Correspondence
Correspondence VIETNAM RECONSIDERED I concur with Fred Barnes's conclusion that the war in Vietnam was an honorable one, a view rarely voiced in the liberal media ("The Truth About Vietnam," Sept....
...I knew that the men I proudly served with were as good and courageous as any this nation had ever called to arms...
...I knew we were winning and that our cause was just...
...DENNIS TRAVIS Glen Head, NY WHEN I RETURNED HOME in 1969 after serving in combat with the 1st cavalry Division, Airmobile, in Vietnam, I was staggered by the madness that had overtaken my beloved country...
...Two and a half million Americans fought in Vietnam...
...Two hundred and fifty million stayed home...
...If the sons, brothers, and fathers who "answered the call" are ever revealed as the courageous patriots that they were, and are, then what is to be said of the others...
...Had South Vietnam repulsed the communist invasion, we might have found ourselves with a long-range deployment in the face of a continuing low-level guerrilla war, with its attendant human and material cost...
...But when it comes, both the left and right may have to gird for revisionism regarding the third and most successful Vietnam commander in chief as well...
...Sad to say, I'm still waiting...
...I do demur from his assertion that the United States failed to win the war, that "the victory was thrown away...
...General Abrams would not have been able to perform his tactical magic without the breathing room bought by President Nixon's war decisions—the Cambodian incursion in 1970 and the bombing of Hanoi in May and December 1972, not to mention his decision to stay in Vietnam to begin with...
...Within the ranks of those who didn't serve are the politicians, press, professors, and protesters who took to the streets to demand that we be defeated and the North Vietnamese be allowed to impose a barbaric communist dictatorship on the people of the South...
...Nixon himself gets one incidental mention in the whole piece...
...In fact, I would argue that the United States did not lose the battle of Vietnam...
...Yet Barnes discusses the Nixon administration's war policy only tangentially...
...Our struggle in Indochina opened a 30-year window for our allies in southeast Asia, during which period they crushed local communist insurgencies, developed world class economies, and became major players on the Western side in world affairs...
...These steps were among the most difficult ever taken by any postwar president...
...They don't dare let up, for fear of having to answer for their cowardly, treacherous, and, in some cases, treasonous actions...
...Further, our withdrawal from Vietnam (the emblem of our "defeat") was probably quite beneficial for us...
...BILL CORSAIR MCGROARTY New York, NY IN HIS REVIEW of recent books on the Vietnam war, Fred Barnes writes the thirty-seventh president out of the story...
...To paraphrase the 1960s film Love Story: Being on the Left "means never having to say you're sorry...
...This would be historically more accurate, and would transfer the vexation to the left side of the political spectrum...
...JOHN H. TAYLOR Richard Nixon Library Yorba Linda, CA...
...Why not reject this assertion altogether...
...Yes, Vietnam revisionism is inevitable...
...Thus the battle of Vietnam was a successful holding action...
...Congressional outrage over the December bombings fanned the fires of Watergate, which in turn deprived the president of the ability to enforce the Paris Peace Accords...
...to make villains of heroes and heroes of villains...
...The foregoing doesn't mean that I reject the revisionist analyses provided by the Sorley and Lind books...
...The "war" in Vietnam was really the battle of Vietnam, a battle in the larger, more significant war waged against the Soviet Union and its allies...
...The national goal seemed to be to make heroes of cowards and cowards of heroes...
...But there is another issue here, namely, the vexation felt by anti-communists who resort to various contortions to deal with the leftist assertion that the United States lost the war in Vietnam...
...I swallowed hard and waited for our inevitable victory and the vindication of our sacrifices, along with the day of reckoning for those who gave aid and comfort, in a thousand different ways, to the communist dictators of North Vietnam, china, and Russia...
...The truth, as is so often the case, is just not that complicated...
...The worst we can conclude is that the United States lost the battle of Vietnam, but won the war against the Soviet Union...
...In the first place, the terminology is defective...
...Books such as Sorley's A Better War and Lind's Vietnam: The Necessary War are comforting, but these authors will never be interviewed by Katie Couric or any other network host and, with the exception of your review and perhaps a blurb in National Review or the Washington Times, will pass on unaddressed...
...on the contrary, I largely agree with them...
...The job, as the "Four Ps" see it, is an ongoing trashing of the fighting men of Vietnam and their cause...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 3
