10 Years After Vietnam War

In retrospect, it’s been interesting to read about Vietnam. But it seems to me the media have almost completely ignored some aspects of the conflict that could have drastically--and favorably--changed the eventual outcome. As it resulted, there is no question, we lost a war.

A great deal has been written about the lack of support from the American public, and that this was one of the decisive factors in our military failure. But we won an early war, the Revolutionary, without the support of a considerable number of Americans, and the Civil War, obviously, was purely contradictory in its support.

During the Korean conflict, President Truman made the decision to commit the organized reserves. President Johnson relied on the draft. No trained reserve units, to my knowledge, were sent to Vietnam as units. The reserves in Korea performed admirably; the draftees in Vietnam did their untrained best, which, in many cases, just wasn’t good enough. Sending relatively untrained 18- and 19-year-olds into immediate combat doesn’t equate with the 24- and 25-year-old trained reservists.

Kissinger has commented admirably and at some length on the high-level decision to commit our forces piecemeal, and there is no question that this misguided policy was another decisive factor in the unfortunate outcome of the war.

But what maintained the momentum of the war for both the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese regular forces was supply. So, what do you do when supply is a major factor? You cut it off. The bombings and attempted interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail (actually hundreds of trails and roads under heavy cover) proved futile. It seems obvious the answer is to hit the points of entry--Hanoi and Haiphong. Had the supply routes been bottled at their entry, the Ho Chi Minh Trail would have been empty, and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese would not have been fighting with modern weapons of war supplied by the Chinese and Russians.

But the decision to interdict at the point of entry was not made by President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, probably out of a misguided fear of Chinese or Russian retaliation. May their souls rest with those of some 58,000 American dead.

There is only one objective in war, and that’s to win!

G.M. BRYANT

Yucca Valley