Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 79
INSIGHT
Dung cogently stated in Nhan Dan in April-May
1976 that “the [Paris] agreement represented a big
victory for our people and a big defeat for the U.S.
imperialists and their [Vietnamese] lackeys.”9
After we recovered our prisoners of war and
returned our troops to the United States, America
lost interest in Vietnam and the fate of the Vietnamese. It was then difficult to get any aid, especially
military aid, for them. Congress reduced military
aid to South Vietnam from $2.3 billion in fiscal
year 1973 to $799 million in fiscal year 1975—a
crippling reduction. Gen. Van Tien Dung said in
Great Spring Victory, “[President] Nguyen Van
Thieu was forced to fight a poor man’s war. Enemy
firepower had decreased by nearly 60% . . . [and]
its mobility was also reduced by half.”10 While this
reduction in aid contributed substantially to South
Vietnam’s defeat in the spring of 1975 (after the
North had three years to recover from its 1972
defeat), the final blow was the 4 June 1973 CaseChurch Amendment that cut off all funding for
U.S. military operations in Indochina. This made
it impossible for us to enforce compliance with
the Paris Accords. It also ensured that South Vietnamese troops would not have the U.S. air support
that was essential in 1972 and encouraged the final
attack by the North in 1975, which conquered the
South. We had abandoned our South Vietnamese
allies to a grim and tragic fate, whereas, Hanoi
would continue to count on its loyal allies, China
and the Soviet Union.
Isaacs’ Final Point
This brings us to the last point: should we have
ever fought this war? I argue that by continuing to
disparage the South Vietnamese government and
its armed forces, our media convinced the American public that Vietnam was not worth fighting
for. Certainly, the South Vietnamese government
suffered from corruption and at times was incompetent. (Corruption was far more extensive in the
tightly controlled North. In 1967, Ho Chi Minh
inveighed on the radio against the widespread corruption in his country.) South Vietnamese troops
performed poorly at times and lost four times as
many troops as did the United States, but in the
end, South Vietnam was winning the war. The test
for the South came during the 1968 Tet Offensive
when enemy troops (mostly Vietcong) overran the
MILITARY REVIEW
March-April 2014
majority of the towns and cities in the country. The
North’s initial success was widely publicized by
the U.S. media, making a lasting impression on the
American public. What received little attention was
the South’s widespread and courageous resistance,
which remained true to the government and successfully countered VC efforts to incite a popular
uprising against it. It was scarcely reported that the
VC was soundly crushed and never really recovered
from this disastrous defeat. The resulting increased
security in the countryside made possible one of the
most successful land reforms in history. Even when
under siege, those areas under government control
enjoyed a remarkable degree of freedom. To me,
South Vietnam was worth defending.
United States Enters WW II
Because of Vietnam
When I was teaching at Georgetown, students
were surprised when I said that the United States got
into World War II because of what is now Vietnam.
When the Japanese were rampaging all over China,
and even in response to the notorious 1937 Nanking
Massacre, the United States took no serious punitive
steps against Japan. However, when Japanese troops
occupied what is now Vietnam, the United States
and its allies placed embargoes on shipments of oil,
scrap iron, and rubber to Japan. The embargo posed
a major threat to Japan’s economy, and Tokyo no
doubt considered it a warlike move. We took this
step because then-French Indochina was an ideal
staging area for invading the Dutch East Indies
(now Indonesia). Japan then assumed that when
they moved in this direction, we would attempt to
interpose our fleet to thwart them. To prevent this,
Japan sought to neutralize our fleet by attacking it
at Pearl Harbor. It then moved to capture vi