I think the simple factual answer to the OP is that the US military doesn’t classify conflicts one way or another.
The broader issues, I think, are better dealt with in GD than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I agree with you here. It’s clear now that our best course of action would have been to allow the Geneva Accord elections and accept a Communist-dominated Vietnam. If we hadn’t been so adamantly anti-Communist, we could have played on the nationalist angle and shown Hanoi that China was a bigger threat to Vietnam than the United States was.
Not Vietnam itself. I was projecting the widening of the war. The North being a base for attacks on the South was the basis for the argument that we should have sent troops into the North. But if we had I’m convinced that the Chinese would have intervened (the alternative is the unlikely scenario of China accepting a large American military presense directly on its border). So we would have then been fighting in the North against Chinese troops based in China (along with the Vietnamese). Some would have then argued that the same logic would compel us to send troops into Guangxi and Yunnan to attack the Chinese bases that were supporting those troops. And that would have opened the risk of nuclear war.
My cousin’s new hubbie is in the Royal Army. He says that the British salute is supposed to demonstrate to the officer, in quasi-ceremonial fashion, that the soldier is not armed. Of course, the American salute is rooted in the same ideal, but I guess the Brits are more thorough about it.
FTR, he claims that the British have never lost a war. He explains away the Revolutionary War as a civil war.
I’m not a fan of either war, but they’re not as similar as they look, IMO. The war against Iraq resulted in a decisive American victory. It’s the aftermath that we’re having problems with. That’s a big difference. I call what we’re in now a “war” for convenience’s sake (and because the only suggested alternatives do not adequately capture the horrors of what’s going on over there, and the negative effects on our country), but it seems more like an exponentially drawn-out race riot than a war in the traditional sense of one army versus another. Can we even enumerate with whom we are at “war”? It’s all academic, I suppose, but my point is that, IMO, it’s a mistake to equate the current situation with the Vietnam disaster.
I agree, I only meant to illustrate that they were similar in the lack of planning for aftermath and the use of decisive force to meet both ends of the operation, before and after. And how it’s become a military, media and political quagmire, let’s not forget that similarity.
What I can add to this is that it is generally accepted as fact here that the war did indeed prevent Thailand from turning communist. Whether that’s true or not may be debatable, but it’s taken as gospel truth here and is one reason for the US being popular in this country.
There used to be a sizable communist presence in Thailand’s Northeast, the part nearest Laos and Cambodia. It has always been THE poorest part of the country, even today. There’s also a small Vietnamese community spread out in a few locations; Ho Chi Minh even lived in the area for a while, I think in the 1930s. His biography details his being on assignment from the Vietnamese Communist Party. (The house where he lived is a historic site now, and a couple of trees he palnted himself have grown very large.)
The reasoning here is that the US keeping the communists busy in Indochina allowed Thailand time to improve the infrastructure in the Northeast – roads, communications, electricity etc. Otherwise, so it goes, the communists, who were genuinely popular with a large chunk of the population, if not the majority, could very well have taken over. And Thailand was very, very nervous when it saw all of Indochina fall in rapid succession. Remember, that was right on their doorstep! They saw themselves as THE next domino.
Even into the 1980s, I remember there were areas of the Northeast that you simply could not venture safely into for fear of communist activity. They were also active in the deep South, where a favorite activity of the Thai army was roasting them alive in oil drums. Finally, they wore down, and I remember a general amnesty being called in 1988 or 1989, and the communists all laid down their arms. Today, you can go anywhere in the Northeast. Unfortunately, the deep South, which is majority Muslim and another traditionally neglected area, is again too dangerous these days, but that’s because of Muslim insurrection. (The three or four southernmost provinces near Malaysia is a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, and an insurrection with daily bombings and beheadings has been going there for 3-1/2 years now, fuelled in part by Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian al-Qaeda branch.)
I cannot say that I necessarily buy into the notion that Thailand was saved by the Vietnam War, but I cannot refute it with any degree of certainty either.
Multiple sites online, in addition to books Google Books spidered, mention a truce running from January 27 to February 3, 1968, which was broken on January 31. This bibliography provides a good amount of information, including direct links to primary sources (military communications from forces in Vietnam at the time).
Moving to the heart of the matter, it’s important to realize that an American victory condition in Vietnam would have involved us still being there defending Saigon and the South Vietnamese government just like we’re still defending Seoul. The difference is that South Korea has ocean on three sides, whereas South Vietnam is right up against a lot of land we don’t own which is controlled by a lot of people we aren’t always friendly with. Even if you posit a different outcome for all of the countries bordering South Vietnam, would they still be eager to prevent all VC activity directed at American boys doing what Asian boys should be doing for themselves? (President Lyndon Johnson, just so it’s clear.)
Now that I think about it, and I can’t believe I forgot it yesterday, but when I first moved to Thailand in the 1980s and set up house in the North, the North too had just emerged from a significant communist presence a la the movie *Volunteers * with Tom Hanks and John Candy. Thailand really felt itself backed into a corner in the 1970s. I feel, though, the younger generation is not as aware of what was going on back then as their older counterparts, but odd as it may sound to some people, I still often find myself being thanked by the older generation just for being an American.
Was it Clauswitz who wrote many many years before Vietnam that the main purpose of your own armed forces are not to defeat the enemy forces in the field but to cause the enemy to lose the will to fight?
As this is exactly what happened to the U.S. in Vietnam then no matter how you look at it they were defeated,never mind all the euthanisms,withdrawal etc.
Here’s another theory:
It was, uh, destroyed on 9/11. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
This is an excellent point, one often overlooked. The National Liberation Front didn’t start out to be Communist, as Buddhist monks have very little interest in dialectical materialism. It started as a rebellion against an utterly corrupt and oppressive government, a government that deserved to be overthrown. And the VC were inheritors of a nationalist guerrilla movement that had been extant for generations. VC moved about in tunnels some of their grandfathers had dug.
The NVA used the VC, but Communist ideologues have neither time, patience, or sympathy for nationist movements. The most glaring fact about Viet Nam was that the “good guys” had lost before the party even started. S. Viet Nam had a lot going for it in terms of infrastructure, educated populace, the essentials. Had we supported the NLF when it was still worthy of our support, we might have attained a truly worthwhile result.
And so it goes.
If this was a victory, I’d hate to see defeat.
You obviously weren’t there during Spirit Week.
Why were the choppers being pushed/flown into the sea?
There are many ways to look at the Vietnam conflict. Obviously it was a ‘defeat’ in the sense that the stated goal was to keep South Vietnam from becoming Communist, and that failed.
However, part of the strategic reason for that war was to show the Chinese and the Soviets that the U.S. was willing to fight for its interests, and in that sense it had some limited success. Had the U.S. stayed home and just let Vietnam fall, it’s hard to say what would have happened, but it’s possible that it could have kicked off a larger round of Soviet or Chinese adventurism. Some people make that claim, but it’s unprovable so we’ll never agree to it here.
My personal opinion is that the U.S. screwed up in handling Vietnam in the first place - there were signs that Vietnam could have been pulled into the U.S. sphere peacefully in the 50’s, but the U.S. let its support for French Colonialism cloud its judgement. However, the ending of the war was disgraceful - not so much the military withdrawal, but the pulling of promised funding and support for South Vietnam in the post-Watergate Congress.
If Eisenhower had just let the Vietnamese have the promised national elections in 1956, Ho Chi Minh would have won and Vietnam would have gone Communist – but independent, non-aligned Communist, like Yugoslavia and Albania. That would have been preferable to what actually happened.
To make room for the next wave to land.
Yes it did. The Viet Minh was set up as a result of the 8th Plenum of the Indonesian Communist Party in 1941. It was set up as a common front movement with the goal of national liberation, but it was set up by communists, and all of it’s early leaders were communist. The Plenum’s decision was that, for the time being, national liberation took priority over the class struggle.
Is that the sound of a Bell Huey going over my head? 
Ah, I see tagos was in fact not buzzing me.