Vietnam The True Victory

With release of the film We Were Soldiers, based on the Battle of la Drang, the reality of the Vietnam War is finally given a reasonable and unbiased depiction. This is far removed from the patent defeatist fantasies of films such as Platoon and Apocalypse Now. It also leads to examination of the persistent myth that America and her Allies were "defeated" in the Vietnam War, a myth peddled continuously by journalists, academics and other commentators with a real vested interest in convincing all that it is reality; the big lie of military defeat that, said often and long enough, becomes the reality.

News organisations such as the BBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post are among those most strident in the relentless peddling of this falsehood. It is bias and inaccuracy of the highest order, at odds with the supposed impartiality and high standards of these renowned news institutions, but powerfully embeds the myth in the mainstream of accepted truths. To argue against the American "'defeat" now automatically brings a conditioned response of disbelief and condescension, so pervasive has this campaign been.

One of the most persistent and recognisable motifs of this longstanding perspective is continuous and excessive use of footage of the helicopter evacuation of US citizens from the US Embassy in Saigon, a completely non military activity. It gives the impression US forces were driven out of the country in 1975, all presumably exiting from the roof of the Embassy. This is invariably accompanied by dialogue using the words "defeat" and "tragedy" and other emotive and factless commentary to complete the quite shameless distortion.

Most recently, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on the opening of an Australian memorial in Phuoc Tuy Province for the Battle of Long Tan. The reporter exhibited all the results of 30 years of misinformation. Firstly calling the Australian campaign ill fated, he went on to describe the battle as a Vietnamese "ambush" of the Australian force, finishing by only mentioning Viet Cong and North Vietnamese casualties, not the Australian dead. By some convoluted logic he managed to imply that Australians were militarily inept, by being ambushed, but were also callous and brutal in killing the enemy once engaged, suffering no casualties ourselves.

The facts of the Battle of Long Tan are well known, particularly that it was an encounter battle, not an ambush. It was far from a blundering disaster. In fact it unbalanced a determined and numerically superior attempt to destroy the newly established 1 Australian Task Force, precisely what large, armed fighting patrols are intended to do. It also, irrevocably, wrested the initiative from the Viet Cong and the People's Army of Vietnam in Phuoc Tuy Province. So much so that 18 months later, 1 ATF was able to commit two thirds of its strength outside the province, so much in control was the Australian force. However, such factual analysis escaped the Herald reporter completely.

The Tet Offensive is often offered as an example of how American and Allied forces were completely outclassed by the Viet Cong and PAVN, the siege of Khe Sanh being one of the key "tragedies" of the Tet Offensive. The facts are that for North Vietnam, the Tet Offensive was an unmitigated and wildly overestimated disaster. There was no mass, popular uprising and all that was achieved was the exposure of both Viet Cong and main force units to the withering destruction of American and Allied firepower. The Viet Cong in South Vietnam were effectively wiped out and ceased to play any effective role in the war from then on. The North Vietnamese mounted an undeniable invasion of South Vietnam through neutral Laos and Cambodia; an act of military amorality equal to Pearl Harbour and the two invasions of Belgium by the German Army in 1914 and 1940. The very large number of these PAVN divisions, virtually all their first line combat units, suffered over twenty thousand killed and half that number wounded.

None, absolutely none, of the military aims of the Communist forces were achieved and it was called off by Vo Nguyen Giap when its failure became obvious. It was a military defeat of the order of the French Army in 1940 or the Gallipoli Campaign. Yet, conventional wisdom has it as a shining victory by the apologists and mythmakers. At Khe Sanh, particularly, an outnumbered US Marine garrison inflicted a huge defeat on the Communist forces.

There, a combination of fighting spirit and technology beat the four NVA divisions arrayed against them and foiled Giap's aim to repeat Dien Bien Phu. This also destabilised overall Communist strategy for the Tet Offensive, tying down valuable forces in the North, hardly a display of the alleged superior military thought of this "master" strategist and his political master, Ho Chi Minh. The Tet Offensive was a military miscalculation of the most callous and egregious kind, a complete waste of the military resources deployed by the North. In Phuoc Tuy, the Australian Army never lost a battle, no thanks to the absence of our other SEATO ally, Great Britain, perhaps the underlying cause of the BBC's anti Americanism and its particular attempts to rewrite the results of the Vietnam War.

In fact, all American and Allied forces had left South Vietnam by January 1973, over 18 months before the fall of Saigon. A peace treaty, the Paris Accords, had been signed by all parties as, to all intents, North Vietnam had been well and truly defeated militarily in the field, despite what years of misinformation would have us believe. Concurrently, and most germane, was the fragmenting and emasculation of Communist aggression in Asia from the resolute example of America and Australia in Vietnam [despite the craven nature of British actions]. The "dominoes" of 'South East Asia were given a priceless five years to cement their fragile economies and begin to deliver benefits to the people that evaporated the appeal of Communism. No less an authority than Lee Kuan Yew has asserted this crucial result This was the main game the defeat of Communist expansion in South-East Asia, and we well and truly won it.

Saigon fell because the North Vietnamese broke the Accords, with deliberate and cold-blooded aggression, waiting long enough after Allied forces had left. The Communists attacked with four armoured Divisions across the DMZ, not far short of the Wehrmact's 1940 French Blitzkrieg through the Ardennes. In a new war, the NVA most certainly defeated the numerically inferior South Vietnamese but this was not the American fictional defeat posited by the BBC. If President Nixon had not been emasculated by the effects of the Watergate scandal, US air power would have been committed to the defence of South Vietnam, withheld by a hostile US Congress.

Finally, another myth is the defeat of US technological might by a barefoot army. The small part played by the Viet Cong against the consistent activities of the very well equipped and numerically superior MN forces dismisses the "barefoot" fallacy. If there was any defeat in the Vietnam War, it was that of the political dimension. This was completely ignored, yet any elementary student [or reporter) of war theory knows, as Klauswitz enjoined, "war is an extension of policy by other means." To focus on technology as the cause of any negative result in that war is a fatal flaw in any argument trying to deduce future directions in warfare.

In the Vietnam War, technology was the equaliser for our forces against a more numerous and well equipped enemy. Helicopters gave flexibility to move less numerous forces rapidly and productively. Air and artillery support gave them a firepower equaliser when they met this larger enemy. This crucial dynamic of operations in South Vietnam, the technology "equaliser", never got a mention.

So, when we see the balance brought, at long last to the realities of the Vietnam War by We Were Soldiers, the reality of our own military victory, and its long lasting effect on the peace of South East Asia, should also be a part of that balance.