Why did America lose the Vietnam War? [Archive]

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TheCuriousJournalist

9th November 2011, 18:54

Explain why.
Explain why in a Marxist perspective if you can.
And also, was America's loss a victory for socialism?

#FF0000

9th November 2011, 19:02

Explain why.
Explain why in a Marxist perspective if you can.

I don't really know how you could. They lost because it was an army trained to fight other, regular military. Instead they had to fight an irregular, guerilla force.

I also can't think of an instance where an insurgency was actually defeated without, like, genocide taking place.

And also, was America's loss a victory for socialism?

I don't think so. I don't see how it's a victory one way or the other.

khad

9th November 2011, 19:09

#FF0000

9th November 2011, 19:25

The American economy was in a deep recession and political will was no longer behind the war. Troop levels had to come down, and once once American combat operations were ended, the NVA rolled in with superior armor, airpower, and artillery, and pounded the ARVN into dust.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ban_Me_Thuot

South Vietnam: About 3/4 of all soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing.
Vast quantities of military hardware were lost

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn[/URL][URL="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Battle_of_Ban_Me_Thuot#cite_note-2"] (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Battle_of_Ban_Me_Thuot#cite_note-2)

Ismail

9th November 2011, 20:00

Explain why in a Marxist perspective if you can.I don't see how you can explain military tactics and morale from a specifically Marxian perspective. The NVA and the Vietcong had strong morale, South Vietnam was militarily inefficient and its government domestically unpopular, the Soviets and the Chinese assisted the North and ensured it got decent weapons, and as noted the American public wanted the war to end and for the USA to leave Vietnam.

And also, was America's loss a victory for socialism?It was definitely a defeat for imperialism, although after the war ended a lot of leftist groups, which were based on anti-war movements on campuses, began to lose strength.

thriller

9th November 2011, 20:09

Zealot

9th November 2011, 22:28

Ismail

9th November 2011, 23:41

Also, socialism did spread to Cambodia...but we all know how that turned out, Vietnam had to stop that one.Technically Vietnam replaced the Khmer Rouge with another "socialist" government, but it was basically just Vietnam Jr. and its economic policies preceded Vietnam's own market reforms. Ironically the US proceeded to denounce said government as illegitimate and the UN allowed the Khmer Rouge regime to continue having representation within its halls as a government in exile.

Princess Luna

9th November 2011, 23:52

sherper

10th November 2011, 00:42

The U.S. DIDN'T lose the war in Vietnam. Every single one of the US's goals was obtain merely by fighting that war. Did the North really come out as winners after the war? Just look at their economy. Did 'socialism' continue to spread throughout Asia? No, it pretty much ended there. Did the US pull out? Yes, but that doesn't mean the US lost.
The "Communist threat" never really existed. China, The Soviet Union and other countires in the local area had no interest in any territorial expansion, and the Vietnam War would have never started if the Americans had not cut in and screwed everything up. (They were gonna have a election, if anyone remembers, to "choose" which form of government they wished to use.) The Yanks took no chance that the political party supporting the Capitalist system might lose, and invaded the whole place. Dragging it out into a war that continued for 10 or so years, lost lives on all sides, to "solve" a problem that never existed.
"If" the "reds" ever wanted to continue down south, to steamroll over the pacific. Whats stopping them? Pretty sure a country out of operation and use to anyone, wouldn't impede a military campaign. Esspecially if there doesn't exist any large amount of military forces (American ground troops) within the pacific region.
All of this points to one conclusion. There was no red threat to western society, and no win from any side, unless if the yanks thinks screwing a country's economy up for a few decades was their goal. Oh and the South Vietnamese faction lost, just as a side note.

thesadmafioso

10th November 2011, 02:16

citizen of industry

10th November 2011, 02:41

The populous didn't want the US in the war after the tet offensive, which blew the lie that it was a "police operation" the US was winning apart. The draftees didn't want to be there fighting an enemy they didn't care about in a country they didn't care about, while college students were exempted from the draft. Black draftees didn't want to fight for the government that oppressed them. The US installed a brutal puppet government that was unpopular. The terrain greatly limited the US from using advantages in armor, aircraft, etc. Failing to significantly defeat the enemy in the field, the US took to war on the entire Vietnamese population, massacring millions of them and putting them in concentration camps, losing any chance they had of getting the support of the civilian population. With no chance of winning the war militarily, domestic pressure forced the US out of the country, and the NVA had no trouble after that.

America's loss was a victory for socialism in some ways. The country was reunited, something which would have been done democratically had not the US intervened in the first place. It was a blow for US imperialism (though somewhat mitigated today with Vietnamese market reforms). It was instrumental in ending the draft in the US in practice (though still possible, hence selective service numbers). The civil rights movement, women's rights movement and anti-war movement changed US society for the better, in fact completely demolished the lifestyles and social norms of the nation prior to that, resulting in much greater individual freedoms. And the Vietnamese people are most likely pleased to be reunited and independent.

tanklv

10th November 2011, 05:49

Explain why.
Explain why in a Marxist perspective if you can.
And also, was America's loss a victory for socialism?

The US lost the Vietnam War because

1) it was a war the US had no valid reasons for being in (French, Dienbenphu)
2) was started under false pretenses, ("only a few advisors", "Domino Theory") and escalated on lies (Tonkin Gulf) - see also "McCarthy Hearings"
3) the people of Vietnam were overwhelmingly against the US invasion of their homeland and resisted it with their entire living breaths to defend their families while the US forces were all drafted and FORCED TO FIGHT AGAINST THEIR WILL - mainly the sons of the poor
4) once the lies and deceit and carnage became known in the US, the people of the US lost all "appetite" for it (nightly DINNER TIME TV newscasts of on site war reporting - very "unappatising" - does not go well with desert)
5) there was no justifiable reason for the US to be in the war...from the moment it began to its almost decade long duration
6) the US propped-up a false and very corrupt "south" leadership against a genuine people's revolutionary government/army - just like in Iraq and Afghanistan now

There are probably a few more pertinent reasons that I can't remember, but those should be the biggies

At least those were the main reasons...from my perspective

tanklv

10th November 2011, 06:00

The US lost, get over it. They achieved their goal of a unified country under socialism and the US miserably failed in their goals, at least in the short term. Wars are redundant nowadays when you can just slap sanctions/blockades on a nation and force it into private capitalism. Also, socialism did spread to Cambodia...but we all know how that turned out, Vietnam had to stop that one.

Firstly, Americans didn't understand the situation. Viet Nam had already been through several wars and another one wasn't going to stop them from gaining independence. Vo Ngyuen Giap, when writing about the war, called the Americans "Interventionists" (they were) stepping up to finished what the French failed to do whereas Americans saw themselves as liberators from Communism. Even Mcnamara had this view, so it becomes quite clear they had no idea of the psyche of the Vietnamese people at that time. This also meant they had experience fighting regular armies with guerilla forces.

Secondly, they were armed with Maoist guerilla tactics... Maoist armies are damn hard to defeat.

Third, public support for the war went down dramatically.

Fourth, they had a shit-for-brains president(s) that wanted to drop nuclear weapons and just overall did not have any idea how the war was really going.

It is also quite amazing to learn the the Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minn felt extremely betrayed by the US entrance in place of the French. They thought that, considering American Ideals against colonialism, and the way the US fought against the British for THEIR own independence, and that the Allies fought against the Nazis, that SURELY they would side with the then INDEPENDENCE movement of the Vietnamese AGAINST the French. That this failed to materialize was extremely enraging and disappointing to Ho and his people. To think of what could have been if the US hadn't betrayed it's own "ideals"...and the lives and treasure it could have saved...

mrmikhail

10th November 2011, 06:12

The US lost the Vietnam War because

3) the people of Vietnam were overwhelmingly against the US invasion of their homeland and resisted it with their entire living breaths to defend their families while the US forces were all drafted and FORCED TO FIGHT AGAINST THEIR WILL - mainly the sons of the poor

That is an untrue statement, 2/3rds of those who fought in Vietnam volunteered to be there (while 2/3rds of the US WW2 vets were drafted.) and 70% of those killed were volunteers. It is really a bad myth of the mass conscript army, while there were many, the vast majority were their on their own accord, here are some facts on Vietnam vets:

http://www.vhfcn.org/stat.html

Commissar Rykov

10th November 2011, 06:54

That is an untrue statement, 2/3rds of those who fought in Vietnam volunteered to be there (while 2/3rds of the US WW2 vets were drafted.) and 70% of those killed were volunteers. It is really a bad myth of the mass conscript army, while there were many, the vast majority were their on their own accord, here are some facts on Vietnam vets:

http://www.vhfcn.org/stat.html
Beat me to the punch. Vietnam was made up of a lot of lifers and Right-Wing Kids wanting to kill people for America it was a largely volunteer affair which is quite unlike American involvement in WWII where most were draftees and not the volunteers American Propaganda painted them as. I find it amusing that a war that wasn't popular or did well gets painted with the conscript brush by American Bourgeois Historians while a war that was popular gets dubbed some kind of heroic effort by a generation. Ah historical distortions how sweet thou art.

Jose Gracchus

10th November 2011, 06:55

"Won" is a curious way to describe the post-American bloodletting condition of the South Vietnamese peasantry and workers (the actual targets of the U.S. war effort).

Commissar Rykov

10th November 2011, 07:04

"Won" is a curious way to describe the post-American bloodletting condition of the South Vietnamese peasantry and workers (the actual targets of the U.S. war effort).
True enough more bombs were dropped in the South than in the North IIRC. There was a recent docu on the Military Channel interviewing US Veterans and it took an extremely negative view of the war as the vets complained about being told to win hearts and minds thus going into a village to build a school or something only to go back a week latter to do bomb damage assessment and sweep the village.

citizen of industry

10th November 2011, 07:22

That is an untrue statement, 2/3rds of those who fought in Vietnam volunteered to be there (while 2/3rds of the US WW2 vets were drafted.) and 70% of those killed were volunteers. It is really a bad myth of the mass conscript army, while there were many, the vast majority were their on their own accord, here are some facts on Vietnam vets:

http://www.vhfcn.org/stat.html

That's interesting, I didn't know that. I would say some differences in the WWII draftees favor is that basically the whole country was drafted, excepting vital industries. If you didn't volunteer or go to the draft board, everyone would be like "Why aren't you in the service?"

On the other hand, in Vietnam they were using the lottery system. Congratulations - you've won a ticket to Vietnam! And the percentage of those serving relative to the population was much smaller. Also 12 month tours rather than the whole ride, so who wants to fight when they only have a couple months left?

B0LSHEVIK

10th November 2011, 12:39

Technically, the US didnt lose anything in Vietnam. It was all geopolitical hogwash built around hollow containment strategies. At the height of the Cold War and the anti-communist hysteria in the US, it was indeed seen by many US civilians as America's crusade to save the world from godless communism. You know, 'fight them there or in our backyards' mentality. That being said, the main the thing the US had to lose in Vietnam, as in Korea, was prestige. The war was unwinnable because the S. Vietnamese govt was corrupt (ahem, Afghanistan/Iraq), popular support was NOT with the US, and to the people of 'Nam, the US were imperialists who had taken up the fight from the other imperialists, the French.

And draftees accounted for 30% of combat deaths in Vietnam, about 18000. Whats more interesting, Caucasians accounted for 86% of combat deaths. But thats deceiving, because back then, latinos were counted as caucasians, in most army offices. Estimates have that Latinos represent 5% of KIA's, and Blacks were at 15%. But, just by looking at these numbers, it seems plenty of corn fed American 'heartland' kids were willing to die to fight communism, and volunteered. I do feel pity for the draftees though, some had no choice (in their minds).

ВАЛТЕР

10th November 2011, 12:45

They lost because you cannot force an idea on a population that does not accept it, and because they were seen as occupiers by much of the population. There was no possible way for the US/South to win short of genocide.

thesadmafioso

10th November 2011, 13:17

B0LSHEVIK

10th November 2011, 18:20

the US Army still had a tremendous amount of trouble with poor, working class soldiers choosing to shoot their bourgeois officers over obeying their orders

Well first of all, universally speaking, armies consist of poor, working class soldiers. And second, what are you talking about?

Black_Rose

10th November 2011, 20:57

Regardless of the statistics of the draft and of the percentage of volunteers present in the fighting, the fact still remains that draftees were given the worst possible grunt work and that the Vietnam war did see a tremendous amount of chaos within the ranks of the US military as a result of political unrest in many units on the front.

Say what you will about the willful imperialists present in the fighting, but it would be unwise to take that mold and to apply it to the entire entity of the US military of the era. You still had naval vessels seeing dissident printing presses emerge and the US Army still had a tremendous amount of trouble with poor, working class soldiers choosing to shoot their bourgeois officers over obeying their orders. If that is not indicative of the presence of proletarian class consciousness in an institution, then I really do not know what is.

Could I please home some documentation for those claims. I find it too interesting.

There was a recent docu on the Military Channel interviewing US Veterans and it took an extremely negative view of the war as the vets complained about being told to win hearts and minds thus going into a village to build a school or something only to go back a week latter to do bomb damage assessment and sweep the village.

what does "sweep the village" mean?

Well first of all, universally speaking, armies consist of poor, working class soldiers. And second, what are you talking about?

The leaders and the bourgeoisie merely regard infantrymen as expendable pawns, although the general populace would regard the loss of military personnel to be a tragedy. A revolutionary guerrilla or nation should try to impair the logistics (damaging supply lines, depleting financial resources to fund a military campaign, interrupting communications) of their enemy on offensive campaigns instead of inflicting maximum causalities.

eyeheartlenin

10th November 2011, 21:29

Pretty Flaco

10th November 2011, 21:33

Zealot

10th November 2011, 23:15

what does "sweep the village" mean?

Whole villages were cleared, burnt or bombed during the war. When I was in Viet Nam I went to a War Crimes Museum that had on display the vehicles used to bulldoze villages, I think this is what he's referring to.

mrmikhail

10th November 2011, 23:57

The source that the Grantist ("IMT") "MrMikhail" quotes, comes from the Viet Nam Helicopter Flight Crews Network, which is very likely a pro-war source, and consists of quotes from the likes of President Richard Nixon, General William Westmoreland, General Barry McCaffrey, etc., all of whom were pro-war, so, if you believe Richard Nixon or General Westmoreland were objective commentators on their failed intervention (and few people in the US believed that at the time), then "MrMikhail" has made his point, that GI's were pro-war. I guess that is why they fragged their officers and why there was a collapse of morale in the US Army during its intervention in Viet Nam.

Furthermore, the war was fought by conscripts for years, because the US military had conscription until 1973, and the US had fought in Viet Nam from the mid-1960's. I was subject to conscription during that war, and, if you got drafted, chances are, you would be sent to 'Nam as a replacement for someone who got shot. Every young man in the US at the time knew that.

* * *

Another thing that stopped the war and led to the US' defeat, was action by the US Congress, which progressively shut off funds for the war, probably as more and more of the ruling-class decided that prolonging the war was not in the interests of US power in the world. During the Viet Nam war, there was a whole bloc of US (pro-imperialist) politicians who thought the war was a useless drain on US resources, and their "dissent" from the war was, I am sure, felt in Congress.

* * *

The interesting question today is, why is the US still in Afghanistan, a war even more pointless, even more peripheral to US imperial interests than Viet Nam, and a war about which, there is now dissent even in the US Defense Department.

Oh nice, you open in a history thread with pointless bullshit Trotskyist factionalism. It is people like yourself that are the problem in Trotskyism, especially seeing your support for a clearly dead fourth international. Instead of working with others on the same side of the spectrum, you just attack the views, you people are no better than the Stalinists who do the exact same. But I'll get back to the point "eyeheartlenin".

If you would like another source how about this one: www.http://history-world.org/vietnam_war_statistics.htm

I had never once said there were not conscripts in the ranks, I merely said the vast majority were volunteers, and this is supported by more than enough facts. The only sources saying that it was a conscript only/mainly war were bourgeoisie leftists, so if you "fourth internationalists" like "eyeheartlenin" subscribe to this school of thought then I guess you have made a point (See how that works).

I also personally never said that US troops, conscript or volunteer, didn't become disillusioned with the war and how it was being carried out, it is only logical that this would occur as in any unpopular war, especially after '68.

mrmikhail

11th November 2011, 00:00

Geopolitically they did lose, because vietnam became a state aligned with the chinese and ceased any sort of friendly relations with the US.

Vietnam during the war was aligned with mostly the Soviet Union and to a lesser degree China, shortly after the war Vietnam decided to settle a score with the Khmer Rouge and went into Cambodia to stop their atrocities, which sparked a war with China (and short invasion by China) so I wouldn't say that the US geopolitically lost due to any alignment with China

citizen of industry

11th November 2011, 00:11

Well sourced article, though of course hardly objective. Gives a lot of statistics how draftees were manipulated based on race/class: http://www.isreview.org/issues/09/soldiers_revolt.shtml

International Socialist Review Issue 9, August-September 2000
Vietnam: The Soldier's Revolt
By Joel Geier

The hidden war

Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinousŠ[C]onditions [exist] among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by...the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.

Armed Forces Journal, June 19711
THE MOST neglected aspect of the Vietnam War is the soldiers' revolt--the mass upheaval from below that unraveled the American army. It is a great reality check in an era when the U.S. touts itself as an invincible nation. For this reason, the soldiers' revolt has been written out of official history. Yet it was a crucial part of the massive antiwar movement whose activity helped the Vietnamese people in their struggle to free Vietnam--described once by President Johnson as a "raggedy-ass little fourth-rate country"--from U.S. domination. The legacy of the soldiers' revolt and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam--despite more recent U.S. victories over Iraq and Serbia--casts a pall on the Pentagon. They still fear the political backlash that might come if U.S. ground forces sustain heavy casualties in a future war.
The army revolt was a class struggle that pitted working-class soldiers against officers who viewed them as expendable. The fashionable attempt to revise Vietnam War history, to airbrush its horrors, to create a climate supportive of future military interventions, cannot acknowledge that American soldiers violently opposed that war, or that American capitalism casually tolerated the massacre of working-class troops. Liberal academics have added to the historical distortion by reducing the radicalism of the 1960s to middle-class concerns and activities, while ignoring working-class rebellion. But the militancy of the 1960s began with the Black working class as the motor force of the Black liberation struggle, and it reached its climax with the unity of white and Black working-class soldiers whose upsurge shook U.S. imperialism.
In Vietnam, the rebellion did not take the same form as the mass stateside GI antiwar movement, which consisted of protests, marches, demonstrations and underground newspapers. In Vietnam, the aim of the soldiers was more modest, but also more subversive: survival, to "CYA" (cover your ass), to protect "the only body you have" by fighting the military's attempt to continue the war. The survival conflict became a war within the war that ripped the armed forces apart. In 1965, the Green Machine was the best army the U.S. ever put into the field; a few years later, it was useless as a fighting force.
"Survival politics," as it was then called, expressed itself through the destruction of the search-and-destroy strategy, through mutinies, through the killing of officers, and through fraternization and making peace from below with the National Liberation Front (NLF). It was highly effective in destroying everything that military hierarchy and discipline stand for. It was the proudest moment in the U.S. army's history.
Like most of the revolutionary traditions of the American working class, the soldiers' revolt has been hidden from history. The aim of this essay is to reclaim the record of that struggle.
A working-class army

The Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war by themselves or govern themselves.

Vice President Richard M. Nixon, April 16, 19542
From 1964 to 1973, from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 27 million men came of draft age. A majority of them were not drafted due to college, professional, medical or National Guard deferments. Only 40 percent were drafted and saw military service. A small minority, 2.5 million men (about 10 percent of those eligible for the draft), were sent to Vietnam.3
This small minority was almost entirely working-class or rural youth. Their average age was 19. Eighty-five percent of the troops were enlisted men; 15 percent were officers. The enlisted men were drawn from the 80 percent of the armed forces with a high school education or less. At this time, college education was universal in the middle class and making strong inroads in the better-off sections of the working class. Yet, in 1965 and 1966, college graduates were only 2 percent of the hundreds of thousands of draftees.4
In the elite colleges, the class discrepancy was even more glaring. The upper class did none of the fighting. Of the 1,200 Harvard graduates in 1970, only 2 went to Vietnam, while working-class high schools routinely sent 20 percent, 30 percent of their graduates and more to Vietnam.5
College students who were not made officers were usually assigned to noncombat support and service units. High school dropouts were three times more likely to be sent to combat units that did the fighting and took the casualties. Combat infantry soldiers, "the grunts," were entirely working class. They included a disproportionate number of Black working-class troops. Blacks, who formed 12 percent of the troops, were often 25 percent or more of the combat units.6
When college deferments expired, joining the National Guard was a favorite way to get out of serving in Vietnam. During the war, 80 percent of the Guard's members described themselves as joining to avoid the draft. You needed connections to get in--which was no problem for Dan Quayle, George W. Bush and other ruling-class draft evaders. In 1968, the Guard had a waiting list of more than 100,000. It had triple the percentage of college graduates that the army did. Blacks made up less than 1.5 percent of the National Guard. In Mississippi, Blacks were 42 percent of the population, but only one Black man served in a Guard of more than 10,000.7
In 1965, the troops came from a working class that had moved in a conservative direction during the Cold War, due to the long postwar boom and McCarthyite repression. Yet, in the five years before the war, the civil rights movement had shaped Black political views. The troops had more class and trade-union consciousness than exists today. The stateside Movement for a Democratic Military, organized by former members of the Black Panther Party, had as the first points of its program, "We demand the right to collective bargaining," and "We demand wages equal to the federal minimum wage."8 When the Defense Department attempted to break a farm workers' strike by increasing orders for scab lettuce, soldiers boycotted mess halls, picketed and plastered bases with stickers proclaiming "Lifers Eat Lettuce."9 When the army used troops to break the national postal wildcat strike in 1970, Vietnam GI called out, "To hell with breaking strikes, let's break the government."10
Shortly after the war began, radicalism started to get a hearing among young workers. As the Black liberation struggle moved northward from 1965 to 1968, 200 cities had ghetto uprisings--spreading revolutionary consciousness among young, working-class Blacks. In the factories, those same years saw a strong upturn in working-class militancy, with days lost to strikes and wildcats doubling.11 Left-wing ideas from the student movement were reaching working-class youth through the antiwar movement. In 1967 and 1968, many of the troops had been radicalized before their entry into the army. Still others were radicalized prior to being shipped to Vietnam by the GI antiwar movement on stateside bases. Radicalizing soldiers soon came up against the harsh reality that the officers viewed working-class troops as expendable.
The middle-class officers corps

Let the military run the show.

Senator Barry Goldwater12
The officer corps was drawn from the 7 percent of troops who were college graduates, or the 13 percent who had one to three years of college. College was to officer as high school was to enlisted man. The officer corps was middle class in composition and managerial in outlook. Ruling-class military families were heavily represented in its higher ranks.13
In the Second World War, officers were 7 percent of the armed forces, an amount normal for most armies. The officer corps used the postwar permanent arms economy, with its bloated arms budget, as its vehicle for self-expansion. By the time of the Vietnam War, the officer corps was 15 percent of the armed forces, which meant one officer for every six plus men.14
After the end of the Korean War in 1953, there was no opportunity for combat commands. As the old army song goes, "There's no promotion/this side of the ocean." In 1960, it took an excruciating 33 years to move from second lieutenant to colonel. Many of the "lifers," professional officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs), welcomed the Vietnam War as the opportunity to reinvigorate their careers. They were not disappointed. By 1970, the agonizing wait to move up the career ladder from second lieutenant to colonel had been reduced to 13 years.15 Over 99 percent of second lieutenants became first lieutenants, 95 percent of first lieutenants were promoted to captain, 93 percent of qualified captains became majors, 77 percent of qualified majors became lieutenant colonels and half of the lieutenant colonels became colonels.16
The surest road to military advancement is a combat command. But there were too many active duty officers of high rank, which produced intense competition for combat commands. There were 2,500 lieutenant colonels jostling for command of only 100 to 130 battalions; 6,000 colonels, 2,000 of whom were in serious competition for 75 brigade commands; and 200 major generals competing for the 13 division commands in the army.17
General Westmoreland, the commander of the armed forces in Vietnam, accommodated the officers by creating excessive support units and rapidly rotating combat command. In Vietnam, support and service units grew to an incredible 86 percent of military manpower. Only 14 percent of the troops were actually assigned to combat. Extravagant support services were the basis for the military bureaucracy. The armed forces created "numerous logistical commands, each to be headed by a general or two who would have to have high-ranking staffs to aid each of them." Thus it became possible for 64 army generals to serve simultaneously in Vietnam, with the requisite compliment of colonels, majors etc.18
These superfluous support officers lived far removed from danger, lounging in rear base camps in luxurious conditions. A few miles away, combat soldiers were experiencing a nightmarish hell. The contrast was too great to allow for confidence--in both the officers and the war--to survive unscathed.
Westmoreland's solution to the competition for combat command poured gasoline on the fire. He ordered a one-year tour of duty for enlisted men in Vietnam, but only six months for officers. The combat troops hated the class discrimination that put them at twice the risk of their commanders. They grew contemptuous of the officers, whom they saw as raw and dangerously inexperienced in battle.
Even a majority of officers considered Westmoreland's tour inequality as unethical. Yet they were forced to use short tours to prove themselves for promotion. They were put in situations in which their whole careers depended on what they could accomplish in a brief period, even if it meant taking shortcuts and risks at the expense of the safety of their men--a temptation many could not resist.
The outer limit of six-month commands was often shortened due to promotion, relief, injury or other reasons. The outcome was "revolving-door" commands. As an enlisted man recalled, "During my year in-country I had five second-lieutenant platoon leaders and four company commanders. One CO was pretty good...All the rest were stupid."19
Aggravating this was the contradiction that guaranteed opposition between officers and men in combat. Officer promotions depended on quotas of enemy dead from search-and-destroy missions. Battalion commanders who did not furnish immediate high body counts were threatened with replacement. This was no idle threat--battalion commanders had a 30 to 50 percent chance of being relieved of command. But search-and-destroy missions produced enormous casualties for the infantry soldiers. Officers corrupted by career ambitions would cynically ignore this and draw on the never-ending supply of replacements from the monthly draft quota.20
Officer corruption was rife. A Pentagon official writes, "[the] stench of corruption rose to unprecedented levels during William C. Westmoreland's command of the American effort in Vietnam." The CIA protected the poppy fields of Vietnamese officials and flew their heroin out of the country on Air America planes. Officers took notice and followed suit. The major who flew the U.S. ambassador's private jet was caught smuggling $8 million of heroin on the plane.21
Army stores (PXs) were importing French perfumes and other luxury goods for the officers to sell on the black market for personal gain. But the black market extended far beyond luxury goods: "The Viet Cong received a large percentage of their supplies from the United States via the underground routes of the black market: kerosene, sheet metal, oil, gasoline engines, claymore mines, hand grenades, rifles, bags of cement," which were publicly sold at open, outdoor black markets.22
The troops were quickly disillusioned with a war in which American-made military matériel was being used against them. And then there were endless scandals: PX scandals, NCO-club scandals, sergeant-major scandals, M-16 jamming scandals. In interviews, when Vietnam veterans were asked what stood out about their experience, a repeated answer was "the corruption."23
The ethics of the officer corps imitated those of the business elite they served. They were corrupted by six-month command tours while their men served a year, by career advancement at the expense of troop welfare, by black market profiteering, and by living in luxury in the midst of combat troop slaughter. The corruption of the officers, combined with the combat plan that avoided officer casualties while guaranteeing the slaughter of their men, produced explosive results.
A ruling-class strategy

We know we can't win a ground war in Asia.

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew on "Face the Nation" (CBS-TV), May 3, 197024
The political and military position of the U.S. was hopeless from the moment it entered the war. The U.S. was fighting to protect capitalism and empire. The Vietnamese were fighting to reunify their country and break free of foreign control. The American-controlled government of South Vietnam was the political representative of the landlord class, which took 40 to 60 percent of the peasants' crop as rent. In National Liberation Front (NLF)-controlled territory, rents were lowered to 10 percent, creating enormous peasant support for the Communist insurgency.25
As the NLF expanded their areas of control, it became increasingly difficult for the landlords to collect rents. They therefore struck a fateful bargain with their government: the army would collect the peasants' rent in return for a 30 percent cut, which was to be split three ways between the government, the officers and the troops. Rent collection became more important to the army than fighting. The corrupt South Vietnamese government and its army were little more than tax collectors for the landlords. The enormous economic and military power of U.S. imperialism was no stronger than the social relations of its most corrupt and reactionary colonial clients.26
The war was fought by NLF troops and peasant auxiliaries who worked the land during the day and fought as soldiers at night. They would attack ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and American troops and bases or set mines at night, and then disappear back into the countryside during the day. In this form of guerrilla war, there were no fixed targets, no set battlegrounds, and there was no territory to take. With that in mind, the Pentagon designed a counterinsurgency strategy called "search and destroy." Without fixed battlegrounds, combat success was judged by the number of NLF troops killed--the body count. A somewhat more sophisticated variant was the "kill ratio"--the number of enemy troops killed compared to the number of Americans dead. This "war of attrition" strategy was the basic military plan of the American ruling class in Vietnam.27
For each enemy killed, for every body counted, soldiers got three-day passes and officers received medals and promotions. This reduced the war from fighting for "the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese" to no larger purpose than killing. Any Vietnamese killed was put in the body count as a dead enemy soldier, or as the GIs put it, "if it's dead, it's Charlie" ("Charlie" was GI slang for the NLF). This was an inevitable outcome of a war against a whole people. Everyone in Vietnam became the enemy--and this encouraged random slaughter. Officers further ordered their men to "kill them even if they try to surrender--we need the body count." It was an invitation to kill indiscriminately to swell a tally sheet.28
Some enlisted men followed their officers into barbarism. The most infamous incident was the genocidal slaughter of the village of My Lai, where officers demanded that their men kill all inhabitants--more than 400 women, children, infants and old people. Only one minor officer, Lt. Calley, received a sentence for this Nazi-like war crime. President Nixon quickly pardoned him.29 At that point, 32 percent of the American people thought high government and military officials should be tried for war crimes.
Rather than following their officers, many more soldiers had the courage to revolt against barbarism.30
Ninety-five percent of combat units were search-and-destroy units. Their mission was to go out into the jungle, hit bases and supply areas, flush out NLF troops and engage them in battle. If the NLF fought back, helicopters would fly in to prevent retreat and unleash massive firepower--bullets, bombs, missiles. The NLF would attempt to avoid this, and battle generally only occurred if the search-and-destroy missions were ambushed. Ground troops became the live bait for the ambush and firefight. GIs referred to search and destroy as "humping the boonies by dangling the bait."31
Without helicopters, search and destroy would not have been possible--and the helicopters were the terrain of the officers. "On board the command and control chopper rode the battalion commander, his aviation-support commander, the artillery-liaison officer, the battalion S-3 and the battalion sergeant major. They circled...high enough to escape random small-arms fire." The officers directed their firepower on the NLF down below, but while indiscriminately spewing out bombs and napalm, they could not avoid "collateral damage"--hitting their own troops. One-quarter of the American dead in Vietnam was killed by "friendly fire" from the choppers. The officers were out of danger, the "eye in the sky," while the troops had their "asses in the grass," open to fire from both the NLF and the choppers.32
When the battle was over, the officers and their choppers would fly off to base camps removed from danger while their troops remained out in the field. The class relations of any army copy those of the society it serves, but in more extreme form. Search and destroy brought the class relations of American capitalism to their ultimate pitch.
Of the 543,000 American troops in Vietnam in 1968, only 14 percent (or 80,000) were combat troops. These 80,000 men took the brunt of the war. They were the weak link, and their disaffection crippled the ability of the world's largest military to fight. In 1968, 14,592 men--18 percent of combat troops--were killed. An additional 35,000 had serious wounds that required hospitalization. Although not all of the dead and wounded were from combat units, the overwhelming majority were. The majority of combat troops in 1968 were either seriously injured or killed. The number of American casualties in Vietnam was not extreme, but as it was concentrated among the combat troops, it was a virtual massacre. Not to revolt amounted to suicide.33
Officers, high in the sky, had few deaths or casualties. The deaths of officers occurred mostly in the lower ranks among lieutenants or captains who led combat platoons or companies. The higher-ranking officers went unharmed. During a decade of war, only one general and eight full colonels died from enemy fire.34 As one study commissioned by the military concluded, "In Vietnam...the officer corps simply did not die in sufficient numbers or in the presence of their men often enough."35
The slaughter of grunts went on because the officers never found it unacceptable. There was no outcry from the military or political elite, the media or their ruling-class patrons about this aspect of the war, nor is it commented on in almost any history of the war. It is ignored or accepted as a normal part of an unequal world, because the middle and upper class were not in combat in Vietnam and suffered no pain from its butchery. It never would have been tolerated had their class done the fighting. Their premeditated murder of combat troops unleashed class war in the armed forces. The revolt focused on ending search and destroy through all of the means the army had provided as training for these young workers.
Tet--the revolt begins

We have known for some time that this offensive was planned by the enemy...The ability to do what they have done has been anticipated, prepared for, and met...The stated purposes of the general uprising have failed...I do not believe that they will achieve a psychological victory.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, February 2, 196836
The Tet Offensive was the turning point of the Vietnam War and the start of open, active soldiers' rebellion. At the end of January 1968, on Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, the NLF sent 100,000 troops into Saigon and 36 provincial capitals to lead a struggle for the cities. The Tet Offensive was not militarily successful, because of the savagery of the U.S. counterattack. In Saigon alone, American bombs killed 14,000 civilians. The city of Ben Tre became emblematic of the U.S. effort when the major who retook it announced that "to save the city, we had to destroy it."
Westmoreland and his generals claimed that they were the victors of Tet because they had inflicted so many casualties on the NLF. But to the world, it was clear that U.S. imperialism had politically lost the war in Vietnam. Tet showed that the NLF had the overwhelming support of the Vietnamese population--millions knew of and collaborated with the NLF entry into the cities and no one warned the Americans. The ARVN had turned over whole cities without firing a shot. In some cases, ARVN troops had welcomed the NLF and turned over large weapons supplies. The official rationale for the war, that U.S. troops were there to help the Vietnamese fend off Communist aggression from the North, was no longer believed by anybody. The South Vietnamese government and military were clearly hated by the people.37
Westmoreland's constant claim that there was "light at the end of the tunnel," that victory was imminent, was shown to be a lie. Search and destroy was a pipe dream. The NLF did not have to be flushed out of the jungle--it operated everywhere. No place in Vietnam was a safe base for American soldiers when the NLF so decided.
What, then, was the point of this war? Why should American troops fight to defend a regime its own people despised? Soldiers became furious at a government and an officer corps who risked their lives for lies. Throughout the world, Tet and the confidence that American imperialism was weak and would be defeated produced a massive, radical upsurge that makes 1968 famous as the year of revolutionary hope. In the U.S. army, it became the start of the showdown with the officers.
Within three years, more than one-quarter of the armed forces was absent without leave (AWOL), had deserted or was in military prisons. Countless others had received "Ho Chi Minh discharges" for being disruptive and troublemaking. But the most dangerous forces were those still active in combat units, whose fury over being slaughtered in useless search-and-destroy missions erupted in the greatest rebellion the U.S. army has ever encountered.38
Mutiny

If an officer attempted to impose disciplinary punishment upon a soldier, the power did not exist to get it executed. In that you have one of the sure signs of a genuine popular revolution. With the falling away of their disciplinary power, the political bankruptcy of the staff of officers was laid bare.

Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution39
The refusal of an order to advance into combat is an act of mutiny. In time of war, it is the gravest crime in the military code, punishable by death. In Vietnam, mutiny was rampant, the power to punish withered and discipline collapsed as search and destroy was revoked from below.
Until 1967, open defiance of orders was rare and harshly repressed, with sentences of two to ten years for minor infractions. Hostility to search-and-destroy missions took the form of covert combat avoidance, called "sandbagging" by the grunts. A platoon sent out to "hump the boonies" might look for a safe cover from which to file fabricated reports of imaginary activity.40
But after Tet, there was a massive shift from combat avoidance to mutiny. One Pentagon official reflected that "mutiny became so common that the army was forced to disguise its frequency by talking instead of 'combat refusal.'" Combat refusal, one commentator observed, "resembled a strike and occurred when GIs refused, disobeyed, or negotiated an order into combat."41
Acts of mutiny took place on a scale previously only encountered in revolutions. The first mutinies in 1968 were unit and platoon-level rejections of the order to fight. The army recorded 68 such mutinies that year. By 1970, in the 1st Air Cavalry Division alone, there were 35 acts of combat refusal.42 One military study concluded that combat refusal was "unlike mutinous outbreaks of the past, which were usually sporadic, short-lived events. The progressive unwillingness of American soldiers to fight to the point of open disobedience took place over a four-year period between 1968-71."43
The 1968 combat refusals of individual units expanded to involve whole companies by the next year. The first reported mass mutiny was in the 196th Light Brigade in August 1969. Company A of the 3rd Battalion, down to 60 men from its original 150, had been pushing through Songchang Valley under heavy fire for five days when it refused an order to advance down a perilous mountain slope. Word of the mutiny spread rapidly. The New York Daily News ran a banner headline, "Sir, My Men Refuse To Go."44 The GI paper, The Bond, accurately noted, "It was an organized strike...A shaken brass relieved the company commander...but they did not charge the guys with anything. The Brass surrendered to the strength of the organized men."45
This precedent--no court-martial for refusing to obey the order to fight, but the line officer relieved of his command--was the pattern for the rest of the war. Mass insubordination was not punished by an officer corps that lived in fear of its own men. Even the threat of punishment often backfired. In one famous incident, B Company of the 1st Battalion of the 12th Infantry refused an order to proceed into NLF-held territory. When they were threatened with court-martials, other platoons rallied to their support and refused orders to advance until the army backed down.46
As the fear of punishment faded, mutinies mushroomed. There were at least ten reported major mutinies, and hundreds of smaller ones. Hanoi's Vietnam Courier documented 15 important GI rebellions in 1969.47 At Cu Chi, troops from the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Infantry refused battle orders. The "CBS Evening News" broadcast live a patrol from the 7th Cavalry telling their captain that his order for direct advance against the NLF was nonsense, that it would threaten casualties, and that they would not obey it. Another CBS broadcast televised the mutiny of a rifle company of the 1st Air Cavalry Division.48
When Cambodia was invaded in 1970, soldiers from Fire Base Washington conducted a sit-in. They told Up Against the Bulkhead, "We have no business there...we just sat down. Then they promised us we wouldn't have to go to Cambodia." Within a week, there were two additional mutinies, as men from the 4th and 8th Infantry refused to board helicopters to Cambodia.49
In the invasion of Laos in March 1971, two platoons refused to advance. To prevent the mutiny from spreading, the entire squadron was pulled out of the Laos operation. The captain was relieved of his command, but there was no discipline against the men. When a lieutenant from the 501st Infantry refused his battalion commander's order to advance his troops, he merely received a suspended sentence.50
The decision not to punish men defying the most sacrosanct article of the military code, the disobedience of the order for combat, indicated how much the deterioration of discipline had eroded the power of the officers. The only punishment for most mutinies was to relieve the commanding officer of his duties. Consequently, many commanders would not report that they had lost control of their men. They swept news of mutiny, which would jeopardize their careers, under the rug. As they became quietly complicit, the officer corps lost any remaining moral authority to impose discipline.
For every defiance in combat, there were hundreds of minor acts of insubordination in rear base camps. As one infantry officer reported, "You can't give orders and expect them to be obeyed."51 This democratic upsurge from below was so extensive that discipline was replaced by a new command technique called ''working it out.'' Working it out was a form of collective bargaining in which negotiations went on between officers and men to determine orders. Working it out destroyed the authority of the officer corps and gutted the ability of the army to carry out search-and-destroy missions. But the army had no alternative strategy for a guerrilla war against a national liberation movement.52
The political impact of the mutiny was felt far beyond Vietnam. As H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, reflected, "If troops are going to mutiny, you can't pursue an aggressive policy." The soldiers' revolt tied down the global reach of U.S. imperialism.53
Fragging

The moral condition of the army was hopeless. You might describe it by saying the army as an army no longer existed. Defeats, retreats, and the rottenness of the ruling group had utterly undermined the troops.

Leon Trotsky,History of the Russian Revolution54
The murder of American officers by their troops was an openly proclaimed goal in Vietnam. As one GI newspaper demanded, "Don't desert. Go to Vietnam, and kill your commanding officer."55 And they did. A new slang term arose to celebrate the execution of officers: fragging. The word came from the fragmentation grenade, which was the weapon of choice because the evidence was destroyed in the act.56
In every war, troops kill officers whose incompetence or recklessness threatens the lives of their men. But only in Vietnam did this become pervasive in combat situations and widespread in rear base camps. It was the most well-known aspect of the class struggle inside the army, directed not just at intolerable officers, but at "lifers" as a class. In the soldiers' revolt, it became accepted practice to paint political slogans on helmets. A popular helmet slogan summed up this mood: "Kill a non-com for Christ." Fragging was the ransom the ground troops extracted for being used as live bait.57
No one knows how many officers were fragged, but after Tet it became epidemic. At least 800 to 1,000 fragging attempts using explosive devices were made. The army reported 126 fraggings in 1969, 271 in 1970 and 333 in 1971, when they stopped keeping count. But in that year, just in the American Division (of My Lai fame), one fragging per week took place. Some military estimates are that fraggings occurred at five times the official rate, while officers of the Judge Advocate General Corps believed that only 10 percent of fraggings were reported. These figures do not include officers who were shot in the back by their men and listed as wounded or killed in action.58
Most fraggings resulted in injuries, although "word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units."59 The army admitted that it could not account for how 1,400 officers and noncommissioned officers died. This number, plus the official list of fragging deaths, has been accepted as the unacknowledged army estimate for officers killed by their men. It suggests that 20 to 25 percent--if not more--of all officers killed during the war were killed by enlisted men, not the "enemy." This figure has no precedent in the history of war.60
Soldiers put bounties on officers targeted for fragging. The money, usually between $100 and $1,000, was collected by subscription from among the enlisted men. It was a reward for the soldier who executed the collective decision. The highest bounty for an officer was $10,000, publicly offered by GI Says, a mimeographed bulletin put out in the 101st Airborne Division, for Col. W. Honeycutt, who had ordered the May 1969 attack on Hill 937. The hill had no strategic significance and was immediately abandoned when the battle ended. It became enshrined in GI folklore as Hamburger Hill, because of the 56 men killed and 420 wounded taking it. Despite several fragging attempts, Honeycutt escaped uninjured.61
As Vietnam GI argued after Hamburger Hill, "Brass are calling this a tremendous victory. We call it a goddam butcher shop...If you want to die so some lifer can get a promotion, go right ahead. But if you think your life is worth something, you better get yourselves together. If you don't take care of the lifers, they might damn well take care of you."62
Fraggings were occasionally called off. One lieutenant refused to obey an order to storm a hill during an operation in the Mekong Delta. "His first sergeant later told him that when his men heard him refuse that order, they removed a $350 bounty earlier placed on his head because they thought he was a 'hard-liner.'"63
The motive for most fraggings was not revenge, but to change battle conduct. For this reason, officers were usually warned prior to fraggings. First, a smoke grenade would be left near their beds. Those who did not respond would find a tear-gas grenade or a grenade pin on their bed as a gentle reminder. Finally, the lethal grenade was tossed into the bed of sleeping, inflexible officers. Officers understood the warnings and usually complied, becoming captive to the demands of their men. It was the most practical means of cracking army discipline. The units whose officers responded opted out of search-and-destroy missions.64
An Army judge who presided over fragging trials called fragging "the troops' way of controlling officers," and added that it was "deadly effective." He explained, "Captain Steinberg argues that once an officer is intimidated by even the threat of fragging he is useless to the military because he can no longer carry out orders essential to the functioning of the Army. Through intimidation by threats--verbal and written...virtually all officers and NCOs have to take into account the possibility of fragging before giving an order to the men under them." The fear of fragging affected officers and NCOs far beyond those who were actually involved in fragging incidents.65
Officers who survived fragging attempts could not tell which of their men had tried to murder them, or when the men might strike again. They lived in constant fear of future attempts at fragging by unknown soldiers. In Vietnam it was a truism that "everyone was the enemy": for the lifers, every enlisted man was the enemy. "In parts of Vietnam [fragging] stirs more fear among officers and NCOs than does the war with 'Charlie.'"
Counter-fragging by retaliating officers contributed to a war within the war. While 80 percent of fraggings were of officers and NCOs, 20 percent were of enlisted men, as officers sought to kill potential troublemakers or those whom they suspected of planning to frag them. In this civil war within the army, the military police were used to reinstate order. In October 1971, military police air assaulted the Praline mountain signal site to protect an officer who had been the target of repeated fragging attempts. The base was occupied for a week before command was restored.66
Fragging undermined the ability of the Green Machine to function as a fighting force. By 1970, "many commanders no longer trusted Blacks or radical whites with weapons except on guard duty or in combat." In the American Division, fragmentation grenades were not given to troops. In the 440 Signal Battalion, the colonel refused to distribute all arms.67 As a soldier at Cu Chi told the New York Times, "The American garrisons on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken the weapons from us and put them under lock and key."68 The U.S. army was slowly disarming its own men to prevent the weapons from being aimed at the main enemy: the lifers. It is hard to think of another army so afraid of its own soldiers.69
Peace from below--search and avoid

The army was incurably sick...so far as making war was concerned, it did not exist. Nobody believed in the success of the war, the officers as little as the soldiers. Nobody wanted to fight any more, neither the army nor the people."

Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution 70
Mutiny and fraggings expressed the anger and bitterness that combat soldiers felt at being used as bait to kill Communists. It forced the troops to reassess who was the real enemy. Many began to conclude that the enemy was the lifers or the rulers in the U.S.--that it was the capitalist class and not, as they had once believed, the NLF.
In a remarkable letter, 40 combat officers wrote to President Nixon in July 1970 to advise him that "the military, the leadership of this country--are perceived by many soldiers to be almost as much our enemy as the VC [Viet Cong] and the NVA [North Vietnamese Army]."71 Extraordinary as this officer admission was, it was too little, too late. Fort Ord's Right-On-Post proclaimed that GIs had to free themselves and all exploited people from the oppression of the military, that "we recognize our true enemy...It is the capitalists who see only profit...They control the military which sends us off to die. They control the police who occupy the black and brown ghettoes."72 For others, the enemy was more immediate. As the GI paper, the Ft. Lewis-McChord Free Press, stated, "In Vietnam, the Lifers, the Brass, are the true Enemy, not the enemy."73
From there it was a short leap to the idea that "the other war, the war with Charlie," had to be ended. After the 1970 invasion of Cambodia enlarged the war, fury and the demoralizing realization that nothing could stop the warmongers swept both the antiwar movement and the troops.74 The most popular helmet logo became "UUUU," which meant "the unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful." Peace, if it were to come, would have to be made by the troops themselves, instituted by an unofficial troop withdrawal ending search-and-destroy missions.75
The form this peace from below took came to be called "search and avoid," or "search and evade." It became so extensive that "search and evade (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, 'CYA' (cover your ass) and get home!" It was not just a replay of early combat avoidance, of individual units hiding from the war--it was more open, more political, and more clearly focused as a strategy to bring peace.76
In search and avoid, patrols sent out into the field deliberately eluded potential clashes with the NLF. Night patrols, the most dangerous, would halt and take up positions a few yards beyond the defense perimeter, where the NLF would never come. By skirting potential conflicts, they hoped to make it clear to the NLF that their unit had established its own peace treaty.
Another frequent search-and-avoid tactic was to leave base camp, secure a safe area in the jungle and set up a perimeter-defense system in which to hole up for the time allotted for the mission. "Some units even took enemy weapons with them when they went out on such search-and-avoid missions so that upon return they could report a firefight and demonstrate evidence of enemy casualties for the body-count figures required by higher headquarters."77
The army was forced to accommodate what began to be called "the grunts' cease-fire." An American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, said, "They have set up separate companies for men who refuse to go out into the field. It is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place, he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp."78
An observer at Pace, near the Cambodian front where a unilateral truce was widely enforced, reported, "The men agreed and passed the word to other platoons: nobody fires unless fired upon. As of about 1100 hours on October 10,1971, the men of Bravo Company, 11/12 First Cav Division, declared their own private cease-fire with the North Vietnamese."79
The NLF responded to the new situation. People's Press, a GI paper, in its June 1971 issue claimed that NLF and NVA units were ordered not to open hostilities against U.S. troops wearing red bandanas or peace signs, unless first fired upon.80 Two months later, the first Vietnam veteran to visit Hanoi was given a copy of "an order to North Vietnamese troops not to shoot U.S. soldiers wearing antiwar symbols or carrying their rifles pointed down." He reports its impact on "convincing me that I was on the side of the Vietnamese now."81
Colonel Heinl reported this:

That 'search-and-evade' has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation's recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that Communist units in Indochina have been ordered not to engage American units which do not molest them. The same statement boasted--not without foundation in fact--that American defectors are in the VC ranks.82
Some officers joined, or led their men, in the unofficial cease-fire from below. A U.S. army colonel claimed:

I had influence over an entire province. I put my men to work helping with the harvest. They put up buildings. Once the NVA understood what I was doing, they eased up. I'm talking to you about a de facto truce, you understand. The war stopped in most of the province. It's the kind of history that doesn't get recorded. Few people even know it happened, and no one will ever admit that it happened.83
Search and avoid, mutiny and fraggings were a brilliant success. Two years into the soldiers' upsurge, in 1970, the number of U.S. combat deaths were down by more than 70 percent (to 3,946) from the 1968 high of more than 14,000. The revolt of the soldiers in order to survive and not to allow themselves to be victims could only succeed by a struggle prepared to use any means necessary to achieve peace from below.84
The revolt was not just against body bags, it was the "Revolt of the Body Bags," of men who refused to allow themselves to be shoved into body bags, to become American capitalism's road kill. The soldiers' revolt won the internal war within the army. Ground troops were removed from Vietnam. The armed forces are still afraid to use them elsewhere.
Revolution and the army

It is a manifest fact that the disorganization of armies and a total relaxation of discipline has been both precondition and consequence of all successful revolutions hitherto."

Engels to Marx, September 26, 185185
It is a maxim of revolutionary politics that for revolution to be successful, some part of the army must go over to the revolutionary forces. For that to occur, the revolutionary movement must be strong enough to give confidence to soldiers that it can protect them from the consequences of breaking military discipline.
The army revolted in Vietnam--but it lacked revolutionary organization. There was no revolution for it to go over to. The revolt was successful in ending the use of ground troops, but left intact the structures of the army, which allowed imperialism to slowly rebuild out of the wreckage.
The army revolt had all of the strengths and weaknesses of the 1960s radicalization of which it was a part. It was a courageous mass struggle from below, creatively improvising the necessary tactical means to accomplish its goals as it went along. It relied upon no one but itself to win its battles. It was revolutionary in temper and tactics, but it lacked the prerequisites for revolutionary success: organization, program, cadre and leadership. It is possible to name dozens of heroic acts of the soldiers' revolt in Vietnam, but impossible to record any organization or leader. They are nameless.
It was brilliant but brief. The only organizing tools were the underground GI newspapers. A newspaper, as any revolutionary can tell you, is an organizer, the scaffolding for the building of organization. But newspapers became a substitute for organization. There was scaffolding, but no building. Had revolutionary organization coordinated, centralized, politicized, made conscious and generalized the striving of the soldiers' revolt, the potential for change would have been enormously greater, and the outcome unimaginable.
A contradiction of modern imperialist armies is that they serve ruling-class wars of conquest, while they rely on working-class troops, who--whatever their initial ideological confusion--have no material interest in conquest. This contradiction has the potential to destroy armies. In the 20th century, it did so to the Russian and German armies at the end of the First World War, the Portuguese army in the African colonial wars in the 1970s and the American army in Vietnam. But armies have also been used for counterrevolution, of which the defeat of the Chilean revolution is a still living reminder.
The hidden history of the 1960s proves that the American army can be split and won to the revolutionary movement. But that requires the long, slow patient work of explanation, of propaganda, of education, of organization, and of agitation and action. The Vietnam revolt shows how rank-and-file soldiers can rise to the task. The unfinished job is for revolutionary organization to also rise to that level. When it does, the troops of the American army can become the troops of the American revolution.

1 Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., "The Collapse of the Armed Forces," Armed Forces Journal, June 7, 1971, reprinted in Marvin Gettleman, et al., Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove Press, 1995), p. 327.

2 Quoted in William G. Effros, Quotations: Vietnam, 1945-70 )New York: Random House, 1970), p. 172.
3 Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 18.
4 Appy, pp. 24-27 and James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), pp. 214-15.
5 James Fallows, "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?" Vietnam: Anthology and Guide to a Television History, Steven Cohen, ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 384.
6 Appy, p. 26. The rate of Black deaths in Vietnam in 1965 was double their army participation rate, but was brought down to normal proportions within three years because of Black soldiers' struggle against racism. The struggle for Black liberation within the army in these years deserves another article of its own. For more information, see David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), pp. 201-16.
7 Appy, pp. 36-37.
8 Larry G. Waterhouse and Mariann G. Wizard, Turning the Guns Around: Notes on the GI Movement (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 136-38.
9 Camp News, January 15, 1971, and March 15, 1971.
10 Vietnam GI, May 1970. Of the hundreds of underground GI newspapers, only a handful appeared regularly over time and had readership beyond a particular base or army division. Of these, the most important were Camp News, The Bond and Vietnam GI. Vietnam GI had the largest following in Vietnam due to its ability to put a clear, radical political analysis in language that connected with the experiences of the grunts. It was put out by Vietnam vets and by former members of the left wing of the Young People's Socialist League, who were loosely associated with, although organizationally independent from, the current that became the American International Socialists.
11 Kim Moody, "The American Working Class in Transition," International Socialism, No. 40 (Old Series), Oct/Nov 1969, p. 19.
12 Effros, p. 209.
13 Appy, pp. 25-26.
14 Cincinnatus, Self-Destruction, The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), p. 155.
15 Cincinnatus, p. 139.
16 Cincinnatus, p. 145.
17 Cincinnatus, p. 146.
18 Cincinnatus, pp. 147-48.
19 Cincinnatus, pp. 157-59.
20 Gibson, p. 116.
21 Cincinnatus, p. 54-56.
22 Cincinnatus, p. 55.
23 Cincinnatus, p. 53.
24 Effros, p. 217.
25 Gibson, p. 71.
26 Gibson, pp. 74-75.
27 Gibson, pp. 101-15 and Cincinnatus, pp. 75-82.
28 Appy, pp. 155-56, and Cincinnatus, pp. 84-85.
29 Seymour M. Hersh, "What Happened at My Lai?" in Gettleman, pp. 410-24.
30 Cohen, p. 378.
31 Appy, pp. 152-58, 182-84.
32 Cincinnatus, pp. 62-63, 70.
33 Cincinnatus, p. 147, 161.
34 Cincinnatus, p. 155.
35 Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage, Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 16.
36 Effros, p. 89.
37 Gibson. See Chapter 6, "The Tet Offensive and the Production of a Double Reality."
38 Robert Musil, "The Truth About Deserters," The Nation, April 16, 1973 and for "Ho Chi Minh" discharges, Steve Rees, "A Questioning Spirit: GIs Against the War" in Dick Custer, ed., They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 171.
39 Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1957), Vol. 1, p. 256.
40 Appy, p. 244-45.
41 Cincinnatus, p. 156 and Richard Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (Perspectives in the Sixties) (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1996), p. 44.
42 Matthew Rinaldi, "The Olive-Drab Rebels: Military Organizing during the Vietnam Era," Radical America, Vol.8 No. 3, May-June 1974, p. 29.
43 Gabriel and Savage, quoted in Appy, p. 254.
44 Cortright, p. 35-36.
45 The Bond, September 22, 1969.
46 Cortright, p. 38.
47 Moser, p. 45.
48 Cortright, p. 36 and Heinl, p. 329.
49 Moser, p. 47 and Cortright, p. 37.
50 Rees, p. 152 and Cortright, p. 37-38.
51 Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 474.
52 Moser, p. 133 and Cortright, p. 35.
53 Wells, p. 475.
54 Trotsky, Vol.1, p. 260.
55 Quoted in Heinl, p. 330.
56 Eugene Linden, "Fragging and Other Withdrawal Symptoms," Saturday Review, January 8, 1972, p. 12.
57 Cincinnatus, pp. 51-52.
58 Moser, p. 48 and Appy, p. 246.
59 Heinl, p. 328.
60 Terry Anderson, "The GI Movement and the Response from the Brass," in Melvin Small and William Hoover, eds., Give Peace A Chance (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1992), p. 105.
61 Andy Stapp, Up Against The Brass (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. 182 and Heinl, p. 328-29 and Appy, p. 230-31.
62 Vietnam GI, June 1969.
63 Linden, p. 14.
64 Wells, p. 474.
65 Linden, p. 12-13.
66 Cortright, p. 44 and Moser, p. 50.
67 Cortright, p. 47 and Moser, p. 50.
68 Quoted in Heinl, p. 328.
69 Linden, p. 15.
70 Trotsky, Vol. 1, p. 261.
71 Cortright, p. 28.
72 Quoted in Moser, p. 98.
73 Quoted in Heinl, p. 330.
74 Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor, recalled "a grave heroin epidemic...surfaced right after the Cambodian invasion." Interviewed in Wells, p. 456. Heroin addiction thereafter affected between 10-30 percent of the troops.
75 Appy, p. 43 and Cincinnatus, p. 27.
76 Heinl, p. 329.
77 Cincinnatus, p. 155.
78 Quoted in Heinl, p. 328.
79 Richard Boyle, GI Revolts: The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam (San Francisco: United Front Press, 1972) p. 28.
80 Moser, p. 132.
81 Wells, p. 526.
82 Heinl, p. 329.
83 Moser, p. 132.
84 Cincinnatus, p. 161.
85 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1982) Vol. 38, pp. 469-70.

Commissar Rykov

11th November 2011, 00:33

Whole villages were cleared, burnt or bombed during the war. When I was in Viet Nam I went to a War Crimes Museum that had on display the vehicles used to bulldoze villages, I think this is what he's referring to.
Exactly, it was pretty standard to displace entire villages by destroying them in order to stop Viet Cong insurgencies...though I imagine that did more to strengthen them than it did to stop them.

B0LSHEVIK

11th November 2011, 19:06

The leaders and the bourgeoisie merely regard infantrymen as expendable pawns, although the general populace would regard the loss of military personnel to be a tragedy. A revolutionary guerrilla or nation should try to impair the logistics (damaging supply lines, depleting financial resources to fund a military campaign, interrupting communications) of their enemy on offensive campaigns instead of inflicting maximum causalities.

Huh?

I was asking about that statement you made about 'poor and working class soldieres...disobeyed....shot their officers.' And, attacking logistics is a great rearguard tactic, but you're not going to win, ever. If the objective is class war, the bourgeois are prepared to leave the world in flame and ruin, before they'll cede the reins of power.

And, thinking about it, doesnt the US and Vietnam today have trade deals of some sorts? I could of sworn the US was about to give them nuclear power or something. Point is, the US got what it wanted, a colony.

Vendetta

11th November 2011, 19:12

The only reasons America didn't 'win' the Vietnam War is simply because of political reasonings.

Militarily, America would've smashed the VC and the NVA into pieces, especially after the Tet offensive.

Politically, America was getting tired of fighting a war with no real end in sight (see: Vietnam's objective).

B0LSHEVIK

11th November 2011, 19:46

Vendetta

11th November 2011, 20:34

Oh, I get it. They didn't fight the war to win it, right?

If that was sarcasm, sorry, I didn't get it. No, the political base that America depended on for support to keep on fighting (ie, the civilians), got so fed up with the war that the government had no choice but to pull out (see: the clusterfuck that was the end of the Vietnam War for America).

I'm giving a really hashed version of what happened, but I'm about 3 24 packs of Yuengling in, so forgive me.

Zealot

11th November 2011, 21:47

Militarily, America would've smashed the VC and the NVA into pieces, especially after the Tet offensive.

Sure, it only took them 20 years before they gave up :laugh:

They didn't win either politically or militarily. The only way they could've won that war was through genocide, if it wasn't already a genocide, because no one in Viet Nam was willing to go under.

Psy

12th November 2011, 00:31

Oh, I get it. They didn't fight the war to win it, right?
The US military didn't know how to win during the Vietnam war. The NVA had advanced USSR weapons that were far superior to the USs at the time for example, the USSR's PT-76 while the USA's answer to light tanks was the then very obsolete M41 Light Tank and the USA only matched the PT-76 with the M551 Sheridan that only started to be deployed in Vietnam in 1969. Then there was the M16 that at the time was a *****y rifle that wouldn't fire unless was cleaned regularly while the NVA had AKM's that was the improved AK-47 that was far more reliable then the M16.

Don't forget to add military bureaucracy that was lying to itself over its successes as officers knew that fudging numbers was a fast track to promotion. So US officer in Vietnam would greatly inflate inflicted casualties on the enemy so they could be given a promotion for doing a good job.

Blake's Baby

12th November 2011, 00:37

America's game changed.

In the early 1960s, they thought they could go in and defeat the NVLA easily. By the late '60s, due to unpopularity of the war at home among the American middle classes, and I'd think more importantly the increasing turbulence of the working class both in the US and throughout the world, that possibility was i think receding rapidly before the US ruling class.

Furthermore, the increasing bitterness of the Sino-Soviet split allowed the US to court China as an ally (or at least, a tolerantly neutral country) against the USSR (still enemy number one at this stage - as the ancient Vulcan proverb has it, "only Nixon could go to China").

I think probably Nixon considered that if Mao demanded that the US leave South-East Asia as a condition for China not supporting the USSR against the USA, that the phrase 'fuck you Saigon I'm going home' was probably at the forefront of many people's minds (not least Kissinger I would think).

So they may have lost the battle for Vietnam, but they won the Cold War.

A Marxist Historian

12th November 2011, 23:50

Explain why.
Explain why in a Marxist perspective if you can.
And also, was America's loss a victory for socialism?

You had a revolution in the country with the support of the great majority of the population, moreover supported by North Vietnam, a state power with its own large, battle-tested army, receiving ample military supplies from the Soviet Union, and some from China too, at least at first.

The US came remarkably close to losing the Iraq War against a vastly weaker and less impressive insurgency. And may well lose in Afghanistan, against insurgents who are rightly detested by probably the majority of the population, namely the Taliban. Invading another country of any size and subduing it is just not that simple.

Of course, the US in theory could have "won" by using its main and most effective military weapon, namely by nuking North Vietnam. And this was discussed quite seriously within the Johnson administration, and also by his successor Nixon.

However, the Soviet Union was supporting North Vietnam and had equally strong nuclear armament. And Brezhnev left it deliberately unclear whether or not the Soviet nuclear shield was covering Hanoi. So that option was not open.

Was it a victory for socialism? Of course.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

13th November 2011, 00:02

The U.S. DIDN'T lose the war in Vietnam. Every single one of the US's goals was obtain merely by fighting that war. Did the North really come out as winners after the war? Just look at their economy. Did 'socialism' continue to spread throughout Asia? No, it pretty much ended there. Did the US pull out? Yes, but that doesn't mean the US lost.

The spread of "socialism" in Southeast Asia, or whatever you want to call it, was halted by the military coup in Indonesia in 1965, after which US intervention in Vietnam really made no more sense, which is why the US ruling class turned against the war in Vietnam, not just the American people.

And yes, the victory in Vietnam had dramatic effects the world over. the FMLN in Algeria, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Portuguese being chased out of Africa, the South Africans chased out of Angola and Namibia, all were direct results of the defeat of US imperialism in Southeast Asia. For a while, a lot of people, even in Washington, were seriously thinking that the USSR not the USA was winning the Cold War.

US imperialism had to basically lay low for a decade and a half, and the US economy took a body blow. Until the Vietnam War, the dollar was pegged to gold, US was far more prosperous than Western Europe or Japan, and the US standard of living was the highest in the world. It's basically been downhill ever since, with a brief interruption during the Clinton years in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR.

As for the North, of course they won. They reunited their country. It was pretty smashed up by the war of course, but they have managed to rebuild, and Vietnam is actually doing rather well economically at the moment, rather better than the US is come to think of it.

Before the Vietnam War, Vietnam was a divided, dirt poor Third World country/colony with no prospects, and the US was on top of the world. Now the US is in ever growing economic crisis and steadily weakening, and the Vietnamese economy is growing at a rate of some 5-10 percent a year. Still far poorer than the US of course, but the gap has definitely narrowed.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

13th November 2011, 00:08

The Vietnam war was less about socialism and capitalism (from the US's perspective) and more about stopping the spread of Soviet influence. So yes the US did lose the Vietnam war, as it took decades for them to re-build relations with Vietnam and by the time they did the Soviet Union was gone and the cold war over.

Rightly or wrongly, from the US perspective there was absolutely no difference between the two. Certainly in the eyes of a capitalist, once his property is taken away, he doesn't care who is running things, it's all socialism to him. And in the eyes of most of the world, too. That is why after the Soviet Union collapsed, everybody everywhere was saying, "well, socialism didn't work."

In fact, right conclusion was that Stalinism doesn't work, but that is another issue argued elsewhere quite adequately on Revleft. I will just say that the notion that socialism and the Soviet system simply had nothing to do with each other is peculiar, that would mean that most of the human race are idiots and we only have smart people here on Revleft, a conclusion I resist.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

13th November 2011, 00:20

Beat me to the punch. Vietnam was made up of a lot of lifers and Right-Wing Kids wanting to kill people for America it was a largely volunteer affair which is quite unlike American involvement in WWII where most were draftees and not the volunteers American Propaganda painted them as. I find it amusing that a war that wasn't popular or did well gets painted with the conscript brush by American Bourgeois Historians while a war that was popular gets dubbed some kind of heroic effort by a generation. Ah historical distortions how sweet thou art.

This is simply not true. Sure, you had a core of lifers, and at first the soldiers were gung ho, because at first your average American was gung ho. But this was overwhelmingly a draft army. You had half a million soldiers in Vietnam at the peak. This was *not* like the current all-volunteer army, but a true reflection of the American people.

And by the end, the overwhelming majority of the soldiers simply did not want to fight, as they had become opponents of the war, like other Americans. The word "fragging" entered the English language, as soldiers got in the habit of tossing grenades at officers who didn't realize that. Heroin addition became universal. Black soldiers in particular were up in arms, quite literally. A number of decorated black war heroes like Geronimo Pratt joined the Black Panthers when they got out. You had few outright mutinies, the Mayaguez being the most famous one, but the US Army was simply no longer a usable force in combat.

A good description of this was written up in the Armed Forces Journal by Col. Robert J. Heinl, "The Collapse of the Armed Forces," June 7, 1971. Reprinted in, among other places, Vietnam and America: A Documentary History (NY: Grove Atlantic, 1995), pp. 323-331. And that was as early as 1971, after that it got worse.

-M.H.-

Klaatu

13th November 2011, 00:26

One of my colleagues is a Vietnamese immigrant student. From what he has told me, it seems that present-day VietNam's public education system is vastly superior to the US. (my opinion, not his)

So who really won the war?

A Marxist Historian

13th November 2011, 00:29

Oh nice, you open in a history thread with pointless bullshit Trotskyist factionalism. It is people like yourself that are the problem in Trotskyism, especially seeing your support for a clearly dead fourth international. Instead of working with others on the same side of the spectrum, you just attack the views, you people are no better than the Stalinists who do the exact same. '68...

"mrmikhail" alleges he is a supporter of the IMT, I have my doubts. I do not care for the IMT, but I do not think a real IMT supporter would systematically lace all his posts with quotes from right wing and police sources. And his claim on another thread that police are "petty bourgeois" is not only pro-cop, it is illiterate to the degree that I am sure no real Grantite would entertain it.

Anybody who, like "mrmikhail," wants to run around claiming that there is a rape a day at Occupy Wall Street, basing this, as he outright admitted, on what a New York policeman says, is suspect.

-M.H.-

mrmikhail

13th November 2011, 01:01

"mrmikhail" alleges he is a supporter of the IMT, I have my doubts. I do not care for the IMT, but I do not think a real IMT supporter would systematically lace all his posts with quotes from right wing and police sources. And his claim on another thread that police are "petty bourgeois" is not only pro-cop, it is illiterate to the degree that I am sure no real Grantite would entertain it.

Anybody who, like "mrmikhail," wants to run around claiming that there is a rape a day at Occupy Wall Street, basing this, as he outright admitted, on what a New York policeman says, is suspect.

-M.H.-

You got it buddy :rolleyes:

If you do not follow every line of your party, you are not a member of it! That seems to be about the rhetoric you take on everything, if someone disagrees with you they are obviously wrong and possibly a fascist! Well let's see what we can dig up from your own party, you seem to claim the USSR was Stalinist even in 1991, well then how can you explain away the Sparts supporting this nation's invasion of Afghanistan? I must say that had to be the point when you and your group abandoned Trotskyism, no? Especially since your party opened the article with "Hail the Red Army!".

And once again you come up with factionalism, while yourself engaging in it. And also I pointed in the second thread to a VFW report. But we'll just got with your baseless attacks ;)

Here's (http://www.wsws.org/exhibits/slreply/part7-1.shtml) a link talking about the Sparts and how the retrospectively glorified Stalinism, from a Trotskyist organisation of the fourth international.

Here's (http://www.communist-league.org/tcm/tcm201002.pdf) another one, Sparts supporting US army in Haiti.

Here's (http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/archives/oldsite/Pointblk.htm)the one on Soviet Imperialism in Afghanistan

So yeah, by this we should be able to conclude, that you being a rhetoric spitting fully loyal dog of your party, that the Sparts not only support Stalinism, as they claim it, but also imperialism in general be it US or Soviet.

mrmikhail

13th November 2011, 01:12

systematically lace all his posts with quotes from right wing and police sources. And his claim on another thread that police are "petty bourgeois" is not only pro-cop, it is illiterate to the degree that I am sure no real Grantite would entertain it.

Yep, all my posts are laced with right wing sources! Every single one of them people, just have a look, even the ones without sources are obviously right wing sources! Sparts really can't do anything but come up with lies against other Trotskyists from their bourgeois high horse and support imperialism from the same place. I have seen nothing in this organisation short of sheer comedy.

and considering the police as non-proletarian, and instead the latchers on to the bourgeois coat tails, acting as their dogs and supporting their interests is pro-cop? Wow buddy you could have fooled me there! And there is no such thing as a Grantite. I am a Trotskyist of the IMT organisation, so get over using the terminology less I shall start calling you a bourgeois imperialist (which the Sparts clearly are)

Black_Rose

13th November 2011, 01:36

The spread of "socialism" in Southeast Asia, or whatever you want to call it, was halted by the military coup in Indonesia in 1965, after which US intervention in Vietnam really made no more sense, which is why the US ruling class turned against the war in Vietnam, not just the American people.

And yes, the victory in Vietnam had dramatic effects the world over. the FMLN in Algeria, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Portuguese being chased out of Africa, the South Africans chased out of Angola and Namibia, all were direct results of the defeat of US imperialism in Southeast Asia. For a while, a lot of people, even in Washington, were seriously thinking that the USSR not the USA was winning the Cold War.

US imperialism had to basically lay low for a decade and a half, and the US economy took a body blow. Until the Vietnam War, the dollar was pegged to gold, US was far more prosperous than Western Europe or Japan, and the US standard of living was the highest in the world. It's basically been downhill ever since, with a brief interruption during the Clinton years in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR.

As for the North, of course they won. They reunited their country. It was pretty smashed up by the war of course, but they have managed to rebuild, and Vietnam is actually doing rather well economically at the moment, rather better than the US is come to think of it.

Before the Vietnam War, Vietnam was a divided, dirt poor Third World country/colony with no prospects, and the US was on top of the world. Now the US is in ever growing economic crisis and steadily weakening, and the Vietnamese economy is growing at a rate of some 5-10 percent a year. Still far poorer than the US of course, but the gap has definitely narrowed.

-M.H.-

-M.H-

Unfortunately, the Vietnam debacle did not prevent the Chilean military coup; it appears that the CIA still had enough influence to direct the overthrow of Allende. Although I am not a Trotskyist (as also reflects my intellectual pedigree*), I do not advocate "permanent revolution", but it seems that many simultaneous revolutions by the victims of imperialism can overwhelm imperialism's military apparatus, although can productively support in revolutionary in a country where the historical conditions justify and are conducive of revolution, such as a country exploited for natural resources or cheap labor, for export to a "core" imperialist country.

*To use a religious analogy, while I was a neophyte in revolutionary leftism, my catechists (Henry CK Liu and Stephen Gowans) were adamant Marxist-Leninists who occasionally pointed out the "flaws" of Trotskyism, although they did not expose me to any anti-Trotskyist polemics.

mrmikhail

13th November 2011, 01:44

Lev Bronsteinovich

13th November 2011, 02:27

It is also quite amazing to learn the the Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minn felt extremely betrayed by the US entrance in place of the French. They thought that, considering American Ideals against colonialism, and the way the US fought against the British for THEIR own independence, and that the Allies fought against the Nazis, that SURELY they would side with the then INDEPENDENCE movement of the Vietnamese AGAINST the French. That this failed to materialize was extremely enraging and disappointing to Ho and his people. To think of what could have been if the US hadn't betrayed it's own "ideals"...and the lives and treasure it could have saved...

Well, I guess Uncle Ho forgot any lesson he may have ever learned about imperialism. It's hard to believe, actually, that he would have been so insanely ignorant and naive. But as a Stalinist he had some pretty poor training. That being said, he did lead the North to victory in the war, a victory that any socialist should support wholeheartedly. The reasons the US lost have been fairly well elaborated in this discussion. I think an interesting point that has not been made was that the most important battle had been lost in Indonesia -- where the Maoist PKI put its faith in the nationalist Sukharno, and got slaughtered for that favor. Indonesia was far more importantly strategically in Southeast Asia than Vietnam, a country with a relatively small population and few natural resources.

The loss in Vietnam slowed down US military adventures for a couple of decades, a gift to the rest of the world.

S.Artesian

13th November 2011, 04:17

Well, when you give a bunch of poor teenagers rifles and forcefully draft them into a war being fought for terms not relevant to their class interests, you are naturally going to be in for a volatile situation.

As the US military was dependent upon a degree of war mobilization which required heavy and willful participation from the working class, it was bound to see its operations fall to pieces once the proletarian developed a conscious reflective of the realities of this imperialistic conflict.

Nope. Sorry, that's not what happened. What class consciousness did develop, let's say enlisted vs. officers was secondary, a result, not a cause.

Why did the US lose? 1) Because it could not control the battlefield. Why couldn't it control the battlefield? Because it could not stop the resupply of the "enemy." Why couldn't it stop the resupply of the "enemy?" Because of the fSU. 2) Because the imperialist war was a civil war, and the US supported South Vietnamese government really couldn't govern.

Once the uniformed working class began to realize that its interests were not being represented by their participation in this war of the rich, the entire apparatus simply began to fall to pieces. Most every ship in the US navy had an underground press distributing dissident thought to sailors and groups of workers who would convene in clandestine meetings to discuss their intense antagonisms against the capitalist system. The US Army encounter an endemic case of 'fragging', wherein officers would simply be shot by drafted soldiers for issuing orders which were disagreeable to the class conscious soldiers.

Ahh......not really. None of the underground press in the Navy ever resulted in a mission not being fulfilled.

And fragging was not endemic. It occurred, certainly. Occurred, too, in WW2 from what I've been told. Didn't happen that much.

When you combine the structural faults which arise in a military staffed primarily by poverty stricken workers and governed by wealthy officers with a parallel consciousness of political awareness which was insurgent in the US as a result of this baseless conflict of imperial hegemony, it was only inevitable that the US should of lost the war. It was not a matter of who had the shinier guns or who had superior motivation, it was a matter of the political action of the working class forcing the gears of the imperialist war machine to come to a grinding halt as a result of their mass organization and action against the capitalist class and their imperial affairs.

The "class conscious" US soldiers did not end that war. Their consciousness really never reached what would be called class consciousness. Certainly, there was a breakdown in discipline. Certainly there was resistance to "apparently" pointless missions [like the famous Hamburger Hill], but again these things occurred because the US lost control of the battlefield. Losing control of the battlefield did not occur because of class-conscious actions by the enlisted/conscripted troops.

Jimmie Higgins

13th November 2011, 09:49

Explain why.
Explain why in a Marxist perspective if you can.In the US left the explaination for many was that the loss was due to 3 things:

1. The resistance of the Vietnamese themselves - basically haveing popular support and resisting were pre-conditions for them even hoping to prevent US control. It should go without saying. And even thought I disagree with the politics of the North and don't think that model has anything to do with socialism and worker's power, it was a legitimate national resistance to imperialism.
2. Popular anti-war movements and sentiment in the US. The protests made it more difficult for the US government to have carte blanche in fighting the war. As bad and ruthless as the US was, domestic stability and trying to save political face during the cold war, did tie their hands to a degree. It also layed the groundwork for a maybe more direct domestic factor which brings me to...
3. Resistance and discontent in the US military. Essentially there was a breakdown in discipline in the war machine. The popular anti-war sentiment fostered this as well as the black resistance movement. Black GIs resisted first due to the existing movement back in the US - because of political lessons learned in the civil rights movement, among black people there was more of a consciousness that it was "not our war". As civilian anti-war organizing increased the discontent made it easier for GIs to feel confident disagreeing with the war and they had allies who could help them outside the military which was very important. Some GIs and enlistees openly sided with "the enemy" in Solidarity and refused orders, many more saw their officers and the US system as their real enemy and many many more just refused to put their asses on the line for their officers to get medals and for US empire. Towards the end of the ground war, the US simply wasn't able to order solider to be bait anymore and so the ground war was abondoned in favor of bombings. Even after the ground war though, NAVY and Air Force refusals and revolts happened.

And also, was America's loss a victory for socialism?It was a victory for workers because the less power that an empire like the US or USSR has to repress people and dictate its will, the more chance workers can resist. In the US, the war exposed the US, even the liberal face of it, to be dripping with blood and desire for empire at all cost. The anti-war struggles (and civil rights before) engaged a whole layer of people in the US to fight-back against imperialism and out of these movements increased class consiousness and struggle emerged in the late 1960s. The struggle of the Vietnamese against the Japanese, French, and the US increased world-wide identification with anti-imperialist struggles.

The loss and the breakdown of the military machine in the US led to an end to conscription and kept the US from unleashing it's full military force until basically the first Gulf War. The US had to do covert things for 20 years due to the "Vietnam Syndrome" because it was afraid of what the political costs of a war would do. Sure the covert things were pretty awful, but compared to the devastation of Iraq and Afghanistan (which I'm sure could have happened all over Latin America in the 1980s if the US hadn't lost in Vietnam) it is at least noteworthy.

Psy

13th November 2011, 15:48

The "class conscious" US soldiers did not end that war. Their consciousness really never reached what would be called class consciousness. Certainly, there was a breakdown in discipline. Certainly there was resistance to "apparently" pointless missions [like the famous Hamburger Hill], but again these things occurred because the US lost control of the battlefield. Losing control of the battlefield did not occur because of class-conscious actions by the enlisted/conscripted troops.
More that the US didn't understand the battlefield. The US thought it could lure the enemy out into the open and destroy it with air and artillery power, yet the NVA and NLF was able to dig underground to the point artillery and bombings were more of a nuisance, key NLF underground bases being directly under US bases thus the leadership of the NLF was not even bothered by artillery and bombings.

Same with the air bombings of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the US through it could take out the supply line from North Vietnam into the south but their enemy was being advised USSR military advisors that knew how to prevent supply lines from getting destroyed by air power, they trained the North Vietnamese how to create decoys to draw air power away and how to hide convoys off trails so when bombers pass over head so the bombers can't see them (that would then see the decoys and drop their bombs away from the convoy).

Basically the US was dealing with a enemy that refused to stand out in the open so the US can easily destroy it.

S.Artesian

13th November 2011, 17:03

More that the US didn't understand the battlefield. The US thought it could lure the enemy out into the open and destroy it with air and artillery power, yet the NVA and NLF was able to dig underground to the point artillery and bombings were more of a nuisance, key NLF underground bases being directly under US bases thus the leadership of the NLF was not even bothered by artillery and bombings.

Yeah well, the tunnel system was quite extensive. The usual story is that Cu Chi [HQ of the 25th Infantry Division IIRC] was honeycombed with tunnels. Indeed the tunnels of Cu Chi were huge, extending for miles and miles, so much so that you could get lost in them...and die. But the tunnels were not built directly under the US HQ. Rather the perimeter of certain fire bases, etc. included areas above the tunnels.

Anyone who thinks the artillery and bombings were just a nuisance, and didn't bother the NLF [or PLAF and/or the NVA] doesn't know what he or she is talking about.

The toll taken by both was pretty horrific on Vietnamese forces

Basically the US was dealing with a enemy that refused to stand out in the open so the US can easily destroy it.

Oh, that's mostly myth, too-- particularly for the Tet and post-Tet engagments. Tet pretty well decimated the NLF/PLAF forces and militias. Regular army troops, trained in the North, constituted as armies with armor and artillery carried the war forward.

Fact of the matter was, they stood, they fought, and they won.

Psy

13th November 2011, 17:19

Yeah well, the tunnel system was quite extensive. The usual story is that Cu Chi [HQ of the 25th Infantry Division IIRC] was honeycombed with tunnels. Indeed the tunnels of Cu Chi were huge, extending for miles and miles, so much so that you could get lost in them...and die. But the tunnels were not built directly under the US HQ. Rather the perimeter of certain fire bases, etc. included areas above the tunnels.

Anyone who thinks the artillery and bombings were just a nuisance, and didn't bother the NLF [or PLAF and/or the NVA] doesn't know what he or she is talking about.

The toll taken by both was pretty horrific on Vietnamese forces

True but that was mostly when Vietnamese force actually locked horns with US ground forces with significant firepower. Artillery and air power while did cause significant casualties it wasn't focused to the point US ground forces could take advantage of it and for the amount of explosives the US lobbed indiscriminately towards where they thought the enemy was few hit anything.

Oh, that's mostly myth, too-- particularly for the Tet and post-Tet engagments. Tet pretty well decimated the NLF/PLAF forces and militias. Regular army troops, trained in the North, constituted as armies with armor and artillery carried the war forward.

Fact of the matter was, they stood, they fought, and they won.
Though Tet was a change of tactics, previously the NLF had planned out their means of disengaging the US forces before they engaged.

thesadmafioso

14th November 2011, 03:37

Nope. Sorry, that's not what happened. What class consciousness did develop, let's say enlisted vs. officers was secondary, a result, not a cause.

Why did the US lose? 1) Because it could not control the battlefield. Why couldn't it control the battlefield? Because it could not stop the resupply of the "enemy." Why couldn't it stop the resupply of the "enemy?" Because of the fSU. 2) Because the imperialist war was a civil war, and the US supported South Vietnamese government really couldn't govern.

Ahh......not really. None of the underground press in the Navy ever resulted in a mission not being fulfilled.

And fragging was not endemic. It occurred, certainly. Occurred, too, in WW2 from what I've been told. Didn't happen that much.

The "class conscious" US soldiers did not end that war. Their consciousness really never reached what would be called class consciousness. Certainly, there was a breakdown in discipline. Certainly there was resistance to "apparently" pointless missions [like the famous Hamburger Hill], but again these things occurred because the US lost control of the battlefield. Losing control of the battlefield did not occur because of class-conscious actions by the enlisted/conscripted troops.

Well yeah, I didn't mean to imply that conflicts between officers and soldiers led to the development of class consciousness, I meant to use the example to show instances wherein such manifested itself.

I never also said that the class conscious US solider won the US withdrawal, I made a note of commenting on how that when these sentiments of class awareness were combined with mass political action on the home front from organs of the working class that such was achieved. Sure, fragging was not an endemic problem to the US military and underground papers never led to a reprise of Battleship Potemkin, but they still make for great examples of what happens when you take the actual class instincts of the worker into the pressure cooker of imperialist war.

cherokeetears

14th November 2011, 03:43

American imperialism imposed the government of a minority on a country that supported socialism overwhelmingly, especially as the war progressed and the South Vietnamese government and American soldiers alienated the population through brutal martial law and human rights abuses.

Also, guerrilla warfare helped the VietCong defeat the American Soldiers

AntifaZG

24th November 2011, 01:05

Explain why.
Explain why in a Marxist perspective if you can.
And also, was America's loss a victory for socialism?

They didn't go full power into the conflict.. they just used a small part of their army... There is no Marxist perspective, there is only the Miltiades perspective...

Its not a victory for socialism since Vietnam is following China's footsteps and opening itself to the free market.

A Marxist Historian

24th November 2011, 10:05

-M.H-

Unfortunately, the Vietnam debacle did not prevent the Chilean military coup; it appears that the CIA still had enough influence to direct the overthrow of Allende. Although I am not a Trotskyist (as also reflects my intellectual pedigree*), I do not advocate "permanent revolution", but it seems that many simultaneous revolutions by the victims of imperialism can overwhelm imperialism's military apparatus, although can productively support in revolutionary in a country where the historical conditions justify and are conducive of revolution, such as a country exploited for natural resources or cheap labor, for export to a "core" imperialist country.

*To use a religious analogy, while I was a neophyte in revolutionary leftism, my catechists (Henry CK Liu and Stephen Gowans) were adamant Marxist-Leninists who occasionally pointed out the "flaws" of Trotskyism, although they did not expose me to any anti-Trotskyist polemics.

Your logic here is a bit flawed, as the Vietnamese hadn't won yet when the coup happened. But OTOH you had military coups elsewhere in Latin America that did, I think. Argentina maybe?

But in any case, the Vietnamese victory wasn't some sort of magic wand that totally broke the back of US imperialism. It weakened it, and in the aftermath you had things like the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua and the Portuguese being chased out of Africa that quite likely would have gone differently if the US had succeeded in crushing the NLF. If for no other reason than that US military intervention on the reactionary side would have been much more likely.

But ultimately what determines what happens in a country is the domestic class struggle. Despite all the CIA's conspiring, the reason Allende was overthrown was because the Allende regime did everything possible to curb and check the struggle of the Chilean masses vs. capitalism, so when the coup happens the workers had been demoralized and could not resist strongly enough. Who do you think appointed Pinochet as head of the Chilean army? Allende of course.

-M.H.-

sulla

24th November 2011, 22:37

The source that the Grantist ("IMT") "MrMikhail" quotes, comes from the Viet Nam Helicopter Flight Crews Network, which is very likely a pro-war source, and consists of quotes from the likes of President Richard Nixon, General William Westmoreland, General Barry McCaffrey, etc., all of whom were pro-war, so, if you believe Richard Nixon or General Westmoreland were objective commentators on their failed intervention (and few people in the US believed that at the time), then "MrMikhail" has made his point, that GI's were pro-war. I guess that is why they fragged their officers and why there was a collapse of morale in the US Army during its intervention in Viet Nam.

Furthermore, the war was fought by conscripts for years, because the US military had conscription until 1973, and the US had fought in Viet Nam from the mid-1960's. I was subject to conscription during that war, and, if you got drafted, chances are, you would be sent to 'Nam as a replacement for someone who got shot. Every young man in the US at the time knew that.

* * *

Another thing that stopped the war and led to the US' defeat, was action by the US Congress, which progressively shut off funds for the war, probably as more and more of the ruling-class decided that prolonging the war was not in the interests of US power in the world. During the Viet Nam war, there was a whole bloc of US (pro-imperialist) politicians who thought the war was a useless drain on US resources, and their "dissent" from the war was, I am sure, felt in Congress.

* * *

The interesting question today is, why is the US still in Afghanistan, a war even more pointless, even more peripheral to US imperial interests than Viet Nam, and a war about which, there is now dissent even in the US Defense Department.

Afghanistan has at least 3 trillion dollars worth of valuable minerals. Also I think if you look at the history of capitalism, it always seems to want to covert other societies to it's system. I think the powers that be have decided that Afghanistans tribal system, would not be suitable for neo-colonialism. So they plan to change it into a typical 3rd world country with corrupt leader, that will be malleable to first word interests.

leemadison11

1st December 2011, 09:51

citizen of industry

1st December 2011, 10:19

The Westerners concept of war is to come on an open land and fight on the other hand the Asians have a different concept for war, they are excellent in stealth mode and are great in utilizing the environment to camouflage themselves. So it was'nt possible for Americans to push into Vietnam as they were untrained for such form of combat. It is also true that the world sympathiesed with Vietnam and that there were many protest about the war and all so US had to retrieve and fall back its soldiers.

This is untrue. Asian armies have typically utilized night combat, use of tunnels and fortifications, etc. against the US because of a huge firepower and airpower imbalance. You can see this in WWII, the Korean war and Vietnam. Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese armies also sustained casualties far out of proportion to their US counterparts. Basically, they incur a nasty slaughter against the imperial US war machine and the only tactics marginally effective are asymmetric. In the case of the Japanese and Koreans, they didn't rely on stealth or utilizing the environment any different than western powers, in fact they used essentially the same materials, engineering and tactics, until the balance of power turned against them.

Nox

1st December 2011, 11:00

Explain why.
Explain why in a Marxist perspective if you can.
And also, was America's loss a victory for socialism?

Here are some reasons:

- Morale amongst US troops was low, whereas morale amongst the Vietcong & NVA was very high.

- There was very low public support for the war in the USA, in fact there were many protests against it.

- The USA was spending ridiculous amounts of money on the war to little avail.

- The USA were not equipped to fight against guerrila-warfare style groups.

- The NVA and Vietcong were absolute badasses with far superior tactics. The Ho Chi Minh trail should be recognised as one of the greatest military tactics ever used.

- The North had a lot of support amongst the working class/peasantry in the south e.g. the Vietcong

- One reason I haven't seen anyone mention yet is the Tet Offensive, it was a huge propaganda victory for the North.

I wouldn't say it was a victory for socialism, because I don't believe any Marxist-Leninist state has ever achieved socialism. But it was certainly a victory for the working class and anti-imperialism.

The U.S. DIDN'T lose the war in Vietnam. Every single one of the US's goals was obtain merely by fighting that war. Did the North really come out as winners after the war? Just look at their economy. Did 'socialism' continue to spread throughout Asia? No, it pretty much ended there. Did the US pull out? Yes, but that doesn't mean the US lost.

They did lose. Don't listen to the bullcrap they teach you in school about "pulling out". They got their fucking greedy asses handed to them.

They failed every single one of their objectives, suffered huge casualties and fled the country.

I will always remember the Vietnam War as the time when a world imperialist superpower went toe to toe with a small Asian country and got totally fucked over by the might of the working class.

bloody_capitalist_sham

1st December 2011, 13:23

S.Artesian

1st December 2011, 14:39

The Vietcong used a form of Asymmetric warfare, which meant that the US forces were unable to develop the conflict into a more conventional war in which they would have the advantage.

Asymmetric warfare is only fighting in situations where you can likely escape with minimal loss of life after you have attacked a target. The point is not to let the enemy engage directly with your forces, whenever the enemy forces are stronger.

The Vietcong only engaged rarely in fullscale conflict, and when they did they were always the loser.

The Soviets experienced the same vulnerability in afganhnistan.

Some of the combat might be called "asymmetric" but "asymmetry" did not defeat the US and the ARVN. Battalion strength, and above, combat defeated the US and the ARVN.

And.. the vulnerability the Soviets experience in Afghanistan, was the vulnerability to US arming and funding of the enemy.

bloody_capitalist_sham

1st December 2011, 16:08

Mr. Natural

1st December 2011, 16:55

The US didn't prevent revolution in Viet Nam, but it sure as hell perverted it. Viet Nam is now an impoverished country desperate to get in good standing with global capitalism, and its people have little freedom. In the long run, capitalism has won.

I'm not at all happy about this. I cut my eyeteeth on the Viet Nam War and hate what the US and its imperial allies did with a purple passion.

When I think of Viet Nam these days, I also think of what the US and Israel are doing to the Palestinians. Obama lecturing the Palestinians at the UN recently that "there is no shortcut to statehood" has to be one of the most politically obscene and bankrupt statements ever made by an American president.

I live in Obamaland, and "I'm hatin' it."

Tim Cornelis

1st December 2011, 17:09

socialism did spread to Cambodia...but we all know how that turned out, Vietnam had to stop that one.

Marxism-Leninism also spread to Laos in 1975, and it still officially is Marxist-Leninist. But, for some reason, Laos is not on anyone's radar and people tend to not know it still--officially--is Marxist-Leninist.

(EDIT: Why do so many people here write "Viet Nam"?)

mrmikhail

1st December 2011, 17:22

(EDIT: Why do so many people here write "Viet Nam"?)

Because that it how it is officially spelled in the local language, or Việt Nam to be specific, Vietnam is a western spelling of the nation.

Rusty Shackleford

1st December 2011, 17:28

Vietnam won national independence after decades of french, japanese and american rule.

S.Artesian

1st December 2011, 17:37

Whenever the vietcong did use conventional tactics like fighting battles where they directly enganged US soldeirs they were massacred. That is a fact.

The Vietcong won only because of gorilla tactics which allowed them to lower the attrition rate verses US forces.

If they had not fought and asymmetric war they would have been beaten easily.

suggesting that large scale troops battles favoured the Vietcong is the opposite to conventional thought on this war.

1. That's not a fact. Conventional battle tactics were used mostly by the NVA, and they did not always lead to defeat or massacre. They certainly led to heavy casualties. That's what firepower and air support can do. However in the Ia Drang Valley [twice] the NVA [think it was the 66th and 33rd regiments of the NVA Infantry] was able to inflict heavy casualties on the 1st Cav [Airmobile-- specifically 7th Cav], and the following year the 101st Airborne.

After Tet, the NLF [the term Viet Cong was coined as a slur by the US and South Vietnamese governments] militias and provincial forces were pretty well decimated, and the NVA assumed the burden for almost all the remaining fighting. The NVA utilized battalion, and larger, sized units, with supporting artillery and armor. The war was not a guerrilla war when it came to forcing the withdrawal of the US.

2. Opposite to who's conventional thought? Suggest you study up a bit more on the actual course of the war.

Os Cangaceiros

1st December 2011, 17:39

S.Artesian

1st December 2011, 18:05

Yeah, I watched that show Vietname in HD recently, and that did seem to be the theme...the Tet offensive was probably the most famous instance of open combat by the communist Vietnamese forces, and, while initially impressive, they got absolutely fucking pounded by American airpower.

Tet, as I pointed out, was tremendously costly to the militias and provisional forces of the NLF.

Pre-Tet was also costly to the NVA-- particularly at Khe Sanh where perhaps the NVA lost a whole division in its month long assault on the base. Now whether or not the NVA was defeated at Khe Sanh is another issues, since the assault proved to the US that the level of effort required to properly defend such forward bases was essentially unsustainable, making the war, in every real sense, unwinnable. The US did later pull out of Khe Sanh.

Similarly with Tet. Certainly the physical toll on the NLF provisional forces was so severe that the NLF could not put units in the field again for over a year. Still, the assault proved that the US could not control the battlefield, and could not control the battlefield even after defeating this "all-out" assault.

Os Cangaceiros

1st December 2011, 18:13

S.Artesian

1st December 2011, 18:37

It seemed like the American forces suffered under the delusion of controlling the battlefield for a while...they prosecuted the war like a conventional ground campaign, aka they'd fight the Vietnamese opposition, capture some piece of land, and then hold it for a while. Then they'd leave and the Vietnamese would simply reoccupy it.

Another thing that seemed to hold the Americans back was the fact that the South Vietnamese allies gave off the impression of being pretty worthless. It seems to me, when trying to counter an insurgency or guerilla force, that reliable local assets are very valuable, and it didn't appear like the USA had that in Vietnam.

No doubt. The SVN government simply could not generate any popular support, being in origin a government based on an unstable alliance of the Catholic Church, larger landowners, bureaucrats, urban elite, the military, all held together by the glue of imperialist funding. After the overthrow of Diem, the government's only grew worse and more unstable.

As for the ARVN itself-- in the end the army reflects its officers, until the point where it overthrows those officers. The ARVN wasn't about to do the latter. And the officers were.........words can't describe how venal, vicious, commercial the officer corps was.

S.Artesian

4th December 2011, 00:23

WTF does that have to do with why the US was defeated in Viet Nam.

S.Artesian

4th December 2011, 01:21

Not a thing, but he is determined to start a tendency war, every post he made in accordance to mine was an attack on the IMT. If you argue against this "amh" you get hit with ad hominem and various other logical fallacies, because he just, in his own mind, cannot be incorrect.

So put him on your ignore list so the thread maintains a bit of continuity.

mrmikhail

4th December 2011, 01:35

So put him on your ignore list so the thread maintains a bit of continuity.

He has been there for weeks, but he is the one who continually brings it up, so I view post when I hear I am attacked and respond.

thesadmafioso

4th December 2011, 23:03

Since "mrmikhail" knows he can't defend his trying to frame New York OWS up as a bunch of rapists, he drags out everything except the kitchen sink to distract attention from his crime.

He is, at best, a troll, if not something worse.

I don't believe in feeding the trolls.

-M.H.-

Verbal Warning for flaming/trolling.

Stop dragging discussions from other topics into this and keep on with the topic at hand.

A Marxist Historian

5th December 2011, 10:32

Verbal Warning for flaming/trolling.

Stop dragging discussions from other topics into this and keep on with the topic at hand.

Be pleased to.

Why no verbal warning to "mrmikhail" for dragging out everything except the kitchen sink to fling in my direction, utterly irrelevant to the OP, may I ask? To which I was simply responding, in the post you flagged?

-M.H.-

thesadmafioso

5th December 2011, 15:31

Be pleased to.

Why no verbal warning to "mrmikhail" for dragging out everything except the kitchen sink to fling in my direction, utterly irrelevant to the OP, may I ask? To which I was simply responding, in the post you flagged?

-M.H.-

I trashed a few of his posts for the welfare of the topic as well, but I didn't issue a warning to him as he was simply responding to allegations which were already made.

Also, for future reference, you should really make these sorts of inquiries in the members forum as it frees up the history forum for its actual purpose.

A Marxist Historian

6th December 2011, 20:15

I trashed a few of his posts for the welfare of the topic as well, but I didn't issue a warning to him as he was simply responding to allegations which were already made.

Also, for future reference, you should really make these sorts of inquiries in the members forum as it frees up the history forum for its actual purpose.

OK fine. Point made at any rate, as far as I'm concerned.

-M.H.-