My Turn: Have we learned from Vietnam?
Last week, I shared some personal reflections on the Vietnam War. To my surprise, I received a lot of feedback on it, from a variety of sources.
Some of my fellow Vietnam veterans took issue with my assertion that we “lost” the war. They pointed out, rightly, that American forces never lost a major battle in Vietnam. That is true, but in the end, irrelevant. Wars are won and lost by nations, not just by their armed forces.
There are a number of lessons to be learned from our long and painful experience in Vietnam. The nature of these lessons depends, of course, on who the teachers are.
Many of those who supported the war throughout the conflict believe our cause was just and that we should have stayed the course in Vietnam until victory over the North Vietnamese was achieved. Many of those who opposed it still believe it was the wrong war at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
In between these two extremes are those, myself included, who believe our cause was just, but the way we went about it was flawed from the beginning, and certainly by the time of the vast Americanization of the war, starting in 1965, when President Johnson approved sending U.S. ground combat troops into the fray. Ironically, LBJ had said earlier that, “We will not send American boys to fight Asian boys’ wars for them.” After winning a landslide election in 1964, he proceeded to do just that.
In retrospect, the decision to send U.S. ground combat troops to Vietnam was a major mistake. However, the flawed thinking that contributed to the Vietnam debacle began, not with LBJ, but with President Truman, who saw Vietnam as a potential flashpoint in the Cold War. It continued with President Eisenhower, who put U.S. military advisors on the ground there in 1955.
President Kennedy escalated our presence in Vietnam by vastly increasing the number and type of military advisors in Vietnam. When “Ike” left office in 1961, they numbered about 900.
By November, 1963, that number had mushroomed to about 16,000 U.S. military personnel.
Another aspect of the flawed thinking about Vietnam resulted from the lack of genuine U.S.expertise on the history and culture of the Vietnamese. Most of the so-called experts advising American presidents were woefully inexpert on the critical issues related to the Vietnam War.
This lack of expertise was exacerbated by a large dose of ethnocentric arrogance, which caused us to grossly underestimate the will of the enemy.
A third aspect of flawed thinking about Vietnam was our leaders’ collective ignorance of history. The Vietnamese victory over the French and their allies in the First Indo-China War was a lesson to be learned, but it was largely ignored.
There were lessons to be learned from our own Revolutionary War experience as well. Ideologies aside, here was a classic case of a major power, Great Britain, fighting a limited war against a distant, determined foe, who fought a total war within our means. We won the Revolutionary War, with help from the French by the way, because we had the will to prevail over what seemed at the time like insurmountable odds.
Lest we seem too harsh in judging those who got us into Vietnam and kept us there so long, we need to remember that we study history backward, but we live it forward. Our leaders, civilian and military, who grappled with the vexing challenges of Vietnam were not stupid. In fact, some of them have been called “the best and the brightest.” They were dealing with “reality” as they saw it at the time.
The overall lesson from the Vietnam War is that we need to learn from the mistakes of the past so we don’t repeat them, now and in the future. This requires clear thinking and a healthy degree of skepticism, both of which were often lacking in our critical strategic decisions during the Vietnam War.
Thomas B. Vaughn is a professor at Motlow College and co-host of WCPI radio show “Viewpoints.”