From: mccullou@cae.wisc.edu (Mark McCullough)
Subject: Re: Did We Lose?
Organization: U of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering
Date: 26 Sep 92 09:56:20 CDT

In article <1992Sep25.034214.11052@coe.montana.edu> sandy@cs.montana.edu (Colin "Sandy" Pittendrigh) writes:
>In article <24SEP199201043297@summa.tamu.edu> rtb3270@summa.tamu.edu writes:
>>     I am taking a Vietnam political science class at Texas A&M,
>>and I have a very interresting Professor.  He claims that the U.S. 
>>did NOT lose the war.  Many people know about the '68 Tet Offensive,
>
>
> my professor's argument, WE did not lose
>
>
>	Well I'll try to be polite. But your professor sounds like a
>quite the fool. Didn't we lose some 50,000 dead? Didn't we drop
>more bomb tonage on Vietnam than we did on Germany? Didn't we 
>come home with nothing to show for it? 
>	More to the point, isn't it obvious, now some 30 years later,
>that our national security was damaged by the war itself, and not from
>our unmistakable loss. Yes we got our asses kicked, and it didn't make
>and damned difference. 50,000 thousand brave young men died for nothing.
>Yes, we could have won the war. We could have invaded, at great cost.
>And then we would have had to occupy, and then we would have had to leave.
>And then the Viet Cong would still have won. If we had not fought that
>stupid war, Cambodia would not have falled, amidst chaos, to the Kmer
>Rouge. The South would have fallen. And then the stupid communist 
>revolution would have failed, just as surely as it did anyway. I lost 
>friends in that war. They lost their lives because of asshole professors
>from Texas and Lousiana, and from Pennsylvania and from all over. We've
>never had a shortage of fools. >

Sounds to me like you haven't looked at what caused the US to have problems.
It directly links in to why we had so easy a time with Iraq.  No, I am not
talking about a military reason, anyone who bothers to check their facts
realizes that the US did not lose any major battle in all of vietnam.  
What I am talking about is the %(##!&^ Press.  How many times in Vietnam did
the press come in and accompany soldiers on _patrol_!  How often did they
steal military vehicles to go and see the _real_ story.  Look at how
the Tet offensive was reported.  Tet, a major victory for the US, was
reported as a crippling defeat by one certain reporter whose name I need
not mention.  In the Gulf War, the US clamped down on the Press enough so
that the Press did not get out of hand.  But when in Vietnam, the press starts
showing pictures of colleagues shot while accompanying soldiers on patrol,
politicians start panicking.  We were dealing with a fanatical enemy.  In
order to defeat such an enemy, you must break their fanaticism.  This was
never done.  Iraq was easy because we beat their army psychologically before
we started engaging ground forces.  Vietnam owes several million, if not
billion dollars to the press core for psychologically beating the US.  
Funny how several thousand soldiers could not beat the US Army, while
a hundred guys with cameras (I believe it was actually closer to 1000
reporters in '64) beat the entire US Army, without firing a single firearm.
All they had to do was selectively fire their cameras.  The US could
not have occupied North Vietnam until we broke their spirit.  This is what
has been done in all the successful occupations of modern history.

--If you need an officer in a hurry, take a nap.

					Mark
>
>/*=======================================================================*/
>/*                Sandy Pittendrigh  <Sandy@cs.montana.edu>              */
>/*=======================================================================*/


Newsgroups: alt.war.vietnam