They
were small, talked in sing-song squeaks, put a smelly fish sauce
on their food, and often held hands with each other.
It is not surprising that American troops
sent to Southeast Asia -- mostly young, indifferently educated,
and molded by a society with too much self-esteem and too little
understanding of other cultures -- found it hard to empathize
with South
Vietnam's soldiers.
Still, it is a pity that many veterans of
the Vietnam War have joined radical agitators, draft dodgers and
smoke-screen politicians to besmirch the honor of an army that
can no longer defend itself. To slander an army that died in
battle because America abandoned it
is a contemptible deed, unworthy of American soldiers.
Perhaps some find my assertion incredible.
How can I possibly defend the armed forces of
South
Vietnam? Everybody "knows" they
were incompetent, treacherous and cowardly, isn't that so?
No, it is not. This article will outline
some of the more compelling evidence against this scurrilous
mythology and also examine why such a mythology arose to begin
with.
Of course, the South Vietnamese forces
were imperfect. They had their share of bad leaders, cowardly
troops, and incidents of panic, blundering and brutality. So did
the American forces in Southeast
Asia.
In some respects --
organization, logistics, staff work and leadership --
South
Vietnam's armed forces did lag behind
U.S. forces. But how
could one expect otherwise in a developing nation that had just
emerged from colonialism and was suddenly plunged into a war to
the death against a powerful enemy supplied by the Communist
bloc?
In fact, many of the weaknesses
exhibited by the South Vietnamese forces were identical to the
ones displayed by the U.S. armed forces during the American War
of Independence, even though late 18th-century America had
several advantages: the whole scale of the Revolutionary War was
smaller and easier to manage; America's colonial experience,
unlike Vietnam's, had fostered local self-government and
permitted the country to develop some truly outstanding leaders;
the British were less persistent than the North Vietnamese; and
the French allies did not abandon young America the way the U.S.
government abandoned South Vietnam.
But in
any case, organization, logistics, staff work and even
leadership are not the qualities at issue in the slandering of
the South Vietnamese forces.
Two questions
touch on the real issue. Were South Vietnamese fighting men so
lacking in character, courage, toughness and patriotism that
Americans are justified in slandering them and assigning them
all blame for the defeat of freedom in Southeast Asia? Were U.S. soldiers so much
better than their allies that Americans can afford to treat the
South Vietnamese with contempt? The answer to both questions, I
submit, is a resounding "No!"
The objective
"big-picture" evidence is clear. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was
supposed to crack South Vietnam's will
to resist. Instead, South Vietnamese forces fought ferociously
and effectively: no unit collapsed or ran. Even the police
fought, turning their pistols against heavily armed enemy
regulars. Afterward the number of South Vietnamese enlistments
rose so high, according to reports at the time, that the
country's government suspended the draft call for a while.
In the 1972 Easter tide Offensive, isolated
South Vietnamese troops at An Loc held out against overwhelming
enemy forces and artillery/rocket fire for days, defeating
repeated tank assaults. I later met a U.S. adviser who
described how a South Vietnamese infantry squad in his area was
sent to destroy three enemy tanks. The members of the squad
dutifully destroyed one tank, then decided to capture the other
two. As I remember, they got one, but the other made its escape,
with the South Vietnamese chasing it down a road on foot. The
soldiers got chewed out upon returning...for letting one tank
get away. The squad's performance may not be the best
demonstration of military discipline, but the incident
demonstrates the high morale and initiative that many South
Vietnamese soldiers possessed. Certainly it does not support
charges of cowardice.
As further evidence,
consider South
Vietnam's final moments as an independent
nation in 1975, when justifiable despair gripped the country
because it became clear that the United
States would provide no help
(not even fuel and ammunition). Yet one division-sized South
Vietnamese unit held off four North Vietnamese divisions for
some two weeks in fierce fighting at Xuan Loc. By all accounts,
that battle was as heroic as anything in the annals of
U.S. military
history. The South Vietnamese finally had to withdraw when their
air force ran out of cluster bombs for supporting the ground
troops.
Once I saw a television documentary
about an Australian cameraman who had covered the war. Unlike
U.S. reporters, he
spent much of his time with the South Vietnamese forces. He
attested to their fighting spirit and showed film footage to
prove it. He also recalled visiting an enemy-controlled village
and being told that the Communists feared South Vietnamese
troops more than Americans. The principal reason was that
Americans were noisy, so the enemy always heard them coming. But
that would have been immaterial if the South Vietnamese had not
also been dangerous fighters.
However, the
most important evidence of South Vietnamese soldiers'
willingness to fight comes from two simple, undeniable,
"big-picture" facts -- facts that are often ignored or disguised
to cover up American failure in Vietnam.
Fact One: The war began some seven years
before major American combat forces arrived and continued for
some five years after the U.S. began
withdrawing. Somebody was doing the fighting, and that somebody
was the South Vietnamese.
Fact Two: The
South Vietnamese armed forces lost about a quarter-million dead.
In proportion to population, that was equivalent to some 2
million American dead (double the actual U.S. losses in all
wars combined). You don't suffer that way if you're not
fighting.
How, then, did the South
Vietnamese get their bad reputation?
Certainly there were occasional displays of
incompetence and panic by South Vietnamese forces. The same can
be said of U.S. forces. I knew
an American artillery commander whose gunners once had to defend
their firebase by firing canister point-bank into enemy ranks
because the U.S. infantry company
"protecting" them had broken in the face of the enemy assault
and was huddling, panic-stricken, in the midst of the guns.
That incident does not mean the whole U.S.
Army was cowardly, and occasional breakdowns among
America's allies did
not mean all South Vietnamese soldiers were cowards. Yet one
would think so, the way the story gets told by some veterans --
and by the political apologists for a U.S. government that left
South
Vietnam in the lurch.
The truth of the matter was best stated
nearly two centuries ago when a British woman asked the Duke of
Wellington if British soldiers were ever known to run in battle.
"Madam," replied the Iron Duke, "All soldiers run in battle."
Even a cursory study of military history
confirms this. Civil War battles reveal a continuous ebb and
flow of bravery and fear, as Confederate and Union units alike first attacked bravely,
then crumbled and fled under horrendous fire, before regrouping
and charging again. No armies ever laid more justified claim to
sheer self-sacrificing heroism than those two, yet they were
subject to panic as a routine price for doing bloody business on
the battlefield.
Author S.L.A. Marshall
describes how one American rifle company in World War II fled in
panic from a screaming Japanese banzai charge: a second unit
fought on, quickly killing every Japanese soldier involved
(about 10), and discovered that most of them were not even
armed.
If the same thing had happened to a
South Vietnamese unit, it undoubtedly would have been cited
repeatedly by self-appointed pundits as incontrovertible proof
of the cowardice of all South Vietnamese troops.
Why? We've already hinted at the answer. It
all depends on the color and native tongue of the troops
involved. The ugly truth is that the South Vietnamese forces'
false reputation is rooted in American racism and cultural
chauvinism.
I can personally attest to the
pervading, massive and truth-distorting reality of the
phenomenon. When I arrived in Vietnam in June 1969,
I immediately began to witness continuous displays of ignorance
and contempt by some Americans toward the Vietnamese people and
their armed forces.
White troops, black
troops, and civilian Americans such as journalists -- all were
equally afflicted. This passionate hatred of Vietnam and its
people had an astonishing power to become contagious.
I knew an American captain with a graduate
degree from a prestigious university in cinematography
(presumably a specialty that improves visual perceptiveness). He
once returned from temporary duty in Thailand singing the praises of
the Thai.
"They send their kids to school," he said,
contrasting them with the South Vietnamese. He was surprised,
but not repentant, when I pointed out that there was a
Vietnamese school right next door to our compound! Hundreds of
little kids in bright blue-and-white school uniforms could be
seen there daily -- by anyone whose eyes were open. But this
filmmaker apparently could not see them.
It
is ironic that the Vietnamese -- who by reputation honor
learning more than Americans do and who raised South Vietnam's
literacy rate from about 20 percent to 80 percent even as war
raged around them (and despite the enemy's habit of murdering
teachers) -- were accused by the filmmaker of having no schools.
Because he was fighting in a foreign country
and was separated from his family, this American had built up a
hatred for Vietnam, and he
wanted to believe the Vietnamese people were contemptible.
Therefore, it was important to him to believe that they had no
schools; and his emotions literally interdicted his optic
nerves.
Imagine the feelings of the
undereducated masses of American troops faced with a strange
culture in a high-stress environment! Perhaps one cannot blame
the troops for their ignorance. Heaven knows the
U.S. command
made only the most perfunctory effort to educate them about
Vietnam and the
nature of the war.
However, that is no
excuse for veterans to pretend that they understand what they
saw in Vietnam.
America's
Vietnam veterans must
be honored for their courage, sacrifice and loyalty to their
country. But courage and sacrifice are not the same as
knowledge. Fighting in Vietnam didn't make
soldiers into experts on the country or the war, any more than
having a baby makes a woman an expert on embryology.
What most U.S. soldiers did there taught
them little or nothing about South
Vietnam's culture, society,
politics, etc. Few Americans spoke more than a half-dozen words
of Vietnamese; even fewer read Vietnamese books and newspapers;
and not many more read books about Vietnam in English.
Except for advisers, few Americans worked
with any Vietnamese other than (perhaps) the clerks, laundresses
and waitresses employed by U.S. forces.
Most important for our purpose, few
U.S. troops ever
observed South Vietnamese forces in combat. Even the ones who
did rarely considered the attitude differences that must have
existed between soldiers like the Americans, who only had to get
through one year and knew their families were safe at home, and
troops like the South Vietnamese, who had to worry about their
families' safety every day and who knew that only death or
grievous wounds would release them from the army. The Vietnamese
naturally used a different measuring stick to determine what was
important in fighting the war.
Journalists
were no better. Consider a biased TV report I heard in which a
reporter denounced South Vietnam's air force because -- despite
Vietnamization -- it "let the Americans" fly the tough missions
against North Vietnam.
In fact, it was the
United States
that would not let the South Vietnamese fly into
North
Vietnam (except for a few
missions in the early days of the bombing). The American leaders
wanted to control the bombing so that the United
States could use it as a
negotiating tool.
Not wanting the South
Vietnamese to have any control over bombing policy, the
U.S. forces
deliberately gave them equipment unsuited for missions up North.
South
Vietnam did not get the
fighter-bombers, weapons, refueling aircraft or
electronic-warfare equipment necessary for such missions. It was
an American decision.
The TV reporter in
question either was ignorant of that fact or chose to ignore it
in order to do a hatchet job on the American allies. Considering
his blatantly biased words and tone of voice, I concluded that
any ignorance he suffered from was deliberate.
Another example of media bias came during
the Khe Sanh siege. If you asked a thousand Americans which
units fought at Khe Sanh, most of those who had heard of the
battle would probably know that U.S. Marines did. But it would
be surprising if more than one out of the thousand knew that a
South Vietnamese Ranger battalion had shared the rigors of the
siege with American Marines. Other South Vietnamese units took
part in supporting operations outside the besieged area. The
U.S. media just did
not consider the American allies worthy of coverage unless they
were doing something shameful, so these hard-fighting soldiers
became quite literally the invisible heroes of Khe Sanh.
All this -- soldier and media bias -- came
together clearly during news reports of the 1972 incursion into
Laos.
Consider a TV documentary a decade ago. It
included film of some American GIs being interviewed during the
Laotian fighting. These guys, themselves safely inside
South
Vietnam, were "explaining" the
South Vietnamese army's struggle in contemptuous, racist
remarks. The reporter then suggested that these American GIs
understood the situation better than the American generals.
The incursion, of course, is the source of
the infamous photo of a South Vietnamese soldier escaping from
Laos by clinging to a
helicopter skid. This image was and is held up to Americans
again and again as "proof" of South Vietnamese unworthiness.
In fact, it is a classic example of
photography's power to lie. What happened was this: The South
Vietnamese were struck by overwhelming Communist forces. The
U.S. military failed to provide the support that had been
promised because enemy anti-aircraft fire was too strong. There
were reports of U.S. helicopter crews
kicking boxes of howitzer ammunition out the doors from 5,000
feet up, hoping the stuff would land inside South Vietnamese
perimeters. The helicopters simply couldn't get any closer.
Given that context, consider the way Colonel
Robert Molinelli, an American officer who witnessed the action,
described it in the Armed Forces Journal of April 19, 1971: "A
South Vietnamese battalion of 420 men was surrounded by an enemy
regiment of 2,500-3,300 men for three days. The
U.S. could not get
supplies to the unit. It fought till it ran low on ammunition,
then battled its way out of the encirclement using captured
enemy weapons and ammunition. It carried all of its wounded and
some of its dead with it. Reconnaissance photos showed 637
visible enemy dead around its position.
The
unit was down to 253 effectives when it reached another South
Vietnamese perimeter. Some 17 of those men did panic and rode
helicopter skids to escape. The rest did not.
Now, some might consider dangling from a
high-flying, fast-moving helicopter for many miles, subject to
anti-aircraft fire, to be a pretty gutsy move. But, aside from
that, how can such an isolated incident -- during a hard-fought
withdrawal-while-in-contact (universally acknowledged to be just
about the toughest maneuver in the military inventory) -- be
inflated into condemnation of an entire army, nation and
population?
The answer is racism. The guys
hanging from the helicopter skids were funny-looking foreigners.
If they had been Americans, or even British, the reaction
undoubtedly would have been one of compassion for the ordeal
they had been through.
Evidence for this is
found in how Americans responded to the British retreats early
in World War II.
There were some disgraceful
displays among British forces at Dunkirk and elsewhere. At
Dunkirk a sergeant in one
evacuation boat had to aim a submachine gun at his panicky
charges to keep order on board. On another boat soldiers had to
pummel an officer with their weapons to keep him from climbing
over the gunwale and swamping the boat. In Crete, a
New
Zealand brigade had to ring its
assigned embarkation beach with a cordon of bayonets to keep
fear-stricken English troops from swarming over the boats.
Yet the image of Britain's lonely
stand against Hitler in 1940 is one of heroism. That's perfectly
justified by the facts, and isolated incidents like the ones
described above should not detract from the overall picture of
courage and devotion.
It is certainly true
that South Vietnamese forces gave an undistinguished performance
in the final days, with the exception of the incredibly heroic
defense of Xuan Loc.
Yet there are reasons
for that. And there are reasons to believe that, with more loyal
support from the Americans, the South Vietnamese could have
turned in more Xuan Loc-style performances and perhaps even have
saved their country.
The real issue again is
not just how the South Vietnamese performed, however; it is how
their performance compared with the way Americans might have
performed under similar circumstances.
And
the truth is that American troops -- if they were abandoned by
the U.S. the way South
Vietnamese were -- probably would perform no better than the
South Vietnamese did.
Remember: the
United States
had cut aid to South Vietnam
drastically in 1974, months before the final enemy offensive. As
a result, only a little fuel and ammunition were being sent to
South
Vietnam. South Vietnamese air
and ground vehicles were immobilized by lack of spare parts.
Troops went into battle without batteries for their radios, and
their medics lacked basic supplies. South Vietnamese rifles and
artillery pieces were rationed to three rounds of ammunition per
day in the last months of the war.
The
situation was so bad that even the North Vietnamese commander
who conquered South Vietnam,
General Van Tien Dung, admitted his enemy's mobility and
firepower had been cut in half. Aside from the direct physical
effect, we must take into account the impact this impoverishment
had on South Vietnamese soldiers' morale.
Into this miserable state of affairs the
North Vietnamese slashed, with a well-equipped, well-supplied
tank-and-motorized-infantry blitzkrieg.
Yes,
the South Vietnamese folded. Yes, they abandoned some equipment
(much of which would not work anyway for lack of spare parts)
and some ammunition (which they had hoarded until it was too
late to shoot it or move it, because they knew they would never
get any more). So whose fault was that? Theirs... or
America's?
Yes, South
Vietnam's withdrawal from the vulnerable
northern
provinces was belated and clumsy,
leading to panic and collapse. But how could the South
Vietnamese government have abandoned its people any earlier,
before the enemy literally forced it to?
For
a while the South Vietnamese hoped the American B-52s would
return and help stem the Communist tide. When it became clear
they would not, understandable demoralization set in.
The fighting spirit of the forces was
sapped, and many South Vietnamese soldiers deserted -- not
because they were cowards or were not willing to fight for their
country, but because they were unwilling to die for a lost cause
when their families desperately needed them.
Would Americans do any better under the
conditions that faced the South Vietnamese in 1975? Would
U.S. units fight well
with broken vehicles and communications, a crippled medical
system, inadequate fuel and ammunition, and little or no air
support -- against a powerful, well-supplied and confident foe?
I doubt it.
Would the South Vietnamese have
won in 1975 if the U.S. government had
kept up its side of the bargain and continued matching the aid
poured into North Vietnamese by the Communists?
The answer is unknowable. Certainly they
would have had a fighting chance, something the
U.S. betrayal denied
them. Certainly they could have fought more effectively. Even if
defeated, they might have gone down heroically in a fight that
could have formed the basis for a nation-building legend and for
continued resistance against Communism on the Afghan model.
Even if the South Vietnamese had been
totally defeated, wholehearted U.S. support would
have enabled Americans to shrug and say they had done their
best. However, the U.S. did not do its best, and for
Americans to try to disguise that fact by slandering the memory
of South
Vietnam and its army is wrong.
It is too late now for Americans to make
good the terrible crime committed in abandoning the South
Vietnamese people to Communism. But it is not too late to
acknowledge the error of American insults to their memory. It is
not too late to begin paying proper honor to their achievements
and their heroic attempt to defend their liberty.
