The Vietnam
Nightmare—Again
By Eric
Margolis
October 03,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- 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’.
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 of their heavy losses.
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 S. Margolis is an award-winning,
internationally syndicated columnist. His articles
have appeared in the New York Times, the
International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times,
Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times,
Nation – Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times
Malaysia and other news sites in Asia.
https://ericmargolis.com
Copyright
Eric S. Margolis 2017 |