All for Naught

I experienced a long, but perhaps not so illustrious career in the U.S. military having enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1970, amassing a total of over 35 years in various active and reserve components, and finally retiring in 2009. 

As I reflect on it now, it is difficult to imagine how little our civilian government has learned from what is still classified as a ‘conflict,’ but which terminology the deaths of 58,000 brave men and women in Vietnam belies. 

(I’m sorry. It was no ‘conflict,’ it was a WAR).

Oh, the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines experienced some memorable moments, and let it never be said that they failed to do their duty. Nevertheless, the United States fought that war “with one hand behind its back.”

(And this, my friends, is no way to fight a war).

And the case might be made, (and I support ‘the case’) that we should have never waged war there in the first place. At least from my humble perspective, our nation might well have remained neutral in every war it ever fought since WWII, with a couple of rare exceptions, and been the better for it.

(For it is an unusual day when the occupation of a foreign country pays anything except very poor dividends, and we often leave the object of our quest worse than when we ‘found’ it).

Not only was the United States introduction of so-called ‘advisors’ into South Vietnam done on a piece-meal basis, over too long a period of time, gradually, over years, building an occupation force of half a million troops. But time and time again, our civilian government, led successively by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, seemed to regard the war as an orphan aberration which they would rather avoid fighting, but which they inherited from their predecessors. Time and time again, our Commanders in Chief gave lip service to the acumen and advice of area military commanders; while micro-managing the war from the oval office. 

Following are a few insightful comments lifted from an internet site related to a myriad of mistakes our nation made during one of the two or three longest wars in the history of the United States.

Our country was never willing to do what was necessary to end the spread of communism in North Vietnam and the world. President Johnson was consistently presented with options that could have truly devastated North Vietnam, but would have resulted in a significant loss of civilian life. And for this, he was unwilling to take responsibility. He could have flooded much of North Vietnam, just as the Army Air Corps flooded the Rhine valley during WWII. He was never willing to strike the most important targets since Russian advisors were present there.

No American administration was willing to really confront the problem of the corruption in the South Vietnamese leadership. While the USAF obliterated the Ho Chi Minh trail, the ARVN (South Vietnamese) leadership was selling war material to the Viet Cong. The ARVN leadership was fleecing their own people and putting them into relocation camps; not to protect them but to take their land.

President Nixon often used military action in the Vietnam War as cover for his domestic problems, (as stated in an interview with Pat Buchanan). He willingly made an uneven peace in with North Vietnam in 1973; (realizing that upon the pull-out of multiplied thousands of our military troops nothing was left to prevent the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government). It was only a matter of time.

         The war was not lost by the soldiers, it was lost by the politicians in Washington and in Saigon. 

Apart from lying and invading the country due to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the US thought that superior firepower would be enough to defeat a peasant population. This proved incorrect, as were the assumptions the military made about their opponents- they were dedicated, intelligent and ingenious, whereas the US had to depend on conscripts with no real stake in the outcome. The US also made mistakes bombing other countries illegally- Cambodia and Laos- which did not help their cause. On top of this massacres of civilians such as in My Lai and the indiscriminant use of napalm and agent orange, again on civilians, it is no wonder we got our arses kicked. It is interesting to see that the administration hasn't learned from history and are repeating the same mistakes again in Iraq.

From a strategic point of view, the biggest mistake was allowing the politicians to decide how the war would be fought. By making certain targets off limits for political reasons, American soldiers had no choice but to allow the North Vietnamese and Vietcong several secure points from which to resupply, regroup, and rearm for future raids. Letting politicians fight a war, many of whom have probably never been in combat, never ends well. 

Sadly, through no fault of their own, our military, for all intents and purposes, lost a war which they might have easily won.

Ineptness, Mismanagement, Corruption

Over the past year I have especially enjoyed one of Billy Joel’s songs. 

“And So It Goes”

A song which aptly describes the failure of this nation’s Commanders in Chief to learn from the past, and as a result to replicate the mistakes of the past.

Even now, the fight against tyranny continues, though it cannot be said that our recent wars in, and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have yielded the results we might have hoped for, or imagined in the first place.

As another song from my own era put it,

“When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”


By William McDonald, PhD.  Excerpt from "(Mc)Donald's Daily Diary," Vol. 36. Copyright pending

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