Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War

Table of Contents

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One - WHY WE WERE IN VIETNAM

Vietnam 1954-1960 (Nation Building 101)

The playboy and the priest

Chapter Two - CAMELOT IT WAS NOT

Sideshow in Laos: Instructive history ignored

Vietnam: JFK’s godchild

JFK’s big adventure goes sour

Blaming Diem

Flaming Buddhists

The end of Diem

Chapter Three - LBJ’S WAR

China Beach Blanket Bingo

Earlier heroics

Hey, hey, LBJ, how in the heck did you get us into this mess?

Air War Vietnam

Rolling (intermittent with light showers) Thunder, March 1965 to November 1968

Operation Barrel Roll, December 1964 to March 1973

Operation Steel Tiger, April 1965 to November 1968

Tet

Chapter Four - UNHERALDED VICTORY, 1968-1973

The reason why

The missing (largely successful) years

Abrams, Bunker, Colby: The team that could

The old order changeth

The Phoenix program

The handoff to Nixon—no more Mr. Nice Guy

The secret bombing

The Cambodian Invasion

Nixon delivers

The 1972 Christmas bombing

Endgame

Chapter Five - THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

Oh, come on, were the Commies really that bad?

Jane, you ignorant slut. (Actually Dan Aykroyd to Jane Curtin on Saturday ...

Not the VFW

Six great myths of the anti-war movement

The government of South Vietnam is corrupt and unworthy of our support

The Vietnam War is a civil war that needs to be decided by its own people

The American people don’t support the war

The Vietnam war is a proxy war between the capitalist West and the Communist East

The war is immoral

It’s an unwinnable war

Chapter Six - COMING HOME

Vietnam Veteran—and proud of it

The best books about the war (an impossible list)

Summing up: Lessons learned

Acknowledgements

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

INDEX

Copyright Page

Praise for The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to

THE VIETNAM WAR

Phil Jennings has something to say, namely that the historical record, as selectively compiled and presented by the political Left, has done a terrible disservice to the hundreds of thousands of men who fought in The Vietnam War. With great passion, an unapologetic love of his country, and—drum roll, please—the truth to support his case, Captain Jennings walks us through this tragic struggle, the war America never lost, but wasn’t allowed to win, either.

-L. Brent Bozell III, nationally syndicated columnist and president of the Media Research Center

In the past several decades, no historical subject has been so grievously distorted by the politically correct as the Vietnam War. Whereas most of the war’s chroniclers objected to American involvement at the time, Phillip Jennings was in Vietnam fighting the war, and like most veterans he disputes the antiwar narrative that has dominated the publishing world. His account skillfully weaves together a wealth of historical facts that blow apart the myths handed down by professors and journalists.

-Mark Moyar, Ph.D., author of Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965

When I first met Jennings at Camp Lejeune in the 1960s, he told me his ambition was to become the world’s first successful right-wing folk singer. He failed miserably at that, but yet, over the last 40 years, he has managed to channel his energies toward successfully defeating political correctness wherever he finds it. This book debunks so many of what our generation’s warriors know to be ‘The Myths of Vietnam’ that it needs to be required reading. Lance Corporal Diogenes, you may extinguish your lamp. Our generation has found an honest man.

-Major General Larry S. Taylor, USMCR (retired), former Commanding General, 4th Marine Aircraft Wing

For my wife, Deborah. Like a good Marine—Always Faithful.

Introduction

THE DEFEAT THAT WASN’T

No war in American history is as shrouded in obfuscation and myth as the Vietnam War—despite the fact that it was televised at the time, and has been written about at such enormous length that my bookshelves creak under the strain of my Vietnam library. Vietnam has entered into our national memory as a byword for disaster, usually accompanied by the word quagmire, and the specter of the war has haunted our foreign policy discussions ever since.

Guess what?

003 America didn’t lose the Vietnam War

004 Communism did not triumph in Southeast Asia

005 The Vietnamese people are today one of the most pro-American on the planet

The biggest myth perpetuated about the Vietnam War is that America lost. However misguided America’s leaders might have been in some of their political, strategic, and tactical decisions, we still won the war. We forced North Vietnam to submit to the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. Those accords ended the war and pledged the North Vietnamese to peaceful coexistence with the South. I fought in Vietnam, and I never saw us lose a battle. Ask a North Vietnamese veteran of the war, and if he’s honest, he’ll say the same—the Communists could never defeat us on the battlefield. If you look at the casualty figures, you can see brutal confirmation of that. The United States military lost more than 58,000 men in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese military lost more than 1.1 million.¹ Who would you guess was the victor?

Look at the geopolitical outcome of the war. Communist Vietnam is dependent on Western aid and trying to adopt aspects of a capitalist economy—indeed, Vietnam is now regarded as one of the most pro-American countries in Asia in that its young people look to emulate Bill Gates rather than Ho Chi Minh.² If you look at Vietnam’s southern neighbors, you’ll see that they’re mostly free and no longer in fear of Communist expansion. Though Laos and Cambodia fell, no other nations succumbed to Communist control; and Vietnam’s and Laos’s postwar poverty and Cambodia’s killing fields—a Communist-imposed genocide based on class and politics—have so discredited Communism in Asia that even the great remaining Communist power, China, is itself rapidly liberalizing its economy. It is no longer leading any sort of Communist vanguard of worker or peasant revolution. In fact, China’s chief Asian allies are two pariah states of particular stench: Burma and North Korea.

It’s true, however, that the people of South Vietnam lost the war, and lost it in a way that is painful to contemplate. It is true that they were shamefully abandoned by a United States Congress that had ousted the president, Richard Nixon, who was the architect of our military victory. That Congress, perhaps drunk with irresponsible power after having defenestrated President Nixon, was insistent on washing its hands of South Vietnam, even if it meant disgrace and dishonor for America and a catastrophe we had fought to prevent for our South Vietnamese allies who were handed over to Communist tyranny. If the Vietnamese people have hope for a better future, it is only because they are looking towards America. Behind them, and still over them, is a Communist regime of reeducation camps and a dictatorship that drove hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to risk death in fleeing the country on the high seas.

I’ve written this book in order to set the record straight—and to settle scores with the pernicious mythmakers of the war. I’ve written it for my fellow Vietnam veterans who have been so badly mistreated by the media and cultural trendsetters of this country. And I’ve written it for those too young to remember the war, but who have that built-in B.S. detector that tells them that the story they get from the media, and probably in school, is a crock. I trust them to recognize the truth when they hear it.

Here is the true story of the Vietnam War, as it actually was, by someone who fought there as a Marine pilot and later as a pilot for the CIA’s Air America, and who has made a lifetime’s study of the war (and even written a satirical novel about its absurdities). No war in American history is in greater need of a politically incorrect—another word for honest—treatment than the Vietnam War, because the people who misreported the war, hammered vile lies about it into our national consciousness, and now tout its supposed lessons are the very same people who created political correctness in the first place. Shame on them.

Chapter One

WHY WE WERE IN VIETNAM

It was World War II, the good war, that got the United States involved in what liberals would eventually want to paint as the bad war (though liberals were the ones mostly responsible for our fighting it). Before World War II, Vietnam was a colony of France. During the war it was occupied, with the reluctant permission of Vichy France, by the Japanese—the common enemy of the United States and the Communist Viet Minh.

So in 1945 a handful of American Office of Strategic Services (OSS—precursor to the CIA) agents parachuted into Vietnam to recover American prisoners of war and help the Communist Viet Minh fight the Japanese. Americans fighting on the side of the Communists? Well, you have to remember, at the time we were allies with Uncle Joe Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Guess what?

007 North and South Vietnam had been divided since at least the sixteenth century

008 Communist leader Ho Chi Minh had trained as a French pastry chef

009 While Ho Chi Minh’s land reform program resulted in tens of thousands of executions, starvation, and dependence on foreign aid, South Vietnam doubled its rice production in the 1950s

American foreign policy was far less worried about Communist expansion in the waning days of the war (before China became Communist and Communist activities heated up in Southeast Asia and Korea) than it was with the French, British, and Dutch looking to reestablish their colonies. In fact, anti-colonialism had been a sort of bugbear for Franklin Roosevelt, who put Joseph Stalin on a somewhat higher moral plane than Winston Churchill. As Roosevelt put it, Of one thing I am certain, Stalin is not an imperialist¹—unlike the devotedly imperialist British prime minister. No doubt that was small comfort to the people of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere, who would gladly have traded Soviet friendship for British imperialism. (For those who have forgotten, Communism had an even more murderous record than Hitler’s Nazis and represented a far more oppressive and tyrannical regime than your average fascist state. Mussolini’s Italy was a libertarian paradise compared to Stalin’s Russia.) Still, even after Roosevelt’s death, anti-colonialism remained the fall-back position of American foreign policy, equally popular on the isolationist-leaning Right and the progressive Left.

Viet Minh, Viet Cong: A Communist by Any Other Name Is Still a Commie

The Viet Minh (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi) were the Communist guerrilla force, founded in 1941, formed to rid the country of the French. After the defeat of French colonial rule in 1954, remnants of the Viet Minh became subsumed by the Communist guerrilla force in South Vietnam originally called Cong San Viet Nam, or officially the Liberation Army of South Vietnam (Mat tran Dan toc Giai phong mien Nam Viet Nam) which, for obvious reasons, was shortened to Viet Cong.

Legend has it that a South Vietnamese sentry was killed while trying to alert the camp to the approach of the "Mat tran Dan toc Giai phong mien Nam Viet Nam" confusing them with the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Viet Nam (Chinh Phu Cach Mang Lam Thoi Cong Hoa Mien Nam Viet Nam). South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem finally said, Let’s cut the crap. They’re Viet Cong.²

Viet Minh—original Communist guerrillas. Viet Cong—shortened version of name of Communist guerrillas.

The capital of North Vietnam, Hanoi, in rare agreement with Saigon, the capital of South Vietam, officially recognized all guerrillas as Communists.

After the war and the defeat of the Japanese who had taken over Vietnam, the country was put into the temporary care of Great Britain (in the South) and China (in the North), though it was still occupied by the French, who’d never fully left. China had not yet gone Communist and was led by Chiang Kai-Shek, America’s wartime ally against the Japanese. The division of Vietnam between north and south was neither original nor arbitrary. In the late sixteenth century, the country had been divided by two huge walls above the plains of Quang Tri (in the far north of South Vietnam) erected by the Nguyen family, one of many regimes waging bloody feudal battles for control of the countryside. Before that, until the fifteenth century, 90 percent of what became South Vietnam belonged either to the kingdom of Champa (in south-central Vietnam) or Cambodia. In these earlier years, North Vietnam and South Vietnam were combatants, even trying to pit rival European powers against each other—the South seeking assistance from the Portuguese and the North from the Dutch.

Far from being an established nation, it was actually not unusual for Vietnam to be occupied. For most of (what the West calls) the first millennium, Vietnam belonged to China, and for much of its history after, Vietnam was a vassal state of China. In wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century that the French displaced the Chinese as the leading power in the region. French influence began with Catholic missionaries—though hundreds of Catholic priests and thousands of their supporters were killed in periodic pogroms ordered by the Vietnamese rulers. These became the rationale for the French to finally invade Vietnam in 1858 in what began as a punitive expedition and became a war of successful conquest. Ten years later, King Norodom of Cambodia sought, and received, French protection from the Thais and the Vietnamese. Once established in the region, the French did their best to stop the Vietnamese from killing each other and succeeded in uniting Vietnamese nationalists against them for the duration of their control over the country.

True to his anti-colonial views, Franklin Roosevelt reportedly remarked to Cordell Hull, his secretary of state, France has had the country—thirty million inhabitants—for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.³ While it is inarguable that the Vietnamese had serious grievances against their French colonial masters and were frequently at odds with them, it is equally true that France accelerated Vietnam’s economic development, provided it with export markets and infrastructure, and set up Western schools (though far too few of them) and hospitals (ditto) as part of France’s self-proclaimed civilizing mission. As Mark Cunningham and Lawrence Zwier point out in their book The Aftermath of French Defeat in Vietnam, French colonialism in Vietnam was in some ways less harsh than colonialism in other empires. The Vietnamese who learned French and accepted French culture became members of an elite, entitled to good jobs and education. Some even became French citizens. While French rule favored the sizable Vietnamese Catholic minority, Chinese business owners and the Vietnamese landowner class were also admitted to the elite.⁴

Ho Chi Minh asked the United States for assistance to defeat the French after both world wars and both times he was ignored—at first because he was irrelevant to American foreign policy and later because Ho the nationalist was also Ho the Communist, and the United States’ long term interest in Southeast Asia after World War II was limited to preventing the spread of Communism. It was anti-Communism that put the United States reluctantly behind France in its efforts to reestablish itself in Indochina after the war. In the South this happened rapidly with the Viet Minh being driven from Saigon. In the North, things were far more difficult. In 1949, the French signed an agreement with the Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai, making him the titular head of state over one united Vietnam, though the real power remained in French hands, as did an ever-growing war against Vietnamese Communists. The United States felt itself dragged into not only providing France with economic support, but eventually bankrolling up to 80 percent of France’s war effort in Vietnam.

Never Trust a Pastry Chef

Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969, b. Nguyen Sinh Cung) was born in Kim Lien, central Vietnam, the son of a French-employed school teacher, and embraced Communism while living abroad in England (where he trained as a pastry chef under Escoffier) and in France (1915-1923). He later founded the Indochinese Communist Party and spent a good deal of time in Moscow. Ho Chi Minh was an adopted name. It means He Who Enlightens, or in the vernacular, He Who Charms the Pants off Useful Idiots.

American economic support had ballooned because of events outside of French Indochina, the most striking of which was Mainland China’s falling to the Communists in 1949 and Communist North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950. Both were stunning developments for American foreign policy. America had long been sympathetic to China (in part because of the presence of American missionaries there), and it was shocking when the enormous country fell to the hands of Communist revolutionaries. The Communist invasion of South Korea—a part of the world few Americans had ever heard of—only redoubled the sense of an aggressive Communist menace, and was followed by an American-led United Nations peacekeeping action (otherwise known as the Korean War) to save South Korea and restore its borders. Communist guerrillas popped up in the Philippines, Maoist rebels appeared in Indonesia, and a Communist insurgency arose in Malaya. The French were now viewed as a buttress—granted a leaky one—against the Communist onslaught in Asia.

That buttress was exploded when the French arranged to fight the Communists in a set piece battle. The French were convinced that in such a battle they could deliver a mortal blow to the Communists. The mortal blow, however, was to the French.

The French chose as their battleground a valley in northwest Vietnam near the village of Dien Bien Phu. The French began infiltrating troops to the Dien Bien Phu valley in November 1953. The deciding battle took place a few months later from March 13 to May 7. The French felt they were baiting a trap by concentrating their troops in the valley. They were well dug in and had an airstrip for resupply. Their goal was to lure the Viet Minh down from the surrounding jungle-covered hills, and then destroy them with superior French firepower.

This was a miscalculation of tragic proportions, because the Viet Minh did not come down from the hills—at least not before they unleashed a merciless rain of artillery shells on the French. The Viet Minh had dragged hundreds of artillery pieces through the jungle and installed them behind the hills, out of sight, and out of range of the French, who now found themselves surrounded, outnumbered, and out-gunned. The few fighter-bombers the French had could not dislodge the Viet Minh guns.

For the French, the situation at Dien Bien Phu became desperate. French paratroopers were dropped in as replacements, knowing they faced almost certain death. The airstrip, which was supposed to be the French lifeline, was under such constant fire that no plane could land there. Instead, planes swooped low and kicked out boxes of supplies—most of which fell to the enemy. One of the last flights into Dien Bien Phu was made by CIA legend James Earthquake McGoon McGovern—a 260-pound pilot who had flown with the Flying Tigers in World War II and was subsequently recruited into the Civil Air Transport (CAT, a front for CIA operations). He had flown CAT support missions for Chiang Kai-Shek after World War II, and later was called to service in Indochina. An eccentric and a legitimate hero, his C-119 aircraft was shot out of the sky while attempting to drop an artillery piece to the French. He famously keyed the microphone to announce to his co-pilot, and the listening French, Well, kid, looks like this is it, before the aircraft hit the ground and exploded in flames. McGovern and co-pilot Wallace Buford were the first two Americans to die in combat in Vietnam. In 2005 the French government awarded McGovern and six other pilots the Legion of Honor, with the rank of Knight for their service in supplying the French army at Dien Bien Phu.

As the French were being defeated, United States President Dwight Eisenhower wrote a long letter on the situation in Indochina to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It can be regarded as the first full and clear statement of why America went into Vietnam.

Dear Winston:

I am sure that like me you are following with the deepest interest and anxiety the daily reports of the gallant fight being put up by the French at Dien Bien Phu. Today, the situation there does not seem hopeless.

But regardless of the outcome of this particular battle, I fear that the French cannot alone see the thing through, this despite the very