Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 80

warfare could encircle developed capitalist countries and that the defeat of U.S. imperialism in
Vietnam would show the people of the world that
what the Vietnamese people can do, they can do too
(as reported in my memoir).11 In July 1964, North
Vietnam’s Defense Minister Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap
declared, “South Vietnam [the Vietcong] is the vanguard fighter of the national liberation movement
in the present era … and the failure of the special
war unleashed by the U.S. imperialists in South
Vietnam would mean that this war can be defeated
anywhere in the world.”12 The war bought precious
time for strengthening Southeast Asian regimes
while wearing down North Vietnam (which lost a
million troops in the war) and effectively eliminating its threat to Southeast Asia.
In the 1970s, Indonesian leaders Suharto and
Malik confirmed in an interview with columnist
Robert Novak that our introduction of combat
troops in Vietnam in March 1965 encouraged
their courageous resistance to a nearly successful October 1965 Chinese-backed communist
coup. Success of that coup would no doubt have

triggered our treaty obligation to come to the aid
of the Philippines in the face of a massive communist threat that would have dwarfed what we
faced in Vietnam.13 Historian Norman Friedman
argues that U.S. troop commitment to Vietnam
also encouraged the successful British defense
of Malaysia against a communist invasion force
launched from Indonesia.14
As noted above, in 1941, the United States considered the area now called Vietnam important to
our national security at a time when it was vastly
more remote that it was in 1965. We should look
at the Vietnam War as another facet of George
Kennen’s global “containment policy.” With this
perspective, our war effort, while ending in a
tactical defeat, was ultimately a strategic victory.
It most certainly was not a war fought in vain.
All of those who served in Vietnam, both in
uniform and as civilians, should applaud the
Pentagon for creating a website that reflects a
positive side to our involvement in Vietnam. It is
time the nation recognized our service in a positive light. MR

NOTES
1. Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).
2. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York, Oxford University Press,
1978), 343.
3. Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (New York, Pocket Books, 1972), 262.
4. Lewy, 321-22.
5. Lewy, 454.
6. Uwe Siemon-Netto, Duc: A Reporter’s Love for the Wounded People of
Vietnam (Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 211.
7. Lewis Sorley, A Better War (Boston: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1999), 366.
8. William Colby, Lost Victory (Chicago: Contemporary Books Publishing

78

Group, 1989).
9. Gen. Van Tien Dung, quoted in Nhan Dan, April-May 1976.
10. Gen. Van Tien Dung, quoted in Great Spring Victory (Monthly Review
Press, 1977).
11. William Stearman, An American Adventure: From Early Aviation through
Three Years in the White House (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2013), 192.
12. Lewy, 424.
13. Stearman, 193.
14. Norman Friedman, The Fifty Year War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute
Press, 2000), 315-16 and 398.

March-April 2014

MILITARY REVIEW