraq, not IraqII, not Afghanistan, not Yugoslavia, not Somalia, etc.
Oh, and not in SyrIraq against ISIS. That “war” has to be even better than Korea. Here’s a war so political, we can’t even kill the enemy, despite air superiority and literally having them surrounded on all sides. We knocked Iraq down 2 times in less than 100 hours. Compared to that, ISIS should be like a weekend training exercise, and yet it’s been around for years. I think Russia proved how full of shit the ISIS war is when they visited Syria briefly.
I’m not an avid fan of war, but if we’re going to have one, I think it should be with public approval and with a real declaration of war and all the burdens that come with that.
We’re not “officially” at war, it’s not declared by Congress, so we have enemy combatants who don’t fall under the Geneva Conventions and therefore can be tortured, but yet, we are at war, so we must have more war funding and NDAA and all the other things politicians like to implement during war.
Similar to this short, sick segment written about here, the following article, “Rip, USA” posted in Oct’01, that some might deem seditious, says the cloud people have been at almost since our start, without pause:
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2001/libe145-20011029-03.html
Sad.
I used to work with a an ex pilot that flew lots of sorties in Viet Nam. His specialty he sid was dropping napalm. His eyes lit up when he talked about it. He described it as the greatest thing he ever did. I believe he said that he would set fire to a strip 100 yards wide and 400 yards long, incinerating anything inside that strip. He was proud of it.
It was the most despicable, horrifying thing to hear the guy. He was insane, seemed to me. but otherwise he was a God-fearing, community leading, family man.
What the fuck is wrong with people?
llpoh, it is spelled Vietnam. And we appreciated the napalm drops. It often saved our asses. He was proud of his ability to place the napalm right where it was needed. You weren’t there, you don’t understand. He did his job accurately and efficiently. Yes, napalm is horrible to contemplate. But when you are at risk of being overrun by a horde of screaming Vietnamese you thanked God for the guy in the Skyraider who stopped them from reaching you.
That, is what is “wrong” with these people.
You see, we BELIEVED. We actually thought we were doing what was right. Now, I don’t see it that way. But back then, we believed.
Thanks for that explanation, SemperFido. Makes more sense now. Glad you don’t see it that way anymore.
It is a bitter taste M’Lady
So true ask any Huey pilot and his door gunner if they were lucky to come home after a tour in a bullet magnet ! They believed because in the shit up to your neck all you think about is getting thru it with the guys next to you !
Reminds me of the Duval character in Apocalypse Now.
Holy cow, it’s moral equivalency Monday!! There have been some really fatally flawed whoppers tossed around today.
TBP went off track on 9/11 when the truthers all showed up and then morphed into the moon landings were faked conspiracy phase. Now we have an empire jag underway. What!s next…….the X files ?????
I grew up on Vietnam. My Uncle, who was more like my older brother, went over in 1966 so we had a stake in it, our family. His name sake was the only male on my Grandmother’s side of the family and he was killed early on in North Africa fighting the Germans at Kasserine, and our family never got his remains back. That was a very present reality in our home. Every week we’d box up cookies and little wedges of cheese wrapped in tinfoil, letters and drawing I’d done in school and send it off hoping it might make it’s way to him. He went missing for a good long while- he was a LRRP with the 173rd Airborne in the Central Highlands and a lot of what he did was clandestine ops that put him out of range of mail- and the mood in our home had an impact that stays with me to this day. He’d send home rolls of film that my Grandmother would have developed into slides and we’d all watch on a screen set up in the living room; sandbagged bunkers and shirtless men filthy from the red earth with somber faces. War was not a glamorous or exciting thing to us, it was a sacrifice, and obligation, like paying taxes. You did it or you were punished by a powerful government, you offered up what was most valuable to you because you were told to by people you didn’t have the option of saying no to.
Every night in my memory we’d sit at TV trays and watch the casualty reports on the Evening News- in our home it was Huntley and Brinkley- and pray that it wasn’t him. I don’t ever recall a time from my childhood when there wasn’t a war going on and by the time I got into high school I just assumed that was where I was headed off to and that I’d be equally fortunate to come home in one piece.
When my Uncle came home he was very quiet and spent a great deal of time alone, sitting in a lawn chair under the apple tree and just looking out at the field in front of the house. He bought a brand new Camaro and he and his best friend were going to drive around the US when he got back. Two weeks after he returned he got the news that his friend had been KIA and he took it very hard.
He never took the trip around the country that he planned on and I sometimes wonder if all the years I spent on the road later, just like becoming a paratrooper, was some kind of proxy service to my Uncle, a way of closing the circle.
Smedley Butler was right. War is a racket. Eisenhower was right, too. Beware the military Industrial Complex.
We are being farmed like livestock by people in places of power for ends that benefit none of us. The sooner we remove ourselves from their reach the better.
Thanks for the insightful piece, Robert, well done as always.
“We are being farmed like livestock by people in places of power for ends that benefit none of us.”
Well, put.
This is the common thread that binds the various political factions in the west together. We’re all being used while at the same time being played one against the other so that we don’t notice. Unfortunately, most are too consumed by their pet political ideologies, consumption and basic narcissism to see it.
If you’re busy fighting fake nazis, tearing down monuments and ‘fighting the power’ for more free shit it is difficult to see that you are being played. And it’s hard for the other side to see the same when they’re fighting a rearguard action against what they view as the ‘zombie hordes’ constant encroachment on their way of life.
Ever see that quote from Kissinger, “Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”
“We are being farmed like livestock by people in places of power for ends that benefit none of us. The sooner we remove ourselves from their reach the better.”
No truer words were ever typed. I used to think the sooner we removed them the better, but it’s not going to happen. Unfortunately, neither will removing ourselves from their reach, they will always reach further. What hope I have left rests on the inevitable collapse, the possibility that in some small corners of the world something better may emerge from the rubble.
A great tragedy of Vietnam was the soldiers who were shattered by it, physically and psychologically. That there are people in this world with the power to order other people into such circumstances is a fundamental evil that must be resisted by each of us in our own way, however we can do so.
Thank you for posting the story of your uncle and your family. My obsessive horror with Vietnam started with some of the individual stories of those who were there. It is only by listening to those stories that we can begin to understand the larger meanings and implications of Vietnam, which most Americans still want to ignore.
Farmer, I always appreciate the things that you write.
An old school pal enlisted and volunteered to go to VN. He was a tank commander and witnessed an atrocity. What he saw he didn’t tell until much later. He returned as a member of the reserves. When asked about returning to active service, he stated “When the Eskimos invade Connecticut, I’ll suit up and show up. Otherwise..? Ah, ha-ha-ha-ha!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRFLWuuH_50
I can think of one good thing that came from the Vietnam war, lots of good Pho joints.