# Did anything good come out of the Vietnam War? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 16, 2012, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437 "2012-07-16T19:49:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/61 "2012-07-17T17:22:18Z")
Conservapedia is hardly a reliable source. If you’re genuinely interested I’d recommend reading either Joseph Buttinger’s Vietnam: The Embattled Dragon or Stanley Karnow’s more readable Vietnam: A History. Anyway, I don’t want to start a flame war but frankly it’s a bit ridiculous to complain about North Vietnam invading South Vietnam when it was America that invaded Vietnam. I know many are going to object to my phrasing it like that but if we’re going to argue that the Soviets sending in troops to Afghanistan to prop up their puppet government was an invasion and that Israel sending troops into Lebabon in 1982 with the cooperation of the Falangists was an invasion then I don’t see how the US sending in a much larger army to prop up a regime we installed can be called anything but an invasion. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/62 "2012-07-17T17:30:50Z")
There were a lot of tragic things during the war, such as millions of deaths, and a few benefits, like immigrants and pho shops. Was there a larger good? Perhaps our frustration in Vietnam led to a rethinking of our military adventurism. Perhaps the conflict there in the manner it was waged prevented the superpowers from facing off directly. If Iraq had taken place before Vietnam, or something like Iraq, with better terrain and an unpopular enemy, the US would be more willing to use military power earlier. For example, as horrible as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, suppose the US didn’t use nukes until the mid-50s in an exchange with the Soviets in Europe, where the combatants wiped out 100 cities? In short, maybe we learn from our experiences, and smaller, earlier conflicts might prevent larger and more deadly later conflicts. Such as the usual conclusions that everyone should have stood up to Hitler before he annexed Czechoslovakia. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/63 "2012-07-17T17:48:45Z")
Greenslime, you seem to have taken the position that the United States gets the credit for everything good that happened and North Vietnam gets the blame for everything bad that happened. It’s a simplistic and inaccurate view. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/64 "2012-07-17T18:26:54Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Greenslime, you seem to have taken the position that the United States gets the credit for everything good that happened and North Vietnam gets the blame for everything bad that happened. It’s a simplistic and inaccurate view. Extremely convenient, though. You have to give him that. ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/65 "2012-07-17T20:55:19Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#): > > Holy Christ, you quote conservafuckingpedia??? > > Read what this “cite” says about Obama: > Holy fuck, the dingleberries from Rush Limbaugh’s ass have more credibility than conservapedia. Quite possibly. But what I wanted people to do was to objectively assess the truth of what the article says. Certainly, there’s ample reason to doubt the revisionist contention that Ho Chi Minh was a popular revolutionary who was greeted in the streets of Saigon by happy liberated workers tossing flowers, and that he brought a new era of peace and prosperity to Indochina. ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/66 "2012-07-17T21:06:51Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Greenslime, you seem to have taken the position that the United States gets the credit for everything good that happened and North Vietnam gets the blame for everything bad that happened. It’s a simplistic and inaccurate view. That’s a nonsensical misstatement of my position. I simply stated that our presence, while it was there, prevented the conquest of Indochina by an aggressive regime (armed and funded by Russia and China), and the genocides that eventually occured as a result of that conquest. The US certainly mishandled the war but our intentions were good. Do I give the US credit for everything good that happened? No. I give the US credit for preventing, for the time being at least, something horrible from happening. Do I blame North Vietnam for everything bad that happened? Absolutely. They fought a war of aggression because half the country wasn’t good enough for them after the Geneva accords. Don’t forget, the war was fought _in South Vietnam_. They were _invaders_ and ultimately, conquerors. I also blame the North Vietnamese for the mass slaughters, deportations, imprisonments, and enslavement of over a million South Vietnamese after their victory in 1975. They also bear much of the blame for the Cambodia genocide since the Khmer Rouge were allies and Pol Pot a puppet. The North Vietnamese were the only functional military in the region, but they did nothing to stop the killing fields, probably because they had done the same thing to the South Vietnamese a few years ago, and they secretly approved. By the way, I know all this after talking to dozens of South Vietnamese refugees in San Jose in the 1980s and 1990s. For whatever reason, a lot of them wound up in that city–the downtown street signs there are in English and Vietnamese, for example. Every single person told me that the horror the North Vietnamese visited on their defeated foes was indescribable. They also said that the world media never reported the vast majority of it. So sure, my references are anecdotal, but that’s kind of the point–much of what the North Vietnamese did was hidden from the world for a long time, and much of it will never be told. ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/67 "2012-07-17T21:12:23Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > Anyway, I don’t want to start a flame war but frankly it’s a bit ridiculous to complain about North Vietnam invading South Vietnam when it was America that invaded Vietnam. Lunacy. North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam almost the day after the Geneva accords were signed. We didn’t have any troops at all in the country for several years after that. You can say that our presence there was an “invasion,” but like it or not, it was with the assent of the South Vietnamese government. You could hardly say that the South Vietnamese invited the Viet Cong and the NVA in. Also, when we were in military control of South Vietnam, we didn’t massacre millions of people (though on Planet Der Trihs, we did). A lot of the nonsensical un-history floating around out there exists because we have some kind of national psychic trauma over the Vietnam war. That all too often veers into fantasy-land thinking; for instance, the image of the North Vietnamese as benevolent liberators rather than the bloodthirsty conquerors that they were. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/68 "2012-07-17T21:43:54Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > Just as Germany, France, Poland, Denmark, Norway, etc. were united in 1939-1940. An arguably better comparison is Germany uniting the various other German speaking lands such as Austria, the Saar, Danzig, and the Sudetenland whose locals were just as supportive if not more than the two Vietnams uniting. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/69 "2012-07-17T21:44:56Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > I know many are going to object to my phrasing it like that but if we’re going to argue that the Soviets sending in troops to Afghanistan to prop up their puppet government was an invasion and that Israel sending troops into Lebabon in 1982 with the cooperation of the Falangists was an invasion then I don’t see how the US sending in a much larger army to prop up a regime we installed can be called anything but an invasion. Just a question but what about Korea then? Would intevening there during the Korean War have been considered propping up a puppet? ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/70 "2012-07-17T22:11:41Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > The majority of deaths were caused by the AMERICANS??? Do you imagine that the majority of dead Vietnamese killed themselves? Who do you think killed them aside from America? It’s not a fact in dispute. You just don’t want any VC, NVA, or Vietnamese civilians in the North to count, and want to blame every civilian death in the South on the North Vietnamese. > [@](#): > > Wow, how revisionist and, yes…stupid. It’s not revisionist in the slightest, and FYI the word revisionist only has a negative connotation due to holocaust deniers hijacking the word. There’s nothing inherently negative about historical revisionism. > [@](#): > > You have a faint glimmer of intelligence but your viewpoint is grossly distorted. I am, therefore, calling what you are saying stupid rather than saying that you are–the causal factor for your delusion is probably external. You’re not even to blame for that as you doubtless had no choice in your thinking. For the second time, if you are unable to keep from calling me stupid, take it to the pit. Since you again dodged answering it, I’ll repeat what I said earlier: I noticed you only replied to one of my three responses to you. I guess it would be pointless to ask for your comments on your absurd godwinization in the uniting of independent nations under the boot of Nazi Germany as you are still comparing the Vietnam War to the German invasion of Poland, but you have no response at all to the US support for the Khmer Rouge after Vietnam threw them out of power? Or any comment on the fact that the US did jack and shit to stop the Cambodian Genocide? ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/71 "2012-07-17T22:12:42Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > Do you imagine that the majority of dead Vietnamese killed themselves? We told them to stop dumping Agent Orange on themselves, but they wouldn’t listen. They thought it was orange-scented body wash. So many cancers could’ve been prevented. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/72 "2012-07-17T22:22:48Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > They also bear much of the blame for the Cambodia genocide since the Khmer Rouge were allies and Pol Pot a puppet. The North Vietnamese were the only functional military in the region, but they did nothing to stop the killing fields, probably because they had done the same thing to the South Vietnamese a few years ago, and they secretly approved. Wow. This is quite simply 100% untrue. Pol Pot was not a puppet of North Vietnam and Vietnam in fact kicked him out of power in the [Cambodian-Vietnamese War](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_War). You are sorely misinformed if you think they secretly approved of the Cambodian Genocide; hard as it may be for you to wrap around your ideological blinders _they actually ended the Cambodian Genocide_. > [@greenslime1951](#): > > Lunacy. North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam almost the day after the Geneva accords were signed. We didn’t have any troops at all in the country for several years after that. This is as well entirely untrue. You can try to cast the war as an invasion of the South by the North all you want, but it is simply not true. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/73 "2012-07-17T22:47:28Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > Lunacy. North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam almost the day after the Geneva accords were signed. We didn’t have any troops at all in the country for several years after that. You really ought to get some better sources than Conservapedia. The Accords were signed in 1954. North Vietnam didn’t send troops into South Vietnam until 1964. That’s hardly “almost the day after”. > [@](#): > > You can say that our presence there was an “invasion,” but like it or not, it was with the assent of the South Vietnamese government. You could hardly say that the South Vietnamese invited the Viet Cong and the NVA in. First of all, by the standard your setting the Soviets didn’t “invade” Afghanistan since they were there with the consent of the Afghan government. Moreover, what do you mean “invite the Viet Cong in”. The National Liberation Front(NLF) were South Vietnamese rebels fighting against the Diem Government. The South Vietnamese government was massively unpopular because it was made up almost entirely of wealthy, Catholic landowners in a country where the population were mostly Buddhist peasants. The NLF didn’t “come in”. They were already there. Also, they didn’t call themselves the Viet Cong. That term, which means Vietnamese Communists, was hurled at them by the Diems to manipulate the Americansand deny the nationalist credentials of the NLF. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/74 "2012-07-17T22:56:03Z")
Dissonance & Marley, In all fairness many if not most of the dead Vietnamese were killed by other Vietnamese not the Americans. For example the South Vietnames Army, the ARVN(Army of the Republic of Vietnam) suffered far, far more casualties than the Americans did even during the height of the American entanglement and may very well have killed more members of the NLF than the Americans did. It’s tough to tell because most of the “estimates” of the death toll in Vietnam other than the American and maybe the ARVN casualties would be more accurately described as educated guesses and an educated guess is still a guess. ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/75 "2012-07-17T23:34:41Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > Do you imagine that the majority of dead Vietnamese killed themselves? Who do you think killed them aside from America? It’s not a fact in dispute. Other Vietnamese. Duh. (Apparently you’re saying that if Americans didn’t kill them, then they must have been suicides.) You’re right that it’s not a “fact in dispute”; it’s a non-fact that is not in dispute. You can’t find a single credible source that validates your claim. Your assertion has no basis in fact whatsoever. None. Zippo. Zilch. You have poor reading comprehension skills, it would seem. At no time have I called you stupid. I have called the things you’ve said–such as the above–unbelievably, ridiculously stupid, because they were. Smart people do indeed say stupid things, but the more such things you say, the more applicable Occam’s Razor becomes. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/76 "2012-07-17T23:37:06Z")
> [@greenslime1951](#): > > You have poor reading comprehension skills, it would seem. At no time have I called you stupid. I have called the things you’ve said–such as the above–unbelievably, ridiculously stupid, because they were. Smart people do indeed say stupid things, but the more such things you say, the more applicable Occam’s Razor becomes. I cut you some slack on your previous comments, but you’re not getting the message. This is a formal warning: do not insult other users outside of the Pit. ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/77 "2012-07-17T23:44:36Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > You really ought to get some better sources than Conservapedia. > > The Accords were signed in 1954. North Vietnam didn’t send troops into South Vietnam until 1964. Don’t fasten on the fact that I quoted Conservapedia like a dog chewing on a bone. I offered the article as food for thought. I was not vouching for the accuracy of either that article or Conservapedia in general. That said, there is much in the article that is relevant to the discussion at hand. If you want to read it with an open mind, it mentions quite a few interesting aspects of that period in history. If you want to read it with a _closed_ mind, however, it will be a waste of your time. By 1964, there was a massive North Vietnamese army already in South Vietnam–both the North Vietnamese regulars and the Viet Cong. Most of them infiltrated, not directly across the DMZ, but down the Ho Chi Minh trail. They had been infiltrating for a decade. Ho Chi Minh’s stated aim, after he didn’t acquire dominion over all of Vietnam, was to destabilize the South and eventually add it to his empire. Laos and Cambodia were next on the menu, but a few things went wrong with that. He wished to become a regional warlord and proxy to the Communist superpowers. He got most of what he wanted, precisely _because_ he started the whole process in 1954. ---
**Author:** ![greenslime1951](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9bcb4/32.png) [@greenslime1951](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/greenslime1951)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/78 "2012-07-17T23:49:12Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > I cut you some slack on your previous comments, but you’re not getting the message. This is a formal warning: do not insult other users outside of the Pit. Is it an insult to say that someone has said something stupid? Twice, I tried to differentiate that from calling the _person_ stupid, but the poster in question didn’t seem to understand the distinction. I would have expected a moderator to, though. Nonetheless, if one of the rather bizarre rules of this forum is that attacking a statement is equivalent to attacking the person who said it, I shall abide by that rule. I should note, however, that fifty or so posters who have attacked things _I_ have said should likewise be warned/sanctioned. But another of the bizarre rules here is that the rules don’t apply equally to everyone. ---
**Author:** ![dngnb8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/977dab/32.png) [@dngnb8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dngnb8)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/79 "2012-07-17T23:49:58Z")
> [@Mr.Kobayashi](#): > > still won and today Vietnam seems a decent enough place. Compared to what? ---
**Author:** ![dngnb8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/977dab/32.png) [@dngnb8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dngnb8)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2012, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437/80 "2012-07-17T23:52:12Z")
> [@Full\_Tilt\_Boogie](#): > > Yes - the invention of Super Glue (designed to glue wounds together in battlefield triage before the casuality could be casevac’d back for proper medical treatment). > > And, the Vietnam War was the first time the US military had used any organised system of battlefield triage (an idea/[practise they pinched from the French, who had used it successfully during their wars of withdrawal from what was Indochina). I thought the Triage was the Korean War? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-anything-good-come-out-of-the-vietnam-war/628437.md?page=5)