Seven Myths About the Vietnam War

[thedrifter]

by William F. Jasper

A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the March 25, 2002 issue of THE NEW AMERICAN.
Reprinted with permission.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three decades after pulling out of Southeast Asia, America remains hostage to a relentless barrage of distortion, myths, and outright lies about the Vietnam War.


Myth #1: The United States was defeated militarily in Southeast Asia.

Myth #2: The impact of the Pentagon's Rules of Engagement on our military capabilities in Vietnam has been greatly exaggerated.

Myth #3: The North Vietnamese (Communists) won, ultimately, because they occupied the moral high ground. They were fighting for their homeland against a foreign invader.

Myth #4: The Vietnamese who fought against us were more nationalists than Communists. However, the Communists were willing to help them free their country from the French - and later, American - invaders.

Myth #5: Claims by conservatives and the military that media coverage of the Vietnam War was unbalanced, hostile toward the military, or even anti-patriotic and subversive are not substantiated by the facts. Many scholarly studies have shown that the media coverage, on the whole, was fair and accurate.

Myth #6: It was America's pathological anti-Communist obsession that caused our leaders to get us involved in the Vietnam quagmire.

Myth # 7: All of America's POWs were returned following the 1973 peace agreement, and Vietnam is now cooperating to find the remains of all the unresolved MIAs.

Napoleon is reputed to have cynically remarked that "history is a fraud agreed upon."(1) A similarly cynical attitude is more than justified when it comes to the usual "history" of the Vietnam War, as presented by the prevailing liberal-left voices of the mass media, academia, and Hollywood. For the past four decades, the American public has been subjected to a relentless barrage of distortion, propaganda, myths, and outright lies concerning the war in Southeast Asia that claimed the lives of 58,000 of America's sons and left hundreds of thousands of others physically and psychologically wounded.

While many Americans, especially those under the age of 40, view the Vietnam War era as ancient history, the ghost of Vietnam is still very much with us, greatly affecting our culture, our beliefs, and our political, social, and military policies. Innumerable journalists, commentators, activist professors, politicians, novelists, and historians have stolen the truth and substituted the most contemptible lies. Consider, for example, the late, celebrated historian Henry Steele Commager. Author of many influential books and articles and an activist in many Communist front organizations and radical-left groups, Mr. Commager aggressively denounced U.S. military actions in Indochina and regularly distorted the facts concerning what was happening during the war.(2) His distortions did not stop once the U.S. had pulled out of Vietnam. In 1998, for instance, he wrote the introduction to Loren Baritz's book, Backfire: A History of how American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did. Commager praised this anti-American propaganda assault as "the first full-length and scholarly account of why we got into Vietnam in the first place, why we fought it as barbarously as the Japanese in Manchuria or the Germans in Poland, and why we deserved to lose it - indeed why we did have to lose it if we were to find any kind of ultimate peace."(3)

Incredible! Can the overall performance of American troops in Vietnam truly be compared to the brutal rape of Nanking by the Imperial Japanese invaders of China or the atrocities of Hitler's forces in Poland? Such an obscene defamation of America's armed forces - of America's sons, fathers, grandfathers, and husbands - so blatantly contradicts the facts as to seem possible only from the hand of an enemy propagandist. Yet, this abominable screed came from one of our country's most highly praised historians. Many other prominent academics, journalists, commentators, and politicians share Mr. Commager's distorted views and have propagated them in the minds of millions of unsuspecting Americans. In what follows, we hope to inject some truth into the poisonous smokescreen that has clouded popular thinking and discussion concerning the Vietnam War.

http://www.jbs.org/vietnam/no_win/7myths.htm#myth1


Sempers,

Roger

[exlrrp]

Originally posted by thedrifter
by William F. Jasper

A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the March 25, 2002 issue of THE NEW AMERICAN.
Reprinted with permission.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three decades after pulling out of Southeast Asia, America remains hostage to a relentless barrage of distortion, myths, and outright lies about the Vietnam War.


Myth #1: The United States was defeated militarily in Southeast Asia.

Myth #2: The impact of the Pentagon's Rules of Engagement on our military capabilities in Vietnam has been greatly exaggerated.

Myth #3: The North Vietnamese (Communists) won, ultimately, because they occupied the moral high ground. They were fighting for their homeland against a foreign invader.

Myth #4: The Vietnamese who fought against us were more nationalists than Communists. However, the Communists were willing to help them free their country from the French - and later, American - invaders.

Myth #5: Claims by conservatives and the military that media coverage of the Vietnam War was unbalanced, hostile toward the military, or even anti-patriotic and subversive are not substantiated by the facts. Many scholarly studies have shown that the media coverage, on the whole, was fair and accurate.

Myth #6: It was America's pathological anti-Communist obsession that caused our leaders to get us involved in the Vietnam quagmire.

Myth # 7: All of America's POWs were returned following the 1973 peace agreement, and Vietnam is now cooperating to find the remains of all the unresolved MIAs.

JOHN BIRCH??????????????
JOHN BIRCH??????????????????
First Robert Scheer and now John Birch??????.
Well, youre all over the map to prove your point, first the most radical left wing writer no wcurrent and then the most right wing group then this side of the KKK. What do you do? A Google search on HATEDEMOCRATS.COM?

Anything you get off the John Birch Website is bullsht, absolute bullsht!!!!!!paste that in your hat!!.
Your 7 myths are myths themselves.
If you want to deabte ANY of this stuff. be specific, there's too much to wade through here all at once.

I'll start with this (#1): Whether the US military was defeated or not, AMERICA LOST THE WAR!!!!!!Talk about irrelevance!!!!! We killed a lot more of them but we sure should have with our awesome technology edge, which included complete sea and air superiority throughout. Not enough to win , tho
America should never have fought this war, it was a complete waste of our resources and the lives of our men. We should have just abided by the Geneva Agreements ( as we SWORE to do) and allow Vietnam to have the scheduled elctions mandated in the geneva Agreements. Thats th ONLY way we could have won that war and we could have done it without the loss of ONE LIFE!!! Anything after that was just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic

James

[exlrrp]

I'm going back to Vietnam next year to see a bunch of things for myself and pee on the Ho Chi Minh Trail again.
Anybody here is welcome to accompany me

James

Happy just to be alive

[phuloi]

Talked to several guys that made the trip.To a man,they said it was the best thing they had ever done.Not me.Thanks,but no thanks.Took too many years to get that smell out of my nose.I do,however tip my hat to you.Nope..I`m going moose hunting in British Columbia next year.

[exlrrp]

Well, Griz I wasn't afraid to go then and I'm not now. I think Americans greatest fear is that their lives turned out all right, even tho we lost. If theyre living a good life without us, its OK by me, this is what I want to see. I have no hard feelings towards these people--I went to THEIR country to make war,not vice versa. Actually, I have an admiration for these people. It was not lost on me that I admired our enemies a LOT more than our allies, they had the cause, the fire, the will to win--and they had Ho Chi Minh.
I want to walk down the Trail again, maybe even dig up a mine, and drive thru MangYang Pass.I want to see the country living in peace. Its why I went there in the first place.

As to the rest of this post above, its absolutley ridiculous. The John Birch Society is right there in credibilty with the Flat Earth Society.
Are they still saying THAT RICHARD NIXON IS A COMMUNIST??????
That IKe was run by Commies??? That Earl WARREN was a Commmie????
I did a book report in the 10th grade on "None Dare Call It Treason," The Bircher Bible. I saw it was complete conspiracy fantasy BS then --I'm sure no fan of Nixon but no one in their right mind thinks he was a Commie.

So there's Birchers on this website--no surprise here, much of the other ridiculous bullsht planted here sounds just like them. If you can't debate this ridiculous BS, don't post it.
Anybody else want to raise their hand and identify themselves as a John Bircher? I got a pretty good idea already.

James


"I call it the Madman Theory, Bob"
Richard Nixon

[exlrrp]

"Myth #2: The impact of the Pentagon's Rules of Engagement on our military blablabla "
Just some damn poor losers


"Myth #3: The North Vietnamese (Communists) won, ultimately, because they occupied the moral high ground. They were fighting for their homeland against a foreign invader."
No argument here at all, right?? Does anybody want to say that the North Vietnamese/VC WEREN'T Vietnamese? And that us Americans WEREN'T foreigners???AND the French?????
They were the ones fighting for the supervised elections, as mandated in the Geneva Agreements--we were supporting a corrupt dictator that canceled the elections--still all on the same page?? I mean thats what ALL the books say, except the ones from the John Birch Society, some of which say Tricky Dick was a Commie sympathiser.



"Myth #4: The Vietnamese who fought against us were more nationalists than Communists. However, the Communists were willing to help them free their country from the French - and later, American - invaders."
Who says you can't be a nationalist and a communist? Certainly Ho Chi Minh, was, he was one of the best known nationalists in VN BEFORE THE COMMUNIST PARTY CAME INTO BEING!!!ANYWHERE!!!
This is why we lost the war: We can beat Communism but we can't beat Nationalism
How would anyone know what motivates a man? certainly the biggest thought in VN was THROW THE FOREIGN MOTHERFCKERS OUT!!! and I have to say I agree with this--as should everybody who believes in the right to self detemination. I might even ally with a Commie to do this(Churchill and Roosevelt did ) We did it with our own revolution, as Ho Chi Minh often pointed out.
And as to ", the Communists were willing to help them free their country from the French - and later, American - invaders."
Well, this goes without saying. The US offered NO help to any independence movement in SE Asia at all--thats none, zero, nada--please reference any answer here, I won't take it from the JB Website. There is no credible argument to this view.
Ho got help first from the Socialists, then the Communists because they were the only one who would give him help. There was no alternative for him--and he'd lived in the US and spoke English well. He saw that the rhetoric of the US did not match their true values after seeing the racial situation and realised the US would not help colored people vs white colonialists.
Its in his writings, believe them or don't. He was EXACTLY right about this.

"Myth #5: Claims by conservatives and the military that media coverage of the Vietnam War was unbalanced, hostile toward the military, or even anti-patriotic and subversive are not substantiated by the facts. Many scholarly studies have shown that the media coverage, on the whole, was fair and accurate. "
OMIGOD!!! You mean... the press... was BIASED???This STARTLING REVELATION may cause me to revise all previous views!!!You don't think theyre STILL biased do you?? That would be AWFUL!!
Well, if that don't beat all, guess we can all climb back on the turnip truck agin.

"Myth #6: It was America's pathological anti-Communist obsession that caused our leaders to get us involved in the Vietnam quagmire. "
Another well duh!! So what else was it?? a desire to eat water buffalo??(done it)

"Myth # 7: All of America's POWs were returned following the 1973 peace agreement, and Vietnam is now cooperating to find the remains of all the unresolved MIAs. "
Maybe, maybe not. But there's only 2000 mias still unaccounted for, better than any other war ever. I can believe this many just walked away out of 2.5 million, theyve already have several come back who'd been hiding in various places. I can also believe a few hundred were atomised beyond identifiability, I was close enough to 500lb bombs to dodge dirt clods--BIG dirt clods. I was aware then and am aware now that these things can be misdropped.
What we really should look at here is the swine who make a living keeping the MIA thing going, all the phony BS they run.
It is in no way to Vietnams interest to keep these people.
And why do we never hear about the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese missing, maybe millions missing?? They all had families too, grieving mothers and crying widows.
Did we ever really care for the Vietnamese? I doubt it, I really do.

This is all I need to say about this, I'm going on to something else unless someone wants to try and justify these??
James

[chilidog]

"I'm a faithful follower of Brother John Birch,
I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church,
and I ain't even got a garage,
you can call home and ask my wife!"

No James, I'm not a "Bircher." This thread just made me think of that song.


Chilidog

[exlrrp]

Originally posted by chilidog
"I'm a faithful follower of Brother John Birch,
I belong to the Antioch Baptist Church,
and I ain't even got a garage,
you can call home and ask my wife!"

No James, I'm not a "Bircher." This thread just made me think of that song.


Chilidog

DAVE!!!!!!!

"so I threw the man a twenty and fiiiiiiiiiiredd that mothhhhher on up!!!!!"
Then he chases em around the parking lot a few times in his car.
I love it, one of my favorites,a real Manual on how to deal with conservatives. self did some hitchiking while young and long haired also and met some Birchers then also. Their worst mistake: thinking I was a flower child. You never outgrow yr need for ammo is what the ol lrp keeps in mind--my, the military taught me some useful skills for dealing with people,plus the proper attitude.
The Birchers are now the political arm of The Militia, I guess. If I thought you were a Bircher, I wouldn't have gone in your house.

How bout this, another of my favorite songs about John Birch:

" well we all agree with Hitlers views,
he only killed 6 million Jews
So what if he was a Fascist
Least you can't say he was a Communist!!"
"Paranoids Lament," Bob Dylan

Anybody know all the words to this song? I forget--share em with the group!


I was thinking about you and my other LA friends, hope Isidore aint getting your feet too wet. Another useful military skill you can use later: filling sandbags
All they show is videos of floods there but they don't say where in the state. Things still high and dry in Zachary?
Here's a handy hint from the war:
"To stay dry, roll up in your poncho"
You'll thank me for this later
Hi to D

James

Happy just to be alive (and dry)

"I call it the Madman Theory, Bob"
Richard M Nixon

[chilidog]

James,
Isidore, schmizadore. We barely got enough rain to water the lawn. We got rain for 2 days, but it was light. We were fortunate. Yuk-a-tan took the punch out of Isidore and it never regained it. It also came in to the east of us. That's the weak side. Now we have Lili setting her sights for us. She should be here, or visiting Ron, this weekend.

I don't remember that song by Dylan, how about humming a few bars for me.

Chilidog

[chilidog]

James,
I thought about you the other day. I am reading a book about FSB Mary Ann (overran in '71). LT Barry McGee was mentioned in the book. He was "Golden Gloves" at West Point (class of '69), Airborne qualified, and attended Jungle Warfare School in Panama. Did you know him?

Chilidog