Some Thoughts on “The Vietnam War”

Like the war itself,  it’s finally over.  Here are my thoughts:

  1.  In a previous post, I noted two important differences between Vietnam and Korea:  the open-ended American military commitment and the greater effectiveness of the South Korean government.  Here are a few more important differences: (a) Kim Il Sung didn’t have the kind of nationalist credibility that Ho Chi Minh had; (b) partly as a result of that, there was no South Korean equivalent of the Viet Cong; (c) while the topography in Korea had its challenges, it didn’t provide cover in the same fashion as the jungle did in Vietnam; and (d) due to geography, there was no equivalent of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
  2.  The situation was worse than John Kerry’s famous question made it out to be. Based on the evidence in the film, the last men to die were unwitting tools of Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign.
  3.  The Cambodia campaign and the mining of Haiphong Harbor would have made a lot more sense if they had happened earlier.
  4.  Non-nuclear strategic bombing didn’t accomplish much in World War II.  The story was the same in Vietnam.  Lacking much of an industrial capacity, and relying on imported weapons, there were few targets of any value in North Vietnam.  The bombing essentially evolved into an unsuccessful terror tactic.
  5.  The film omitted one fact of extreme importance:  there was plenty of evidence that the USSR and the PRC were at daggers drawn by the middle of the 1960’s. That cut the heart out of the argument that a defeat in Vietnam was a victory for monolithic Communism, but our government apparently didn’t understand that, or somehow didn’t care.
  6.  I was just a child during the war, but I remember thinking that the public response to returning veterans (particularly draftees who were just following the law) was just wrong.  The statements made by the veterans in the film have assured me that I was right about that.
  7.  The level of mobilization of the North Vietnamese state, given its lack of resources, was nothing less than astonishing.  Nothing short of an effort to obliterate the entire population would have been successful.