Word: viets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sense was impossible under the conditions imposed by the Red Chinese and the Soviets and the nature of the war. The Pentagon should have tried harder to persuade its civilian commanders that both ought to narrow their goals. They could hope to prevent a conquest of South Viet Nam and bolster the South Vietnamese forces for a limited time-and that, perhaps, is all that the President and the nation should have expected to accomplish in Viet Nam. Military men have often said that they were asked to fight the Viet Nam War with one hand tied behind their back...
...victory are highly questionable. The notion that a quick strike by an unfettered U.S. military force would have promptly subdued the enemy ignores the whole history of the incredible tenacity, patience and xenophobic passion of Vietnamese nationalists. It also underrates their guerrilla fighting skills. A U.S. invasion of North Viet Nam to topple the Hanoi government must at times have had an obvious appeal to the military. But it is almost certain that this move would have provoked full-scale intervention by China, perhaps with Russian support. Such intervention might not have happened, many military men argue...
...troops conventionally trained by the U.S. were a little like the British redcoats fighting in lines as they engaged in forest skirmishes against the American colonists and their Indian allies. Clumsy U.S. battalions in the mid-1960s were out of place in the jungles, swamps and highlands of South Viet Nam. The excitement of technology became an almost spiritual feeling among the military. Generals thought that bigger, faster weapons systems, particularly against peasants, would...
...even earlier, asserts TIME Pentagon Correspondent John Mulliken, top military officers should have exercised "their responsibility of advising the civilian leadership in military matters." Instead of automatically embracing President Johnson's proposition in 1965 that U.S. combat forces might go into Viet Nam, the Joint Chiefs should have warned with greater insight-and greater force-of the difficulty of waging guerrilla warfare against an enemy that could match U.S. manpower...
...reason for the willingness of many Western European officials to go along with the Soviet-proposed conference was the hope of detente with Eastern Europe. Some Western Europeans also fear that the U.S., preoccupied with Viet Nam and domestic difficulties, may one day cease to serve as an effective protector of Western Europe...