Don's Tuesday Column

              THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson      Red Bluff Daily News   9/19/2017

             Peaceful villages; rocket-free cities

The Lewis Sorley book, "A Better War; The unexamined victories and final tragedy of America's last years in Vietnam," was published in 1999, over 30 years after the start of the period he writes about, and nearly 25 years after the ignominy of Saigon's fall to communist North Vietnam. I acquired the book in 2016 for summer reading but didn't get around to it until this summer. If you've been following the summaries in past columns, you should have gleaned some hitherto "unexamined" and mostly unacknowledged realities, and "victories," of that war.

They were well sourced and documented in 56 pages of foot notes. In "A Note on the Notes," Sorley wrote: "The documentary record of the later years of the Vietnam War is very rich. This volume draws, for example, on some 455 previously unexploited tape recordings, running in the aggregate to thousands of hours, made at MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) Headquarters during the years 1968-1972. The oral histories of many of the senior American officers involved in prosecution of the war are extensive, as are the papers of some of those officers."

We now have a PBS series by Ken Burns, "The Vietnam War," with 18 hours over 10 episodes of his perspective on that war. I will be watching it so that I can provide some "fact checking" on his work. I am not prejudging it, as it begins with a look at the history of the French colonial era and the overthrow of the French by "Vietnamese revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh." Will he elevate the anti-war element? Will he provide honest accounts of the "victories"?

The Lam Son 719 operation, February and March of 1971, saw the South Vietnamese military conduct a massive incursion into Laos for the essential purpose of destroying war supplies stockpiled by the North, and preemptively inflicting damage and death to NVA military poised to attack the South. It drew some intense, but overblown, criticism of ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) conduct and effectiveness. Indeed, post operation analysis found numerous weaknesses and problems with the officers and some units. American air support, meaning helicopters and bombing that augmented our ally's ground fighting, performed admirably.

However, ARVN weaknesses were seized on by war opponents in the media and political circles to undermine the otherwise relatively smooth and successful "Vietnamization" of the South's defense of their nation. Many heroic and militarily effective aspects of the ARVN part of the operation were diminished and dismissed in the piling-on that reached even into the Nixon White House and Brig. Gen. Alexander Haig. Haig himself later revised his criticism to acknowledge the positive aspects of Lam Son 719, which prevented an attack by the North.

Weighed against the criticism was the tally of how "The North Vietnamese suffered terribly in Lam Son 719." They lost half of the maneuver battalions, almost one third of the "10,000 to 12,000 rear service personnel that operating in the area...that's a complete loss of those battalions...at least 75 of some 110 enemy tanks were destroyed...Up to 20,000 enemy killed in action, along with 5,000 individual weapons, nearly 2,000 crew-served weapons, more than a hundred tanks, and large quantities of ammunition and rice."

Beyond the military accomplishments, the effect of that surprising and audacious cross-border attack reverberated to the detriment of North Vietnam in several ways. A report from MACV stated that "the North Vietnamese were both surprised and hurt by the Lam Son operation...they had lost heavily in personnel, particularly good reserve units which were chewed up...(and) lost heavily in weapons and supplies...They suffered a political loss at home because they could not hide their significant military losses.

"Lam Son 719 had a devastating effect upon the morale of the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) and of the civilian population of North Vietnam...The destruction of nearly two North Vietnamese divisions, and increased defections during the same period, caused the morale of all but the NVA officer corps to disintegrate." It effectively prevented any further large scale attacks for the rest of the year. It was by then an illusion that the Vietnam War was anything other than the attempted subjugation of one nation by another; no popular uprising existed in the South.

Moreover, polling of the South's people found that a stunning "92 percent favored the operation, and only 3 percent opposed it. Those in favor represented the highest percentage ever recorded on any question on any of these periodic surveys. It was an informed opinion, thought (Gen. Creighton) Abrams, because the results of the operation were on the radio every hour and on television every night." Indeed, Haig, Kissinger and others revised their opinions favorably.

Illustrating the relative success, the widespread peace and security that prevailed in 1971, William Colby (CIA Saigon station chief) and John Paul Vann (senior civilian military adviser) traveled across the Delta on a couple of motorcycles, without armed escort. They expressed great satisfaction with the pacification program; Vann: "I feel so strongly about the way this thing is working and the way we're running it..."

"Meanwhile, in the capital, for so long a place of rocket attacks and terrorist atrocities, Sir Robert Thompson (British military and counter-insurgency expert) could express the 'conviction that Saigon was a safer place in which to live and walk around both by day and night than most American cities.'"

Journalist Tom Barnes returned in Autumn 1971 (absent for 3 years); "he was struck by...the rural prosperity, the way the Territorial Forces had taken hold, and the growing political and economic autonomy of the villages." Next: elections; drug and racial tensions in our troops.