Vietnam War, lost or not.

Please pick one of the two options.

  • The US militarily lost the Vietnam War.

    Votes: 25 45.5%

  • The US withdrew only due to the homefront protests, but they it never lost on the military level

    Votes: 30 54.5%
  • Total voters
    55
Italian guy, there's no harm in disagreement. If everyone agreed on everything in this forum then there would be no reason to be here because there wouldn't be anything to learn! :)

When we talk about "millitarily" you all seem to be focused on bombs and bullets but what I am saying is that there is much more to war than that and that if you ignore them you are doomed to failure.

I think you guys are understanding my position here but let me try and clarify it just a little more. In the middle ages you're charged with defending a castle from attackers. You man the ramparts and arm the archers. But at night a spy flings open the gates and lets the enemy in. Did you suffer a millitary defeat? I say yes because espionoge is a facet of warfare. A very similar thing happened in Vietnam. To answer godofthunder's question, those men on the ramparts did not fail in their duty but the end result was defeat.
 
No WD you still don't get it. To use your silly castle analogy, it would be more like being sent to defend your friend's castle against his enemies and their friends. You defeat the enemy every time he tries to take the castle. At some point the folks back home are convinced that they want you to come home despite your friend's situation so after the enemiy agrees to stop fighting with your friend, you go home. A few years later, your friend loses his castle to his enemy and thier friends. The castle was lost, did you lose it? That my young friend is the question.
 
Whispering Death said:
Italian guy, there's no harm in disagreement. If everyone agreed on everything in this forum then there would be no reason to be here because there wouldn't be anything to learn! :)

When we talk about "millitarily" you all seem to be focused on bombs and bullets but what I am saying is that there is much more to war than that and that if you ignore them you are doomed to failure.

I think you guys are understanding my position here but let me try and clarify it just a little more. In the middle ages you're charged with defending a castle from attackers. You man the ramparts and arm the archers. But at night a spy flings open the gates and lets the enemy in. Did you suffer a millitary defeat? I say yes because espionoge is a facet of warfare. A very similar thing happened in Vietnam. To answer godofthunder's question, those men on the ramparts did not fail in their duty but the end result was defeat.
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Right, essesntially your saying that the original quesiton is irrelevant, more or less. To sum up, and correct me if I'm understanding you correctly WD, "You can't separate a Military overseas venture from non-Military domestic affairs. Failure on one front is failure by both." So somebody please add the "Not Applicable" option to the vote then, since your answer would be neither "yes" or "no".
 
godofthunder9010 said:
Right, essesntially your saying that the original quesiton is irrelevant, more or less. To sum up, and correct me if I'm understanding you correctly WD, "You can't separate a Military overseas venture from non-Military domestic affairs. Failure on one front is failure by both." So somebody please add the "Not Applicable" option to the vote then, since your answer would be neither "yes" or "no".
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I actually said that in the first response to this thread which ignighted this whole thing. You can go back and re-read it if you want, I said that my answer to both questions is "yes".

And D-Top the castle analogy is very limmited just to try and illustrate a point. But at the point where you have 500,000 of your soldiers invested in a conflict it becomes your war IMHO. When you have 3 times the ammount of men currently in Iraq+Afghanistan combined that makes you committed to the conflict. Come on now, are you going to argue that America didn't "win" against Germany in WW2 just because we where helping an ally?
 
I remember the situation like this, an old Viet Vet told me a while ago one day.

"The Vietnamese pulled out because they couldn't keep on fighting,
And the Yanks pulled out because their politicans were too gutless to keep on going.
And when the Yanks left, the North Vietnamese came in again."

Take it or leave it, thats how it was.

BTW: Those were his actual words. I was told by my dad it's offensive to call a "southerner", a "yankie"
 
Bory said:
BTW: Those were his actual words. I was told by my dad it's offensive to call a "southerner", a "yankie"
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Well, comming from someone half-way across the world I guess it's okay to call all Americans "yanks", we still call Britts "Limeys" after all :)

But, yeah, I dare you to walk up to any true Texan and call him personally a yankee to his face ;) We use the world as a derogatory term to describe all that's wrong with the North East part of this country!
 
War is politics taken to its extreme according to Von Clausewitz, yet it is entirely logical to separate military action from political action. You will never read an AAR (After Action Review) which has ANYTHING pertaining to politics contained therein. Combat might occur because of political clashes but the action itself has sweet :cen: all to do with politics. It is violence of action and there is nothing political about the realities of an honest to hades battlefield. Where "the metal meets the meat" American soldiers abso:cen:inglutely did NOT lose in Vietnam.

A political or global geo-political loss does not a military loss make.


 
The Vietnam War was a battle in the Cold War.
We didn't lose the Cold War, so how could we have lost
in Vietnam.
 
We did lose Vietnam, that much I'm pretty clear on. Mission was to stop Communism from spreading into South Vietnam, Indochina and beyond. Mission definitely failed, and yet the "beyond" part was actually a possible success. Because of the stubborness we demonstrated in Vietnam, it proved we were at least serious. Our military learned a great deal during Vietnam that proved to be priceless lessons. We also developed a lot of military hardware based purely upon the best school of military R&D: The school of hard knocks. The military was not defeated. Public opinion at home was. My biggest question is, was this an intentional tactic of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, or was this simply the American Media and people betraying us? Treason or tactics?

But I think that WD has confused a lot of people with the debate simply because the original question that started the thread was not, "Did the United States lose the Vietnam War?" My reading of it, it looked more like "Who's fault was it that we lost?" The answer that is very clear. It definitely was not the US military's fault. They did a superb job. The unconventional tactics did not beat the US Military and they got better and better at dealing with them as time went on. And we beat the shit outa them on pretty much across the board.
 
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My biggest question is, was this an intentional tactic of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, or was this simply the American Media and people betraying us? Treason or tactics?
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This article might help. This excerpt speaks about the 1968 TET offensive, a purported turning point in American public opinion.
Until Tet, a majority of Americans agreed with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson that failure was not an option. It was Kennedy who changed the status of U.S. military personnel from advisers to South Vietnamese troops to full-fledged fighting men. By the time of Kennedy's assassination in Nov. 22, 1963, 16,500 U.S. troops had been committed to the war. Johnson escalated all the way to 542,000. But defeat became an option when Johnson decided the war was unwinnable and that he would lose his bid for the presidency in November 1968. Hanoi thus turned military defeat into a priceless geopolitical victory.
With the Vietcong wiped out in the Tet offensive, North Vietnamese regulars moved south down the Ho Chi Minh trails through Laos and Cambodia to continue the war. Even Giap admitted in his memoirs that news media reporting of the war and the anti-war demonstrations that ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called a conditional surrender, Giap said they would now go the limit because America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory was within Hanoi's grasp.
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SOURCE

Whispering Death said:
Well, comming from someone half-way across the world I guess it's okay to call all Americans "yanks", we still call Britts "Limeys" after all :)

But, yeah, I dare you to walk up to any true Texan and call him personally a yankee to his face ;) We use the world as a derogatory term to describe all that's wrong with the North East part of this country!
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Next thing you'll say that the Northeast uses the term redneck to describe all that's wrong with the south. Now enough of the name calling.
Truth be known, there is a big difference between the term "yank" and "yankee". Americans don't use the noun "yank" so if you say it it's not going to be considered offensive.
 
True about the Tet Offensive DTop and I was aware of how that all went down. It was the great invisible victory for the USA: The Vietcong were almost entirely wiped out as an effective fighting force and the NVA had to smuggle their regulars in to compensate. Sadly, this is not what the American people saw. The American public had just been told that "we are winning and its almost over." Then the Tet Offensive happened and (similar to not finding WMD's in Iraq) it made the White House and Military look pretty stupid.

Its unfortunate that the American public did not know that the Vietcong self-destructed in the Tet Offensive. From the Military point of view, the enemy came out into the open and was absolutely demolished by the resulting US/SVA counterattacks. To use the Castle image, the enemy opened the gates, lowered the drawbridge, went charging headlong right into vastly superior forces and got their asses handed to them. Charge of the Light Brigade all over again, and they took an unrecoverable number of casualties. But anciently or in modern times, the immediate result is that everyone on the opposing side assumes that their enemy must be a lot stronger than previously believed. Afterall, nobody would be stupid enough to commit suicide on the field of battle, right? But the Vietcong did exactly that.
 
To the veterans, was it common knowledge at the time among US personell that the VC had decimated themselves?
 
bulldogg said:
To the veterans, was it common knowledge at the time among US personell that the VC had decimated themselves?
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I don't know about other people who were there, but by the time I got there, 2 yrs. after Tet, there were no VC to be found and we didn't expect to find any. Once in a while, we would run into NVA trying to pose as VC but it was pretty clear who they were. We captured Chinese "advisors", Czec, and Chinese, and Russian weapons by the hundreds. The VC didn't decimate themselves, we did. One of the main purposes of Tet was to stir up a civilian revolt but it never materialized.

godofthunder9010 said:
Its unfortunate that the American public did not know that the Vietcong self-destructed in the Tet Offensive. From the Military point of view, the enemy came out into the open and was absolutely demolished by the resulting US/SVA counterattacks. To use the Castle image, the enemy opened the gates, lowered the drawbridge, went charging headlong right into vastly superior forces and got their asses handed to them. Charge of the Light Brigade all over again, and they took an unrecoverable number of casualties. But anciently or in modern times, the immediate result is that everyone on the opposing side assumes that their enemy must be a lot stronger than previously believed. Afterall, nobody would be stupid enough to commit suicide on the field of battle, right? But the Vietcong did exactly that.
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It's called selective reporting. The only people who considered the communists to be superior were those whose only source of information was that selective reporting by the mainstream media.
 
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DTop said:
It's called selective reporting. The only people who considered the communists to be superior were those whose only source of information was that selective reporting by the mainstream media.
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An aquaintence of mine had an interesting thing to say along those lines. It was something along these lines: "I've always watched CNN for the news, but just the other day I switched over to Fox News and the most amazing thing happened! We went from losing the War in Iraq to winning in less than 1 second!!"

Selective reporting is being a bit kind. Much of what the American Media did was Propagandist Bullcrap. One of my favorite examples:
Sai-Gon.jpg


This bit of loveliness. Surely does look all terrible and inhumane when you only take this one frame and slap it onto the cover of your Magazine (it was Time magazine I believe). Makes our role in Vietnam seem like we were absolute monsters, doesn't it? But if you watch the video of exactly the same incident, you realize that the "crying" face is not crying at. It was an expression of rage, but this frame catches it with his eyes closed and all scrunched up. Time (or whover it was) just picked to perfect frame to make it look like something completely different than it was. This gentleman had just been captured. He had just knocked down a couple soldiers and was in the process of breaking and running. The guy with the gun does in fact shoot him in the head. Had he not done so, this man might very well have escaped.
 
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Something similar here that the media have largely contributed to spread distorted news about:

kim.jpg


Myth: Kim Phuc, the little nine year old Vietnamese girl running naked from the napalm strike near Trang Bang on 8 June 1972, was burned by Americans bombing Trang Bang.

No American had involvement in this incident near Trang Bang that burned Phan Thi Kim Phuc. The planes doing the bombing near the village were VNAF (Vietnam Air Force) and were being flown by Vietnamese pilots in support of South Vietnamese troops on the ground. The Vietnamese pilot who dropped the napalm in error is currently living in the United States. Even the AP photographer, Nick Ut, who took the picture was Vietnamese. The incident in the photo took place on the second day of a three day battle between the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) who occupied the village of Trang Bang and the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) who were trying to force the NVA out of the village. Recent reports in the news media that an American commander ordered the air strike that burned Kim Phuc are incorrect. There were no Americans involved in any capacity. "We (Americans) had nothing to do with controlling VNAF," according to Lieutenant General (Ret) James F. Hollingsworth, the Commanding General of TRAC at that time. Also, it has been incorrectly reported that two of Kim Phuc's brothers were killed in this incident. They were Kim's cousins not her brothers.
 
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