Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 77

INSIGHT

official policy to eliminate “bourgeois” and other
“class enemies,” including priests and foreigners.
On retaking Hue, American troops discovered a
mass grave containing about 2,800 bodies; there
was clear evidence that a number of them had been
buried alive. When German correspondent Uwe
Siemon-Netto (Springer papers), accompanied by
Washington Post correspondent Peter Braestrup,
visited the mass grave, they noted an American
television camera crew standing by doing nothing.
Peter asked them, “Why don’t you film this?” he
was told, “We are not here to film anti-Communist
propaganda.”6 This view was typical. The New York
Times, with the largest bureau in the country, carried
only a brief wire service story on this, the greatest
atrocity of the war by far. For other media it was
strictly a one-day story.
After I returned to the states, I was assigned to
speak about Vietnam to audiences all over the country. As I finished each talk, I would ask, “Who has
heard of My Lai?” all hands would go up. When I
next asked, “Who has heard of the Hue massacre?”
not a single hand would go up. I use this as an
example of how our media insufficiently covered
or ignored the misdeeds of the enemy. I remember
that in World War II, all Americans were convinced
the German and Japanese regimes were intrinsically evil, oppressive, and aggressive. This also
aptly described the Hanoi regime, but how many
people knew it by depending on our news media?
Imagine someone during World War II chanting,
“let’s hear it for Hitler” or, “hooray for Hirohito.”
During the Vietnam War, it was common to hear
anti-war groups chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh,
NLF is gonna win.”

Isaacs’ Second Point
As to the second point, that the war was unwinnable, I point out that we no doubt made mistakes
in our prosecution of the war. Our initial emphasis,
for example, was on body count as a metric of
success. However, as it turned out, we were killing a very large number of enemy troops. A History Channel documentary on 25 October 2004,
included a knowledgeable North Vietnamese who
said the North lost about 2 million people, mostly
through hostilities and disease. Our side killed
about a million of their troops, proportionally
equivalent to the United States losing 17 million.
MILITARY REVIEW

March-April 2014

This attrition ultimately brought North Vietnam to
the brink of defeat. Hanoi had to scrape the bottom
of the manpower barrel to mount the 1972 “Easter
Offensive.” The offensive cost the North 100,000
killed in action, twice that suffered by the United
States in the entire war. The concept of using body
count as a metric of success sounded morbid and
generated a great deal of criticism from the media.
The media claimed the after-battle body counts were
exaggerated, and many might well have been. The
only time I was able to check the accuracy of one of
these counts was when we captured the enemy after
action report of a major battle in III Corps area of
operations in 1966. The report set their losses at a
figure that was only about ten percent less than our
count (although this could have been an aberration).
The turning point of the war was the enemy’s
largest offensive, launched at the end of March
1972, the so-called Easter Offensive. North Vietnam attacked with the equivalent of 23 divisions
well equipped with, among other things, hundreds
of Soviet T-54 tanks, long-range artillery, rockets,
and the latest in surface-to-air missile defense weapons. This was clearly a test of the Vietnamization
ordered by President Nixon, which resulted in the
withdrawal of all U.S. ground combat forces. Not
long after the Easter Offensive began, Nixon sent
Henry Kissinger’s deputy, Maj. Gen. Alexander
Haig, to Vietnam to give him a firsthand assessment.
Haig took a fellow National Security Council (NSC)
staffer and me with him. I was sent to Western II
Corps, placing me directly in the path of a major
assault. I landed in Pleiku under artillery fire and
then flew to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam
23rd Division Headquarters, which was also under
artillery attack. I was extracted shortly before it fell
to a tank attack. Back in Pleiku the enemy attacked
us with Soviet 122mm rockets (my ears still ring
from that attack). In Kontum, the principal advisor,
a U.S. Army colonel, was convinced that Kontum,
a key enemy objective, would fall. (He was wrong.
The 23rd saved it.)
I am relating my experiences only to convey why,
when I returned to Washington, I believed South
Vietnam was not going to win. When our side began
to win, it was not reflected in CIA reports, even
though the media reported on the heroic and successful defense of An Loc. On 15 September 1972,
the most significant event of the offensive occurred
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