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Vietnam: What Went Wrong?
Seven years have passed since the victorious sons of Ho Chi Minh marched into Saigon and the U. S. Marines—almost as an afterthought—recovered the SS Maya- gitez. Ground has been broken for the Vietnam Memorial, and we have turned our attention to the Northern Flank, the Indian Ocean, the Rapid Deployment Force, the F/A-18, and the “rediscovery” of maneuver warfare. Despite pleas for articles describing personal combat experiences, the pages of our professional journals continue to be devoted primarily to technical reports, comments on manpower management, and a variety of similar papers. We have quite properly reoriented our thinking toward the serious business of sea power, which is our job. But it is also our job, as the sailors and marines who will presumably inherit more and more of the leadership positions in the Navy and the Marine Corps of the 1980s and 1990s, to look for the answers to what went wrong in America’s last war.
There may be some of our officer corps who disagree with that. After all, did not Georges Clemenceau proclaim that “war is too important to [be] left to the generals”? And do we not subscribe to the belief that we are the tools of America’s policymakers, not the framers of policy? I am not suggesting that we trade jobs with the diplomats, but it is our responsibility to look beyond the Vietnam era and inquire why we lost what history is certain to remember as the Second Southeast Asian War.
Dr. George C. Herring of the University of Kentucky, in a recent Military Affairs article, “American Strategy in Vietnam: The Postwar Debate,” was surprised that “the traumatic climax of the Vietnam War in 1975 did not provoke a great national debate on what had gone wrong.” He goes on to speculate that “apparently, for many Americans. the Vietnam experience is still too painful to relive, too politically sensitive to dwell upon, or too unique to offer any useful lessons.”
I share Dr. Herring’s surprise that the debate over what had gone wrong has been limited to bar talk, sea stories, a string of war novels, and a handful of books from the civilian sector which claim to have known all along what a big mistake involvement in Vietnam was going to be. We have been able to conduct other military inquiries quickly and successfully. For example, when a military mission to rescue the hostages held by Iran resulted in eight deaths and a loss of national pride, a blue ribbon panel of experts was commissioned to find out why the raid failed. It published its findings almost before the public outcry died down. The names of 57,692 American dead will be inscribed on the Vietnam Memorial, yet nearly a decade after the last one fell there is no consensus as to why the job they were sent to do was left undone.
Some “hawks” claim that the United States failed in Southeast Asia because it did not use all its military power. Another school of thought, of which Dr. Herring is a guru, believes that the failure was a result of the military’s attempt to fight a conventional war in a revolutionary setting. Still others believe that the United States was simply incapable of fighting a prolonged war abroad while simultaneously attempting vast social reforms at home. Yet another viewpoint is offered by Bernard Brodie, who writes in his book War and Politics (Macmillan, 1973):
“Of the two or three reasons that dominate all the others, the one that is clearly of greatest importance, and no doubt sufficient in itself to explain the failure, is that we attempted to support a government that our leaders knew to be both inept and corrupt and, in President Kennedy’s words, ‘out of touch with the people.’ ” Colonel H. G. Summers, Jr., U. S. Army, puts forth a different thesis entirely in his book On Strategy:
The Vietnam War in Context:
”... a lack of understanding of the relationship between military strategy and national policy existed among military and political leaders. As a result, we exhausted our will and endurance against a secondary enemy, the guerilla movement in South Vietnam, instead of focusing our military efforts to check North Vietnamese expansion in support of our national policy of containment.” Who is right? Or are all these scholars and critics and thinkers a little bit right?
It may be that we lost the war in Southeast Asia (yes, it was a war despite the fact that it was undeclared; and yes, we fought over not only Vietnam, but also Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand) because we forgot why we went there.
We went to Southeast Asia to halt the spread of communism. That was our strategic objective, but we got so wrapped around the various axles of individual body counts, cooperation with the allies, perceiving the need to accommodate the Soviets and the Chinese, and “peace with honor” that we simply lost sight of why we went in the first place.
The post-Vietnam debate has not really started. The historians, I suppose, will dig eventually into the material available and come up with an official version of what happened. But it hasn’t happened yet.
The military is often accused of preparing to fight the last war. Even a cursory look at our current training missions and procurement programs would belie that accusation with regard to America’s armed forces today. But we should include in our training and our study an examination of why the military team struck out the last time it went to bat, thus breaking a 200-year winning streak. Some 58,000 American lives were lost in Southeast Asia, and so far, there seems to be no reason why. We have a duty to the dead to find the answer. We may not like what we find, but it’s time to start looking.
98
Proceedings / November 1982