Word: vietnames
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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American boys went to Vietnam to stem global communism; we preferred, understandably, a pro-West government to achieve this goal. We propped up a dubious regime in the southern part of the country and called it the Republic of South Vietnam. Our objective, then, was to legitimize this government, a difficult, perhaps impossible, task. But the hit-parade of generals and petty tyrants in Saigon possessed little popular support, no traditions of political leadership, no real boundaries and no mandate to govern from its people. We gave the Vietnamese the shadow of representative government but not the substance; as many...
...plied Vietnam with more arms and cash (which rarely reached its intended beneficiaries) than it could handle. And--since the Vietnamese could not do the job alone--our "advisers" and later our troops would rout communists from the political "infrastructure" and preserve our control of the presidential palace. That theory justified escalation after escalation for 12 bloody years, through more than 57,000 American and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese deaths. Ultimately, we were in Vietnam not to "win" the war--for Tet hammered home the realization that this was unrealistic--but to attain "peace with honor," a euphemism...
...DOCUMENTARY did isolate a crucial military issue in the war--an issue which symbolized the fraudulence of our effort in Vietnam. Because, unlike in previous wars, we were fighting to hold ("pacify") territory, not seize it, the determining factor in our success or failure was the level of opposition in the south; Wallace called troop infiltration to the south "the most critical factor in the war." The Vietnam era--the go-go '60s, when the computer embodied all that was sleek and modern about America--had an obsession with numbers, and Robert S. McNamara installed his B-School brand...
...known to the White House at the time. At a meeting of the "Wise Old Men," brought together to consider the implications of Tet in March 1968, former U.N. ambassador Arthur Goldberg pointed out the impossibility of the army's figures. U.S. leaders knew the information behind their Vietnam strategy was riddled with inconsistencies but chose to overlook their gloomy implications. So the battle--hopeless, pointless, endless--continued...
...Salvador or some place like it, we may not lie about our figures and we may not go "half-way"--but we still will not win, only prolong the agony. That our troops are not yet in El Salvador can be attributed to a limited comprehension of the Vietnam experience, but that comprehension is rapidly fading. Only when we realize that brute force cannot cure the political, social and economic woes of a nation in upheaval will we have salvaged an honorable legacy from our years of dishonor in Vietnam...