Illustration by ED OYAMA/Daily Bruin  Glenn
Sacks Sacks invites readers to e-mail him at [email protected]. Click
Here for more articles by Glenn Sacks
Conservative agitator David Horowitz’s controversial new
nationwide ad campaign, “An Open Letter to the
“˜Anti-War’ Demonstrators: Think Twice Before You Bring
The War Home,” denounces the anti-Vietnam War protest
movement as “treason” and tells us that it was he and
other protesters who were responsible for the U.S. defeat.
The ad, which has run in the student newspapers at UCLA,
Berkeley, Yale and a dozen other universities, says “blood
… is on the hands of the anti-war activists who … gave the
victory to the Communists,” and scolds and stigmatizes the
many college students who have participated in “peace”
protests held over the past few weeks.
The ad is part of an attempt to use the Vietnam experience as a
way to stop Americans from asking questions about U.S. military
intervention at a time when there are a lot of legitimate questions
to ask. It is an attempt to brand dissenters as enemy-sympathizing
“Fifth Columnists” (Horowitz’s term from his Web
site), though I have no doubt that even the most vocal protesters
abhor Sept. 11’s despicable slaughter of American
civilians.
Beyond this, Horowitz’s ad campaign is simply a bad
history lesson, because the Vietnam War was not lost at home due to
student demonstrators, but on the battlefields of Vietnam, due to
the bravery and almost fanatical dedication of America’s
enemies.
According to U.S. General Maxwell Taylor, “The ability of
the Viet Cong (communist guerrillas) to continuously rebuild their
units and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of the
guerrilla war … they have an amazing ability to maintain
morale.”
In Terry Wallace’s book “Bloods: An Oral History of
the Vietnam War by Black Veterans,” one former Marine said,
“The enemy would do anything to win. You had to respect that.
They believed in a cause. They had the support of the Vietnamese
people. That’s the key thing that we Americans don’t
understand yet.”
John Jacobs, a medic who served in Vietnam in 1967-1968,
believes the “war protesters caused our defeat” theory
insults American soldiers and diminishes the military difficulties
they faced. He said, “Whatever one thinks of their cause, the
Viet Cong showed tremendous dedication and courage. It was obvious
that most of the Vietnamese people saw us as the enemy.”
According to scholar John Mueller, the military losses accepted
by the Vietnamese communists, both the National Liberation Front
(NLF, generally known in the U.S. as “Viet Cong”) and
the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), were “virtually
unprecedented in history.” In fact, even the Japanese army of
World War II (including kamikaze pilots), which has always been
seen as the best example of military fanaticism, pales in
comparison. The NLF and NVA took causalities at twice the rate of
the Japanese army, for eight years running.
By contrast, America’s South Vietnamese allies, the Army
of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), though lavishly armed by the
U.S., were never a reliable fighting force. Frequently the butt of
American soldiers’ jokes, such as, “Want to buy an ARVN
rifle? It’s a good deal ““ it’s never been fired
and has only been dropped once.” After the U.S. pullout, the
ARVN were soon overwhelmed and defeated by the NVA, who then
captured billions of dollars in US military equipment.
The morale of the average American draftee collapsed as the war
went on. The first reported occurrence of mass mutiny took place in
Alpha company on Aug. 24, 1968, but mutinies soon became so common
that the Pentagon brass assigned them the gentler name of
“combat refusals.” At the same time, American soldiers
were “fragging” (killing by fragmentation weapon, like
a grenade) their superiors who put soldiers’ lives at risk by
seeking out the enemy. This became so common that many officers
refused to allow their troops to carry grenades. Desertion and
instances of AWOL (Absence Without Leave) skyrocketed during the
war’s later years, and the Pentagon estimates that 500,000
soldiers either were AWOL at some point or outright deserted during
the Vietnam War.
The idea that the Americans lost because they were not trying to
win is false. The U.S. dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all of
the combatants in WWII dropped on each other combined. The U.S.
““ with 10 times the population of communist North Vietnam and
infinitely more national wealth ““ used 60 percent of its
total infantry and Marines, 50 percent of its strategic air force,
and over 10 million tons of bombs.
Of course, the NLF and NVA never beat the U.S. Army in a major
battle but, wisely, this was never their strategy. Instead, they
sought to make the war so costly for us that we would be unwilling
to pay the price and would leave. Before the war Vietnamese
Communist leader Ho Chi Minh said, “In this war you will kill
10 of us for every one of you we kill, but in the end it is you who
will tire of it.” As it turned out, the ratio was closer to
20 to 1, but let’s give the devil his due. Like it or not,
the Vietnamese Communists won not because of anti-war protesters,
but because their soldiers were willing to do whatever they had to
do to win.