Author: tomglenn3

The last two installments of the Burns-Novick documentary, The Vietnam War, broadcast last Thursday and last night, dealt with 1967 and 1968 in Vietnam. I was there part of both years and was deeply involved the Dak To battle (1967) and the Tết Offensive (1968). The Burns-Novick film suggested broadly that U.S. forces were alerted in both instances before the North Vietnamese attacked. I can verify that. I was instrumental in issuing the warnings, derived from signals intelligence—now declassified.

I wrote some months ago in this blog about the Cassandra Effect, the failure of U.S. commanders to believe or act on warnings from signals intelligence. It happened to me so often that I coined the term. The Cassandra Effect was in full force for both Dak To and Tết. General Westmoreland at MACV and the commanders of both the 4^th Infantry Division and the 173^rd Brigade were briefed on the signals intelligence evidence of North Vietnamese plans. They took no action to prepare. The rest is history.

Last night I watched on DVD part six, “Things Fall Apart,” of the Burns-Novick documentary, The Vietnam War, that will be shown on PBS tonight. It centers on the Tết Offensive.

The documentary views the offensive the same way I do, that it was a military defeat but a psychological victory. To my knowledge, the North Vietnamese lost every battle begun during the offensive and suffered enormous casualties. They failed to achieve their goals of sparking a general uprising against the Saigon government, and the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (the military forces of South Vietnam) did not disintegrate under pressure, as the North hoped.

But the North’s forces accomplished something of great value to them: they caused the American public to doubt that the U.S. would ever win the war. That led to greater and greater opposition to the war, the principal factor that finally led to the American defeat in 1975.

The North Vietnamese were determined to win no matter what the cost. As Ho Chi Minh said years before, “You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”

The American people had no such dedication. Indeed, they wanted the U.S. to withdraw from the war. We pulled back our forces in 1973, ended out air support for the South Vietnamese shortly thereafter, and finally reduced our financial support to the South to such a low level that defeat was inevitable. The Chinese and the Soviet Union, on the other hand, maintained their backing of North Vietnam. The fall of Saigon in 1975 surprised no one but the Americans.

Readers of this blog have asked me why I always refer to the communists in Vietnam as the North Vietnamese and never the Viet Cong (VC).

First of all, “Viet Cong” is short for the Vietnamese Việt Nam Cộng-sản which simply means Vietnamese Communist. The communists themselves never used the term. Americans used Viet Cong or VC to mean the communists native to South Vietnam, independent of the north, as opposed to the North Vietnamese who infiltrated South Vietnam. The Americans who used the term bought into the fiction North Vietnam had created that an independent movement developed in South Vietnam that rebelled against the South Vietnamese government. That movement, according to the fiction, was named the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (Mặt trận Dân tộc Giải phóng miền Nam Việt Nam), shortened to National Liberation Front or NLF. The front was never a real organization. It was a cover for North Vietnamese operations in South Vietnam.

Second, the entire effort to defeat the South Vietnamese government and the American forces was a North Vietnamese endeavor. Every aspect of it was controlled by Hanoi. There was no independent rebellion in the south. So the American distinction between “North Vietnamese Army” (NVA) and “Viet Cong” (VC) never actually existed. The North Vietnamese army, called the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) by the north, included three categories of forces: regulars, regional forces, and guerrillas. The latter two were what we Americans called Viet Cong, but troops in these categories were neither independent of the north nor native to south Vietnam. All three types of PAVN soldiers included northern, central, and southern natives.

Therefore, the most accurate term for the forces fighting the South Vietnamese and the Americans is the North Vietnamese. That’s who they were, and that’s what I call them.

That’s a question I regularly get from readers and friends. They ask my views because it was the Selective Service that got me started on my career in Vietnam.

After I graduated from college (University of California, Berkeley) in 1958, I was certain to be drafted unless I acted. So I enlisted in the army to go to the Army Language School (ALS) in Monterey to study Chinese, a language that fascinated me. But then I got to ALS, I learned that I was scheduled to study not Chinese but Vietnamese, a language I had never heard of—in those days we called that area of the world French Indochina. I spent the whole of 1959 in intensive study of Vietnamese. When I graduated, I asked the army to send me to Vietnam. They said no, since I had graduated first in my class, I was to be assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA). In 1961, when I completed my army tour, NSA hired me and, in 1962, sent me to Vietnam.

Had there been no draft, I certainly would not have enlisted. That enlistment changed my life.

I look at young people now and perceive that they lack the discipline and self-control that military service instills. Those are qualities I am deeply grateful for. They have served me well during my life. If the draft were still in force, all young men would benefit from the same training I did.

I’m sympathetic to the arguments that say (1) a new draft law should include alternatives to the army, such as the Peace Corps or a similar service internal to the U.S.; and (2) if young men are subject to the draft, young women should be, too. All that said, the self-reliance and value of teamwork I learned in basic training and combat training have been of inestimable value to me. Whatever service might be included in a draft should emphasize training that enhances those qualities.

Mandatory service to the nation is not unheard of in other nations and has proven especially fruitful for Israel, for example. I think we can learn from others.

I watched the second part of the Burns-Novick The Vietnam War. After I posted my brief piece about the first installment, a friend asked me what I thought of a review (see COMMENTS on the September 18 blog post). That set me off to see what other reviews there are. I found half a dozen. If I have time, I’ll read them and maybe comment here.

So much in the first two installments brought back sharp memories, and I was struck by how the film presents commentary by a variety of players from both sides of the conflict without comment or qualification. To me that’s first-class journalism.

Ironically, I just received a new book to review: Daniel P. Bolger’s Our Year of War about the Vietnam war experience of Chuck Hagel and his brother, Tom. That year was 1968. The book lays out the context of the two brothers’ experience with a detailed history of what was going on in Vietnam and the U.S. at the time. Once again the sharpness of my memories, unleashed by this narrative, surprised me.

I’ve ordered the complete The Vietnam War on DVD. As I work my way through it, I’m sure I’ll have more to say here.

Last Saturday, I participated in the American Legion Flea Market in Columbia, Maryland. I was among the twenty-odd vendors offering their wares to visitors. I had copies of three of my four novels for sale.

I was right at home. Many of my fellow American Legion members are Vietnam veterans. I share with them an unspoken understanding of what it’s like to risk your life for your country only to be spat upon and shamed when you return to the world—what we called the U.S.

And my books were on point. Last of the Annamese is about the fall of Saigon which I survived; The Trion Syndrome is about a Vietnam vet suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI); and No-Accounts tells of a straight man caring for a gay man dying of AIDS, volunteer work I did at the height of the AIDS crisis to help me cope with my PTSI.

In short, I was where I belonged. Many of the members have read my books, and I’ve done my presentation on the fall of Saigon twice for the post over the years. So characteristic of the unspoken brotherhood was the insistence by one member that I wear his billed cap to protect me from the sun. We brothers take care of one another.

Last night I watched the first installment of the new documentary on the Vietnam war. I was flooded with memories.

I’m enormously impressed that, so far at least, Burns and Novick got it right. They laid out the historical settings that led the U.S. to become involved in the war despite our commitment to national self-determination and our opposition to colonialism. I was so struck that the documentary described what I saw happening at the time, that the U.S. misread history. When Vietnam freed herself from French control, it was the step in the universal movement that ended colonialism throughout the world. I saw that Ho Chi Minh was more a nationalist than a communist, determined to free his nation from foreign domination. We Americans had become so anti-communist that we sided first with the French, then with the undemocratic Diem regime.

I was fascinated that the various Vietnamese who appeared in the film spoke a variety of Vietnamese dialects—northern, central, and southern. I had somehow expected those who supported North Vietnam to speak the northern dialect, those on the south side to speak as southerners. Wrong.

I was annoyed that the narrator consistently mispronounced Vietnamese names and words. Are we Americans still so parochial that we can’t pronounce other languages correctly?