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Question about Vietnam war

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We refused to (for political reasons only) cripple North Vietnam by targeting the proper facilities and the harbor of Hanoi.

Doing so; allowed the supply chain to remain intact.
Bombing Rt 1 did not slow things down much.

One needs to cut off the head of the snake not the tail.
 
zod96 said:
My 16 year nephew has to do a report on the Vietnam War. He asked me a question about it and I'm really unsure how to answer really. He asked me basically...

"How did the most powerful country in the world, with the best equipped, best lead, best trained military this world has ever seen lose the war?"

I was totally unsure how to answer really. Its kind of a daunting question...
Click to expand...

There was no way to win that war. What were the win conditions? What were we supposed to do? There is nothing we could have done to actually win the war without dragging in the other world powers into a major conflict. ie we couldnt nuke Hanoi. Hell, even if we could it wouldnt have mattered. The other side had the Viet Cong, which was a more-or-less native merc force for the commies, bred over a generation of fighting. We had nothing that could compete with that. And our supply lines were 10x as long. And our interests in the region were covert (drugs), which made it difficult to manufacture a convincing cover story, so no one believed in it.
 
sm625 said:
There was no way to win that war. What were the win conditions? What were we supposed to do? There is nothing we could have done to actually win the war without dragging in the other world powers into a major conflict. ie we couldnt nuke Hanoi. Hell, even if we could it wouldnt have mattered. The other side had the Viet Cong, which was a more-or-less native merc force for the commies, bred over a generation of fighting. We had nothing that could compete with that. And our supply lines were 10x as long. And our interests in the region were covert (drugs), which made it difficult to manufacture a convincing cover story, so no one believed in it.
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The VC were being supplied by Hanoi/NVA

If those supply lines were closed down; the South could have handled the VC.

We refused to close the supply line; so the VC were always able to get what was needed. Therefore the (propped up) South had no heart to win a protracted battle/civil war.
 
MagnusTheBrewer said:
Don't be gettin' all cynical and pragmatic with us, that's my job.
The Vietnam war isn't history with me, it's personal. It was a defining period of my life as WWII was for my father. I'm mildly annoyed that someone could be old enough to have a 16 year old son and not know much about the Vietnam war. I say mildly because, there are some of my own generation who don't. Sigh...

You're most likely right but, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to spark an interest in our kids to examine the events that shaped our current society.
Click to expand...

It's personal to me, too, but in a different way. I wasn't old enough to understand the war as it was happening, but, somehow it feels like I was part of it and I don't know why - felt that way since I can remember. My parents told me when I was around one to two years old I was glued to the CBS Evening News every night until the war report was over, then I'd go back to whatever I was doing; I was born in '69, so this was '70 to '73/'74 I think.

The OP is the uncle of a 16-year-old, so not the parent, which like you I agree would be odd.

I meant no disrespect at all toward you and apologize for coming across as though I did.

Thanks for your service. 🙂
 
What made it all so bullshit and full of irony was that Ho Chi Minh had telegrammed Truman to ask for independence after the war in a Socially Democratic style of government just like the Europeans were. But Truman never gave a fuck and would never have put the liberty and welfare of millions of oppressed Vietnamese over the interests of the French Colonialist overlords.

And this was after all the shit Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese did for us fighting against the Japanese in World War 2 in cooperation with us. And you are wondering why they were willing to go to war with any Westerners?
 
The war had fully entered into Laos and Cambodia but we refused to officially bring the war over there so we lost big fucking time over that shit.
 
norseamd said:
What made it all so bullshit and full of irony was that Ho Chi Minh had telegrammed Truman to ask for independence after the war in a Socially Democratic style of government just like the Europeans were. But Truman never gave a fuck and would never have put the liberty and welfare of millions of oppressed Vietnamese over the interests of the French Colonialist overlords.

And this was after all the shit Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese did for us fighting against the Japanese in World War 2 in cooperation with us. And you are wondering why they were willing to go to war with any Westerners?
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With respect to the telegram of 28 Feb 1946
All that was asked was for the US to intervene in negotiations between the Vietnamese government and France.

Nothing in the telegram indicates the type of government. Ming was a communist and Truman was very leery of communism; given what both China and the Soviets were doing at the time.

Then there was the issue of support of France itself and loss of colonies by the Western Powers.
 
We entered into the Vietnam war to protect U.S Rubber Interests at the time. They were concerned that communists would take control over the Rubber Triangle.

So we sent people to die in order to protect U.S Rubber interests.
 
cabri said:
The VC were being supplied by Hanoi/NVA

If those supply lines were closed down; the South could have handled the VC.

We refused to close the supply line; so the VC were always able to get what was needed. Therefore the (propped up) South had no heart to win a protracted battle/civil war.
Click to expand...

Please. The reason that Kennedy sent "advisers" was that the corrupt Diem regime was hanging by a thread. The northerners, the Viet Minh, won the loyalty of the people & governed effectively. The Saigon govt never did. Vast areas of the country never were under their control but rather under the control of the Viet Cong, the southern members of the whole leftist nationalist movement. As the French withdrew, the US stepped in & the S Vietnamese we put in charge couldn't handle it.

For the Vietnamese nationalists, the new boss was the same as the old boss who never was very popular. When we bombed the North, we made a huge mistake, underestimated their resolve & their capabilities entirely.

The war was tearing this country apart at the same time. Nixon & Kissinger knew that the American public would not support the kind of genocidal warfare it would take to win in any reasonable timeframe, so they declared peace & left. They also knew they were betraying the Thieu regime entirely. The Communists allowed us to go w/o taking lead in our ass, built up their forces & crushed ARVN resistance in short order when they went on the offensive 2 years later.

All we accomplished was making the Vietnamese pay a higher price for self determination in blood & treasure with a fair amount of our own as well.

It was the first great folly of trotskyite "American Exceptionalism" that later manifested itself in the rise of the Neocons.
 
Jhhnn said:
It was the first great folly of trotskyite "American Exceptionalism" that later manifested itself in the rise of the Neocons.
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I was completely with you until you wrote the above unfathomable sentence.

What on earth is trotskyite (sic) "American Exceptionalism"?

Who were the Trots, in the US at that time?
 
zod96 said:
My 16 year nephew has to do a report on the Vietnam War. He asked me a question about it and I'm really unsure how to answer really. He asked me basically...

"How did the most powerful country in the world, with the best equipped, best lead, best trained military this world has ever seen lose the war?"

I was totally unsure how to answer really. Its kind of a daunting question...
Click to expand...

I don't know, read a fucking book? D: :thumbsup:

You want the short answer? We didn't lose it. The US was never defeated militarily - we beat the north into submission and they begged us for a peace treaty and we obliged them. After the peace treaty was signed, the United States congress passed a LAW which said that we could not interfere with Vietnam without congressional approval. All US military forces LEFT THE COUNTRY. This is after we mopped the floor with the north.

After this law was passed and the US military was GONE, the north violated the treaty and invaded the south UNOPPOSED. The President of the US could not, by law, interfere with the invasion as it would take an act of congress to do so. Congress did not act, and the south was taken over.

Now, can we end this fucking thread?

If I listen to one more ignorant ass idiot speak incorrectly about the Vietnam war I will puke.
 
Art&Science said:
I don't know, read a fucking book? D: :thumbsup:

You want the short answer? We didn't lose it. The US was never defeated militarily - we beat the north into submission and they begged us for a peace treaty and we obliged them. After the peace treaty was signed, the United States congress passed a LAW which said that we could not interfere with Vietnam without congressional approval. All US military forces LEFT THE COUNTRY. This is after we mopped the floor with the north.

After this law was passed and the US military was GONE, the north violated the treaty and invaded the south UNOPPOSED. The President of the US could not, by law, interfere with the invasion as it would take an act of congress to do so. Congress did not act, and the south was taken over.

Now, can we end this fucking thread?

If I listen to one more ignorant ass idiot speak incorrectly about the Vietnam war I will puke.
Click to expand...
Getting to make up your own history to complement your own reality must be awesome.
 
Art&Science said:
I don't know, read a fucking book? D: :thumbsup:

You want the short answer? We didn't lose it. The US was never defeated militarily - we beat the north into submission and they begged us for a peace treaty and we obliged them. After the peace treaty was signed, the United States congress passed a LAW which said that we could not interfere with Vietnam without congressional approval. All US military forces LEFT THE COUNTRY. This is after we mopped the floor with the north.

After this law was passed and the US military was GONE, the north violated the treaty and invaded the south UNOPPOSED. The President of the US could not, by law, interfere with the invasion as it would take an act of congress to do so. Congress did not act, and the south was taken over.

Now, can we end this fucking thread?

If I listen to one more ignorant ass idiot speak incorrectly about the Vietnam war I will puke.
Click to expand...

We lost.
 
Art&Science said:
I don't know, read a fucking book? D: :thumbsup:

You want the short answer? We didn't lose it. The US was never defeated militarily - we beat the north into submission and they begged us for a peace treaty and we obliged them. After the peace treaty was signed, the United States congress passed a LAW which said that we could not interfere with Vietnam without congressional approval. All US military forces LEFT THE COUNTRY. This is after we mopped the floor with the north.

After this law was passed and the US military was GONE, the north violated the treaty and invaded the south UNOPPOSED. The President of the US could not, by law, interfere with the invasion as it would take an act of congress to do so. Congress did not act, and the south was taken over.

Now, can we end this fucking thread?

If I listen to one more ignorant ass idiot speak incorrectly about the Vietnam war I will puke.
Click to expand...

That's some pretty impressive self delusion right there.

We engaged in a conflict where we accomplished none of our political objectives and our opponents accomplished all of theirs. That's called losing.
 
zod96 said:
My 16 year nephew has to do a report on the Vietnam War. He asked me a question about it and I'm really unsure how to answer really. He asked me basically...

"How did the most powerful country in the world, with the best equipped, best lead, best trained military this world has ever seen lose the war?"

I was totally unsure how to answer really. Its kind of a daunting question...
Click to expand...

By not indiscriminately killing everything in sight, which is what we should always do.

Anyways, we didn't lose the war. We got sick of wasting our time and money. I suppose one could argue that is losing, though.
 
Vic said:
The US didn't actually lose the Vietnam War. That's kind of a misnomer. What happened was that the cost of winning exceeded any possible gain we could hope to achieve by winning, and so eventually we cut our losses and pulled out.
Click to expand...

"I went to play ball with you guys but when I decided I couldn't win anymore I took my ball and went home. But I didn't lose, you hear that? I didn't freaking lose."
 
zod96 said:
One thing I do not understand is, why didn't we ever go on the offensive? It seems all we did was play a defensive war. Couldn't the military launch a massive offensive and take Hanoi?
Click to expand...
Both the Soviet Union and Red China were courting and supplying North Vietnam as a client state. Had the US invaded, we would definitely have found ourselves fighting China again and possibly also at war with the Soviet Union. Much as I hate fighting a war half-assed, neither of those things should be taken lightly.

As far as the war itself, it's largely a myth that inside South Vietnam we fought under restrictive ROE. We relocated a significant portion of the population to create free-fire zones, developed remote sensors and denuded great stretches of jungle and forest for better visibility, brought to bear massive fire power. Our biggest self-restraint outside of not invading was honoring other nations' boundaries which provided the NVA safe areas to rest and refit, and that largely went away in 1968. We also allowed the South Vietnamese to be as corrupt as they wished as long as they were strongly pro-American, which allowed the Viet Cong to hide within the civilian population. We had problems within our force as well - racial strife, a policy of rotation by individual (kills unit cohesion) rather than by unit, 12 or 13 month deployments (by the time you know what you are doing you are a short-timer more concerned with surviving than with executing a mission), six month commands for officers (gives them zero time to learn their men or their trade or the terrain before pushing to accomplish something career-building and thus needlessly killing a lot of Americans and South Vietnamese - and the generals thought every officer needed to get his chance at command), and overall leadership failed to sell the nation on the need for the war. Thus we had a reluctant force with poor leadership and little motivation fighting the finest light infantry in the world (after '67 the Viet Cong was largely spent, and after Tet '68 they were completely finished and the NVA regulars fielded the only large units opposing us.) Only the Marines really had a model suitable for winning a guerrilla war and McNamara stuck them on his "wall" as targets rather than allowing them to fully implement it.

The main reason we lost is that we lost our will. Tet '68 was a crushing defeat for the NVA even though they achieved strategic surprise, but it was reported as a crushing defeat for America. War is the continuation of policy via violence. Ho Chi Min said "You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first." He was absolutely correct. His force and his nation were of one mind, fighting for a cause in which they absolutely believed. Our force was powerful but our nation was not of one mind; fighting communism in a tiny country very few Americans could describe or place on a map simply wasn't motivation enough to support a war. In the end we were out-maneuvered, out-fought strategically and operationally if seldom tactically, out-generalled, and out-gutted.
 
John Walker began selling code information to the Soviet Russians in 1968. Whenever they picked up orders for American missions in Viet Nam they would tell their friends the north Vietnamese who would send troops to lie in wait for the Americans.
 
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