I am like most American men: I like to watch war movies from time to time, of which one is the account of the Battle of Ia Drang portrayed in “We were Soldiers Once”. I read the book as well, long ago. Sam Elliot as Plumley is hands down my favorite character. He’s the kind of guy that gets things done right, and quickly.
I have invested a lot of time and energy researching the Vietnam War, and will take this moment to share them in a form I don’t think I have quite put out there with the clarity I am hoping to here.
As any long term readers I have may have know, I believe not only that we won the Vietnam War, then retreated unnecessarily, but that that is the only honest way to look at it, if you know the facts. I discuss many details in my paper on Cultural Sadeism, and wanted to add here just a bit.
What happened in the Battle of Ia Drang (which a friend of mine who was a combat historian claimed means “Shit River”, which I have been unable to verify) is that we subjected our troops to fire, brought a massive number of North Vietnamese regulars (who had infiltrated into South Vietnam in patent defiance of treaty conditions and international law) into contact with American troops, and in particular American artillery, air power, and helicopter gunships. The result was that a LOT of NVA died, roughly 10 times as many as we lost.
This was in my view the origin of Westmoreland’s obsession with body counts and “search and destroy” missions. But it only really worked once. The NVA–and this was always an invasion of the South by the North, even if they did have some voluntary, and a LOT of involuntary support from locals–changed tactics, and from this battle in late 1965 until Creigton Abrams took over in 1968, we were losing a lot of men for little to no benefit. This is why public opinion turned. This is the period the Pentagon Papers covered.
What has received almost NO coverage is the brilliant and SUCCESSFUL strategy Abrams pursued in the wake of the Tet offensives that were DISASTROUS for the NVA. They lost huge numbers of men, but even worse, they lost virtually all support they had had among the South Vietnamese, and made them wake up and realize what was in store for them if they lost the war. Huge number of men enlisted in ARVN, and together with Abrams pacification strategy, the NVA had lost all hold on the countryside by 1972. This left conventional, tank led invasion as their only option, one which the exercised in 1972 and again, successfully, in 1974.
To be clear, conventional warfare is what we do WELL. That is our forte. It depends on large numbers of weapons like artillery and tanks that we have in profusion. What happened in 1974, effectively is what happened when the Shah of Iran fell: we abandoned an ally. We refused to provide air support, we cut off all aid money, and we refused them access to naval transport. With those three things–and NO American combat troops on the ground–they would have resisted the 1974 invasion as well, and remained free.
People who claimed to be “compassionate”, who claimed to be “empathetic” and “against war” caused this failure, which led immediately to tens of thousands of murders, and countless acts of torture and violence. It facilitated as well the coup in Cambodia, which was another nation we abandoned, leading to numerous literal torture chambers being set up, in which dozens of people were tortured to death daily for YEARS, and pictures taken ghoulishly of their bodies.
I have on my shelf a somewhat rare chronicling of the atrocities in North Vietnam following its falling to the Communists, and I have to say it is not pleasant reading. How many of you knew Diem’s brother was murdered by Communists by being buried alive? How many of you know the name of the Montagnard village attacked with flame throwers, in which hundreds of non-combatants were burnt to death? But you know My Lai. Curious.
When I condemn the left as evil, I don’t do this rhetorically. I am not trying to do anything but describe factually patterns I see, and treat as analytically as I can. When you see aging hippies, still proud to have been a part of the anti-war movement, what you need to see are self satisfied children who committed a major crime they will never, ever, accept responsibility for in this lifetime.