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Remembering Vietnam

1
Romantic Heretic2/25/2013 9:42:21 am PST

Whenever I think of Vietnam there are always two things that come to mind.

First is this, maybe apocryphal, meeting between an NVA and an American after the war.

American: You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.

NVA officer: That is true. It is also irrelevant.

The other is this quote.

We weren’t in Vietnam for eight years. We were in Vietnam for one year eight times.

Ultimately Vietnam is the best example of asymmetrical warfare in the 20th Century. The smaller country, basically invaded by the larger, has nowhere to run. All the smaller country has to do is make staying more expensive than the larger is wiling to pay. The invader has an out while the defender does not. This means that the defender has to play for higher stakes. It’s a strategy that rarely fails. Even accomplished imperialists like Soviet Russia in Afghanistan fall to it.

The war cost Vietnam big. As noted, well over 1 million dead. That meant that Vietnam lost a whole generation. This included many of their well educated people and that cost them years of economic backwardness amplified by the idiotic government of the Communists.

In my opinion the biggest mistakes the U.S. made, apart from going in there in the first place, were political. Starting with putting a Catholic in charge of a Buddhist country. Then they kept allowing corrupt Army officers to run the place. Oy.

Vietnam is an example of one of Sun Tzu’s dictums: “Although we have heard of operations that were clumsy but swift we have never heard of one that was skilled but long. No nation ever profited from a long war.”