Vietnam, American Military Victory or Defeat?
May 2, 2009 | Written by Daniel Lagan | 15 Comments
There is often much discussion made on how the United States was supposedly bested in the Vietnam War by a group of “jungle fighters.” Many pundits will look at the American involvement in that war and scoff at the inability of the American soldiers who were sent there to achieve any sort of victory against a foe who is supposed to have been grossly incapable of handling the Americans in any real way. To most who look back on the Vietnam conflict, it is little more than a byword for the mishandling of American resources and a source of mockery of American military prowess. It seems to me that this is far from the truth however, and at least deserves a second look. When I research the Vietnam conflict, I see a valiant group of soldiers, fighting without the support of their people or their politicians, a war in which they were not given any real objectives or way to win. The American soldiers fought for years in a grisly war of attrition which they won in a landslide. The North Vietnamese certainly won the political Vietnam War, but the American soldiers won the military one.
The naysayers will certainly suggest that the Americans had to pull out of Vietnam in the end, but that has little to do with whether or not the American soldiers proved themselves capable of defeating the North Vietnamese. It has much more to do with the fact that Americans decided they didn’t want to do what it would take to fight the kind of war which was required to win against the North Vietnamese, so they pulled their soldiers out. Contrary to popular opinion, the US was not trying to win the Vietnam War at any cost, if that was the case, the Americans would have just used nuclear bombs and turned North Vietnam into a lake. The inability of the American soldiers to achieve victory is not a discredit to them or their military capability, but rather to the ignorance of American policy makers who thought they could waltz through a highly prepared and capable enemy. I believe that given the circumstances the US military was placed in, it was able to wage a cruelly effective war against its North Vietnamese adversaries. One must look no further than the casualty numbers of the North Vietnamese to see the facts supporting this conclusion. The United States lost around 60,000 soldiers in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese released a statement in 1995 suggesting that 1.5 million North Vietnamese combatants were killed in the Vietnam War. It is very likely that this number is far less than accurate. So why are “experts” so quick to discredit the American military for its efforts in Vietnam? The answers are less than conclusive.
The biggest attempt by the Vietnamese to make a legitimate military effort against the Americans was the Tet Offensive of 1968. This campaign by the Vietnamese made a lot of noise, but was overwhelmingly defeated by the American and South Vietnamese forces. To say that the Vietnamese took a sound beating would be a massive understatement. What is so sad about the Vietnam conflict is not that the American military was bested (it wasn’t), but how handicapped the American military was by its leadership. I wonder how things would have been different in Vietnam if the Americans had decided to stop handcuffing their soldiers by forcing them to fight a half hearted war.
It seems to me that in the Vietnam War the American soldiers were fighting a numerically superior enemy, on its home turf, with one hand tied behind their backs as a result of the political wrangling going on at home. The Vietnamese had decades of experience in the warfare that was about to ensue, and had also spent years making elaborate defenses and procedures for carrying out their unique method of warfare. They had miles of supply lines crawling all over neighboring countries the US soldiers were unable to touch, and the North Vietnamese also had the distinct advantage of being able to blend into their surroundings with an ease impossible to the Caucasian Americans. American soldiers went into Vietnam and from the get go were essentially fighting a body count war. That was the mission they were basically assigned, and they accomplished it with an ease which is somewhat unbelievable given the circumstances. America lost 60,000 soldiers in Vietnam, but helped killed over a million North Vietnamese. The Americans lost only six percent of the soldiers the Vietnamese lost. To me that sounds like not just a victory, but a major one.
Some defeats are greater than victories as the Vietnam war illustrates but that still points out the irrefutable fact America withdrew meaning they lost. Also are you sure it was 1.5 million combatants not civilians and combatants, because 1.5 million combatants is a huge number of soldiers. Many deaths (probably more than half were caused by napalm, agent orange and air raids anyway).
Also something confuses me you say “…blend into their surroundings with an ease impossible to the Caucasian Americans”
Ive been to Hanoi and Ho Chi Min and their very typical S.E.A people they’re as white as sheets they stand out in jungle more than a western white will.
I m not saying that the US soldiers weren’t brave or dedicated or the defeat they achieved wasn’t a great defeat killing alot more Vietnamese than the other way but you’ve still got to concede that they withdrew from a enemy whose main form of weapon was a crossbow with a bomb on the front. At the end of the war the Vietcong just dug themselves into tunnels and then their attacks resulted in almost complete loses for American groups and almost no loses for the Vietnamese troops if you had stayed longer they would have leveled the numbers
I think this article is very well written, and I would agree with you. To the other people who posted on your article I would say that his point wasn’t to say that we won the war in terms of victory but in terms of military power and strength we were the victory (he even states this as his thesis in the very last sentence of the first paragraph). And throught the article he proved his point on this issue. I believe this was very well thought out and I applaud you for writing something that could definitely be controversial.
I would also like to point out how similar things are now in the Iraq war to what happened in vietnam. When you talked about the soldiers having their hands tied behind their backs and being asked to fight Iraq is the first thing that came into mind. I’ve had several friends who are US Marines, and many of them have fought over in Iraq and they all say the same thing; they could win this war quickly but there is too much red tape that they have to worry about and they can’t fight war the way it should be. I guess my question is when will our politicians learn that war is war and you can’t hold back your resources and expect them to work, if you start a conflict you need to finish it, and you should do everything in your power to win it.
Michael is right. The post reminded me of some things I have heard my military friends say about the Iraq war as well. A friend of mine who is a Marine told me there are all these crazy rules. Rules like:
1. You can’t fire until fired upon first
2. If there are a crowd of Iraqi’s and a shot is fired from the Iraqi’s towards you, or your fellow troops you must identify the Iraqi that fired at you and you can only fire back at him, no one else.
3. In #2 the Marine is supposed to go into the crowd of Iraqi’s, identify the shooter, arrest them, and bring them back into custody.
I wish I could remember everything else he said. There were some far worse ones. I couldn’t believe it though. And this was all during the inital attack’s on Iraq, not recent stuff. No wonder we lose so many troops.
That is all very sensible regular laws, wlse its murder. What I understand is that your saying that if there is a group of say 30 inocent Iraqis and a terrorist fires at youy from somewhere in them that soldiers should have th right to kill all those innocents to kill one terrorist. well thats murder, no its not murder its mass murder and a crime against humanity. And you cant fired until fired upon is regular practice, unless the suspects are heavily armed and threatening you you have no right to shoot them unless thay attack you. else its murder.
In response to that last post, I would suggest that it cannot always be murder to shoot someone who has not shot at you first. Did United States President Barack Obama order the “murder” of the Somalian pirates because they were shot by snipers who were neither being aimed at nor shot at?
The pirates were armed and threatining people.
From what I understand the same rule goes even if the group of Iraqi’s were all armed and yelling and threatening people. You were still to only identify and retailiate against the one that fired at you. If you shot the wrong one you would get in some kind of “trouble”. I think perhaps you are picturing one guy with a gun around a bunch of guys hanging out and kicking around a soccer ball. Yea, in that case I agree, it would be murder to mow them all down.
if someone aims a gun at you at you and threatens you then you are alowd to fire youre not going to get courtmartialed over that or in any trouble. In fact im pretty sure there are laws saying youre not allowed to have large congregations of people with weapons (including in the USA) as it would be seen as a security risk.
It is a sad indictment to have to record, but the above article demonstrates the inability of some, but not all Americans, to accept that they were ignominiously defeated on the field of battle by an ill-equipped enemy lacking almost all of the high tech weaponry possessed by the US, including the USs mighty bomber force. It is to be hoped that those in the US High Command don’t share the view that America ‘won’ the war, for otherwise no lessons will have been learned.
The scenes of Americans flocking onto helicopters while leaving the South Vietnamese to their fate was a shocking sight for the world to see, and was equalled only by US troops running away from German forces in the Battle of the Bulge - America’s biggest defeat on Europe’s battlefields, when over 10,000 were captured.
Americans must accept that, despite being the richest and most powerful nation on Earth, it does not necessarily equate with having the capacity to defeat its enemies. Vietnam proved that truth.
I have rarely read such claptrap as Daniel Lagan presents in his article. He states that the troops didn’t have the support of either the people or their politicians. So tell me, who sent them to war in the first place? Support was only lost when it became clear the US couldn’t defeat the North Vietnamese and the hundreds of body bags started arriving back home. A conributory factor may also have been the stories coming out about the massacres of civilians by US troops, such as that at My Lai for which Calley was prosecuted, although he was the fall guy for the higher ups.
Lagan also uses the ridiculous argument that the much higher body count of the ‘enemy’ was a sign that the US ‘won’ the war.
A further twist in his story is that the North Vietnamese had “decades of experience in the warfare that was about to ensue”. So, he is saying they were quite accustomed to being bombed by massed armadas of B52 bombers, sprayed with agent orange, plastered with napalm and strafed by fighter/bombers. But one needs to ask who was doing all this damage before the US arrived on the scene with its weapons of mass destruction.
As for the Army commanders not being up to the job is something beyond my knowledge, but it is a not infrequent criticism one reads about given all the conflicts of the 20th century in which the US has been involved.
When one reads that Eisenhower, a five-star general, had never heard a shot fired in anger, then it demonstrates a certain lack of knowledge in the art of War.
Politics and war are two sides of the same coin. “War is politics by other means.” Von Clausewitz wrote. No war is ever fought just to demonstrate military prowess. Wars are fought to acheive political goals. The Vietnamese acheived theirs (reunification of the country and the removal of foreign troops), the Americans acheived nothing.
PS. Using the bodycount argument is like saying that Stalin was more successful than the US in fighting against Hitler because he was more willing to sacrifice his troops.
In war like in almost every human endeavour it’s the result that counts. North Vietnam won. Period.
PPS I mean of course that Stalin killed more Germans than the Americans because he was less restrained in sacrificing his own soldiers. He placed secret police batallions behind the lines and had them shoot everyone who retreated and he made an executive order that all Russian troops who got captured by the Germans would be considered traitors. As a result they fought fiercely against the Germans in a way that the US Army with its human rights considerations could not hope to emulate.
Sir how about the Battle of Ap Bac when the North Vietnamese had downed five chinook choppers? Inspite they lack equipment they repulse the ARVN which has a back up of armor personnel carrier, superior numbers, and US choppers. That three US advisors were killed.