A million years ago (it’s over thirty now), I spent my junior year in Jerusalem. I found a nice little bar–it had a fine array of alchohol and beer, and served cheeseburgers, which were near impossible to find in Jerusalem back then. It was also very near an office building that housed oodles of foreign correspondents from the US and Europe. And these clowns, I mean journalists, were covering the ENTIRE Middle East. Few of them knew Hebrew. Almost NONE of them knew Arabic.

Few ever left the nice comforts of Israel (Tel Aviv was preferable, but Jerusalem was acceptable) to actually visit anywhere else in the Middle East. And back then, if they had to go anywhere, they had to first fly to Cyprus or Egypt. And yet, as probelmatic as it was to travel to ANY other Middle Eastern country, they preferred to base themselves in Israel.

For most of their coverage of Israel, they relied on local stringers. Mostly Arabs were hired. This was before the PLO realized that actively recruiting people for these jobs were to its advantage. But back then, Israelis did NOT want to work for these “journalists.” They were condescending, self-important, ill-informed, and the pay stunk. If an Israeli wanted to get experience as a journalist, they were going to get better experience working for an Israeli publication. It wasn’t long afterwards that the PLO realized that they needed to get their people hired as stringers for the journalists. So now, most stringers for foreign publications probably work for the PA or Hamas.

I have been telling this story for, well, almost thirty years when I get the chance.

You might also want to look at Vietnam the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict.

I agree that there were many, many mistakes made and the worst was the micro-management from Washington. Yet, I don’t agree that we shouldn’t have been there. The USSR and China’s policies were coordinated. Their goal was extending Communism everywhere they could by political processes or force. Do you remember the John Foster Dulles strategy of containment? To contain them within those countries that were already behind the Iron Curtain. That was why we went into Korea. (Although Dulles wasn’t SOS at the time. Part of the reason he declared it as our strategy was because we had succeeded in holding the Communists out of South Korea.) We succeeded in Korea because we were able to thwart them militarily in terrain that was more suitable for the use of air power and artillery than the jungles of Vietnam. South Korea in the beginning was not a model of democracy and good governance. But we stuck with them and slowly they turned things around. Too few people today remember that history and recognize South Korea as one of the major successes of our Cold War foreign policy.

The first big error was Johnson’s opinion that he could apply just enough pressure to Uncle Ho to get him to accept a division of Vietnam, ala Korea. What he missed was that Uncle Ho was not going to be impressed by anything short of B-52s attacking Hanoi and other important targets relentlessly. By the time Nixon was elected on a platform of getting us out of Vietnam things were going quite well for us as noted in Sorley’s book. But few knew those facts. Nixon used the B-52s ( for only a few weeks) to force Ho to the negotiating table. Had he continued to use them for a few months, I’m convinced that the North would have been willing to negotiate a division of Vietnam. But I can’t prove that, so it’s conjecture.

My opinion is that going into Vietnam was necessary if we took our policy of containment seriously. But the idea of fighting a kinder, gentler war (Like we are also trying to do now) was just stupid. Abandoning the South Vietnamese after the war was won, was immoral.

Fortunately for us, both the USSR and China had such awful economic problems that they eventually collapsed. As a result we now have Communist China attempting to become the first Communist/capitalist economic miracle and Russia an oligarchy that struggles (in spite of their energy wealth) to stay afloat.

There are over 2.5 million of us.

Anyone who was there knows it was a clusterf**k from a to z. Micromanagement of strategy and even tactics by political sharpies in Washington made it surreal and untenable. US forces were constantly sent on nonsensical missions with no clear objective (take this hill, then abandon it to take a different hill, then abandon it too, to be then ordered to retake the first hill, etc).

South Vietnam was politically unstable, whether led by Diem or Thieu. The events in 1963 may have altered the course of things, but it’s very difficult to say things would’ve turned out any better if Diem hadn’t been deposed. The ARVNs were pathetic.

Bottom line: we shouldn’t have been there, certainly not under the terms that were imposed. A complete waste of American blood and treasure. As painful as it is to face it, there it is.

Yes, there was incompetence at the top, bet on it, like every other war. The problem was that these incompetents believed their own golden boy BS ,therefore not open for argument or suggestion.
H.R.McMaster’s “Dereliction of Duty” puts a bright Xenon spotlight on that quite nicely.

By the way, every timeI am asked how it felt to be in a losing war, I always reply that we were winning when I left.

WETSU

My family, all naturalized citizens, from post-WWII Europe, were all in anti-war demos, all Better-Red-Than-Dead. I was the only contrarian in the group, a pattern that persists to this day. They fled the Commies and then wanted to cave to them. “Give Peace a Chance”. Ugh. Faah. Puke.