March 29, National Vietnam War Veterans Day

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Cause I’m leavin’ on a jet plane
Don’t know when I’ll be back again
Oh baby, I hate to go
–John Denver

“Leaving on a Jet plane was a song of Vietnam, a plaintiff cry into the unknown, of love that would vanish with a youth we didn’t know we were losing. We were soldiers once and young, who would come home to a country no longer ours, strangers in a strange land forevermore.”

Ken Burns’ monumental “The Vietnam War” presented an America trapped and defeated in South East Asia. That too was the picture painted by journalists David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, and most famously by Walter Cronkite. For Burns, South Vietnam was corrupt and oppressive, a land which deserved to fall to the Communists — the standard view of American academics, and reporters.

Left-leaning commentators like Burns never reveal the brutality of Ho Chi Minh, who slaughtered hundreds in his quest to forge a communist state. Neither do they acknowledge a growing list of revisionist historians including Geoffrey Shaw, Mark Moyar, Rufus Phillips, and Louis Sorley, who argue that Hanoi’s victory was not pre-ordained. The latest contribution to that war’s history is Stephen Young’s Kissinger’s Betrayal, a powerful indictment of Kissinger’s collusion with Hanoi to betray South Vietnam. The revisionist arguments are buttressed by declassified American, Soviet, and Vietnamese documents. Here is the “smoking gun,” the evidence that the Communists never had any intention of honoring the 1954 Geneva Accords or any agreement that impeded their conquest of the South.

President Eisenhower had made American support for South Vietnam abundantly clear in his October 1954 communiqué to Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem pledging economic and military assistance. That pledge was reinforced when John Kennedy sent military advisors to Vietnam and in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson began the large-scale deployment of American troops to thwart communist aggression. In large-scale confrontations, communists were being beaten and beaten badly. Kill ratios were incredible, American firepower destroying whole North Vietnamese regiments. The American press, however, was reporting otherwise to a nation growing disenchanted with a never-ending conflict.

With Johnson, in the face of growing anti-war sentiment, not running for re-election, Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey to win the 1968 presidential race on a campaign promise to end American involvement. Seeking an exit strategy, Nixon continued Johnson’s Vietnamization policy of turning the war over to the Vietnamese while drawing down American troops. Reporters seldom credited American or ARVN successes, or that Tet, contrary to the media, had been an American victory

By 1972, with US ground forces gone, Hanoi launched a full-scale conventional invasion. Initially successful, ARVN’s Herculean effort backed by American air power threw them back. By 1975, however, the Watergate scandal had forced Nixon from office, a less resolute Gerald Ford was now president. While Moscow and Peking turned on the supply spigot, the U.S. Congress, cut off all assistance to South Vietnam. As South Vietnam’s army disintegrated, Ford did not feel he had the power or Congressional backing to order the B-52s back into action to bomb the North Vietnamese columns stretched out on the highways. The road to Communist victory was open. South Vietnam’s collapse was cheered by the media, university campuses, the “smart set” and by Congress itself. Hanoi conquered after all.

In his afterword, Stephen Young excoriates the anti-war movement for the evil it visited on South Vietnam, for denigrating those who served, for poisoning America’s self-confidence and for opening a cultural civil war that continues to this day. He rebukes Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara for failing to comprehend the Vietnamese as a people whose cultural proclivities rejected Hanoi’s evil ambition, a failure of understanding repeated in Afghanistan by decision-makers once again ignoring a country’s natural disposition.
For Vietnamese the price of defeat was tyranny or exile; for American veteran,s it was to be shunned in their own land. The country wanted to forget.

Lt. Colonel Civil Affairs, USAR (ret) served twenty-six years in the regular and reserve components of the US Army. He was civil military liaison for the 260th Military Police, DC National Guard, State Public Affairs Officer, Commander of the Public Affairs unit and a counter-drug intelligence analyst. Transferring to the 352 Civil Affairs Command as monuments and archives officer, he became the Command Public Affairs Officer in Iraq as well as liaison to local Iraqi leaders and acting Secretary to the General Staff. He was instrumental in recovering photographic artifacts of the Iraqi Royal family while in Baghdad. He was wounded in action in an ambush in Feb. 2004 for which he was awarded the Purple Heart.
In his civilian career he worked primarily in Army Public Affairs and for the Air Force as historian to the presidential wing in the early Reagan administration and later for Air Force Legislative Liaison covering congressional hearings and assisting in preparing testimony for senior leaders.
His essays and reviews have appeared in the scholarly and popular press including Asian Affairs and the Washington Times. He is co-author, with Ali Wahab, of The Iraqi Royal Family, a Collection of Photographs Recovered from The Ruins of the Zuhur Palace, 2004.
A native New Yorker, he holds a BA with honors in history from Findlay College (Ohio) and an MA in history from The Ohio State University. He is a graduate of the US Army Command & General Staff College and was graduated with distinction US Naval War College with a MA in National Security and Strategic Studies.

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