The Fall of Vietnam - 40 years Ago and Lessons Learned

I keep getting reminded that I am not as young as I feel. The latest blow was a spate of headlines (e.g. here and an PBS show ("Last Days in Vietnam") commemorating the fall of the Republic of South Vietnam - 40 years ago:

In April of 1975, the North Vietnamese Army was closing in on Saigon as South Vietnamese resistance was crumbling. Approximately 5,000 Americans remained with roughly 24 hours to get out. Their South Vietnamese allies, co-workers, and friends faced certain imprisonment and possible death if they remained behind, yet there was no official evacuation plan in place. Still, over the last days in Vietnam, with the clock ticking and the city under fire, 135,000 South Vietnamese managed to escape with help from a number of heroic Americans who took matters into their own hands, engaging in unsanctioned and often makeshift operations in a desperate effort to save as many people as possible.

At the time of the fall of Vietnam, I was a LTJG and on shore duty. I had submitted my letter of resignation and was plotting my next move. As was common in those days, I had been assigned to one ship for a little over 3 years and I had been deployed about 1/2 of that time, not counting out of home port training.

In late March, 1972 we were off Vietnam headed for liberty in Thailand when we got turned around and sent back north. The North Vietnamese were rolling tanks into the south. U.S. destroyers, cruisers and carriers were in place to try to help stop the advance of the "Easter Offensive." There was a huge expenditure of ordnance. Ammo stocks fell so low so fast that eventually replacement stuff was being flown into to Subic Bay by air for loading onto the replenishment ships that sortied from the Naval Magazine to the "gun line." USS Pyro (AE-24) set a Navy record for ammunition transferred by an ammunition ship. From April to July the South Vietnamese forces held against and ultimately defeated the North Vietnamese forces at the Battle of An Loc. From June to mid -September, the South Vietnamese again defeated the North Vietnamese Army in the Second Battle of Quang Tri. In May, the U.S. Navy and Air Force mined North Vietnamese harbors, including the main harbor at Haiphong. These mining operations continued in bits and pieces for 8 months. In any event, the stiffened South Vietnamese response and the new attacks on North Vietnam both in conventional bombing and with the closure of its ports, drove the North Vietnamese to the peace table. Eventually, it looked like there would be a two state solution. See here.

However, starting in 1974, Congress began cutting funding to South Vietnam:

Congress places a $1 billion ceiling on military aid to South Vietnam for fiscal year 1974. This figure was trimmed further to $700 million by August 11. Military aid to South Vietnam in fiscal year 1973 was $2.8 billion; in 1975 it would be cut to $300 million. Once aid was cut, it took the North Vietnamese only 55 days to defeat the South Vietnamese forces when they launched their final offensive in 1975.

and this:

During his confirmation hearings in June 1973, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger was sharply criticized by some senators after he stated that he would recommend resumption of U.S. bombing in North Vietnam if North Vietnam launched a major offensive against South Vietnam. However, Nixon was driven from office due to the Watergate scandal in 1974 and when the North Vietnamese began their final offensive early in 1975, the United States Congress refused to appropriate the funds needed by the South Vietnamese to protect Saigon, citing strong opposition to American involvement in the war by Americans and the loss of American equipment to the North by retreating Southern forces. Thieu subsequently resigned, accusing the U.S. of betrayal in a TV and radio address:

At the time of the peace agreement the United States agreed to replace equipment on a one-by-one basis. But the United States did not keep its word. Is an American's word reliable these days? The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men.

The North Vietnamese entered Saigon on April 30 1975. Schlesinger had announced early in the morning of 29 April the evacuation from Saigon by helicopter of the last U.S. diplomatic, military, and civilian personnel.

Anyone who watched the debacle of the "evacuation" - or who had any conscience about abandoning our allies on the field of battle or who had had classmates and friends die in the war - was sickened. As noted here:

The immigration of thousands of people from Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s impacted American-Vietnamese relations and gave rise to new communities of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong Americans in the United States. Known as boat people for escaping Southeast Asia by sea, the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians (predominantly Vietnamese) generated a political and humanitarian firestorm for the international community, the United States, and Vietnam.

The first wave in 1975 included 140,000 South Vietnamese, mostly political leaders, army officers, and skilled professionals escaping the communist takeover. Fewer than a thousand Vietnamese successfully fled the nation. Those who managed to escape pirates, typhoons, and starvation sought safety and a new life in refugee camps in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. For many, these countries became permanent homes, while for others they were only waystations to acquiring political asylum in other nations, including the United States.

During the administration of President James Earl Carter, Vietnamese immigration to the United States became a prominent political issue. The number of refugees fleeing Vietnam by sea increased to nearly six thousand in 1976 and twenty thousand the following year. Officials estimated that nearly one-third of this total perished at sea from starvation, drowning, and pirates, problems that increased when some Asian countries began turning away boat people.

The waves of desperate refugees continued for years.

Somewhere in all this, driven by news reports of the plight of the refugees, I withdrew my resignation and remained on active duty for another couple of years, making another deployment to the Western Pacific - albeit too late to assist those in need.

Years later, we began to see that we were not the only ones who learned lessons from the U.S. abandonment of its ally. In nearly every conflict we've been involved in since, including the long war with al Qaeda and its ilk, the theory of our enemies has been that if they can hang on through the initial overwhelming force delivered by the Americans, they will outlast the American "will to fight."

Our enemies know our Congress too well.

So, 40 years later, I am still mad as hell at the Congress that buckled when a spine was needed to see Vietnam was not abandoned to its fate.

In that cratering I see too many links to the messes we find ourselves in now.

Osama bin Laden said:

Bin Laden's hatred and disdain for the U.S. were also manifested while he lived in Sudan. There he told Al-Qaeda fighters-in-training:[23]
“ America appeared so mighty ... but it was actually weak and cowardly. Look at Vietnam, look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has. ... It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death.

I would suggest he was not referring to our troops, but to the weak-kneed folks who refer to our young American warriors as "kids" as if they need coddling. These people seem to believe that by withdrawing from war we are safer.  That is clearly not a lesson that history would support.

No wonder 40 years seems like yesterday to me.

History, if not repeating, certainly seems to be rhyming.

Need to Read: "The Pipe Dream of Easy War"

As recommended by our guest on Midrats last Sunday, John Nagl, H. R. McMaster's NY Times piece, "The Pipe Dream of Easy War". An excerpt:

Today, budget pressures and the desire to avoid new conflicts have resurrected arguments that emerging technologies — or geopolitical shifts — have ushered in a new era of warfare. Some defense theorists dismiss the difficulties we ran into in Afghanistan and Iraq as aberrations. But they were not aberrations. The best way to guard against a new version of wishful thinking is to understand three age-old truths about war and how our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq validated their importance.

We seem to have trouble learning this lesson as our fantasies overtake what we should know are realities.

I am always reminded of some quotes from T.R. Fehrenbach's This Kind of War:

In July, 1950, one news commentator rather plaintively remarked that warfare had not changed so much, after all. For some reason, ground troops still seemed to be necessary, in spite of the atom bomb. And oddly and unfortunately, to this gentleman, man still seemed to be an important ingredient in battle. Troops were still getting killed, in pain and fury and dust and filth. What happened to the widely-heralded pushbutton warfare where skilled, immaculate technicians who never suffered the misery and ignominy of basic training blew each other to kingdom come like gentlemen?
In this unconsciously plaintive cry lies the buried a great deal of the truth why the United States was almost defeated.
Nothing had happened to pushbutton warfare; its emergence was at hand. Horrible weapons that could destroy every city on Earth were at hand—at too many hands. But, pushbutton warfare meant Armageddon, and Armageddon, hopefully, will never be an end of national policy.
Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud. ”

***
Korea showed it was time to tell the men who man our legions that there is nothing easy in this world, that there are tigers, and to furnish them not only with atomic life eradicators but tiger guns.

All the "magic toys" in the world will not change the fundamentals of ugly hard war.

Read the entire McMaster  piece.

Revisited: The Drumbeat of "Humanitarian Intervention?"

Back in January 2009, I posted the following - which I now feel is appropriate to raise again in light of the attacks on Libya: The Drumbeat of "Humanitarian Intervention?"

With the arrival of a new U.S. president, the drumbeat of wars of self-protection seems to be dying out while a familiar old tune arises - suggesting the probable return to "humanitarian interventions." See here:

Regarding the "ongoing genocide" in Darfur, Sudan, Rice said the U.S. priority for the moment is reinforcing a U.N.-backed peacekeeping mission to protect civilians. She expressed concern that Sudan's government may retaliate against international peacekeepers and aid workers if the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant on genocide charges for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

These should not be confused with "humanitarian operations." Humanitarian operations are approved by countries affected by some disaster or another, such as the aid rendered to the victims of the tsunami of December 2004 or other efforts to assist areas impacted by storms or earthquakes. In such cases, military forces may end up working with non-governmental organizations like the Red Cross or transnational entities like the UN and its disaster contractors. In such cases, the role of the military is usually logistical support.

By contrast, in a "humanitarian intervention" armed force is used directly to intervene in a sovereign nation's affairs even against the will of the sovereign of the invaded or attacked nation.

In the last decade of the 20th Century such "invasions to save lives" include Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. In the world of the people who support such interventions, the U.S. led invasion of Iraq was not a humanitarian intervention because. . . well, because. In fact, Human Rights Watch asserted that the saving of thousands of Iraqis from Saddam's terror "gives humanitarian intervention a bad name."

Humanitarian intervention seems to be deemed appropriate when enforcing a "responsibility to protect." This new found responsibility is a code phrase for allowing older concepts like sovereignty to be discarded for some theoretical higher "right." This "responsibility to protect" is spelled out in a document authored by the somewhat Orwellian-named entity - the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). You can find the document here:

This report is about the so-called “right of humanitarian intervention”: the question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive – and in particular military – action, against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state.

Of course, having posed the difficult question, the report goes on to justify such interventions:

(1) Basic Principles
A. State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the
protection of its people lies with the state itself.
B. Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.

As you might gather, these principles don't seem to be evenly applied, While the Balkans intervention was okay, no one seems to argue that it would have been okay to invade - on humanitarian grounds- China during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution". For those of you unfamiliar with that time period:

Millions of people in China reportedly had their human rights annulled during the Cultural Revolution. Millions more were also forcibly displaced. During the Cultural Revolution, young people from the cities were forcibly moved to the countryside, where they were forced to abandon all forms of standard education in place of the propaganda teachings of the Communist Party of China.
***
Estimates of the death toll, civilians and Red Guards, from various Western and Eastern sources are about 500,000 in the true years of chaos of 1966—1969. Some people were not able to stand the cruel tortures, they lost hope for the future, and simply committed suicide.

Whatever.

Kofi Anin, former Secretary General of the UN discussed the changing view of sovereign rights here:

State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined—not least by the forces of globalisation and international co-operation. States are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice versa. At the same time individual sovereignty—by which I mean the fundamental freedom of each individual, enshrined in the charter of the UN and subsequent international treaties—has been enhanced by a renewed and spreading consciousness of individual rights. When we read the charter today, we are more than ever conscious that its aim is to protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them.

In recent years, the many people of a liberal persuasion suggested that it would have been perfectly appropriate to engage in an armed invasion of Myanmar/Burma on humanitarian grounds following the devastating typhoon of May 2008. Time offered up Is it time to invade Burma? by Romesh Ratnesar:

. . .The trouble is that the Burmese haven't shown the ability or willingness to deploy the kind of assets needed to deal with a calamity of this scale — and the longer Burma resists offers of help, the more likely it is that the disaster will devolve beyond anyone's control. "We're in 2008, not 1908," says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. "A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent."

That's why it's time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the U.S. to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — "I can't imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — but it's not without precedent: as Natsios pointed out to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid without the host government's consent in places like Bosnia and Sudan.

A coercive humanitarian intervention would be complicated and costly. During the 2004 tsunami, some 24 U.S. ships and 16,000 troops were deployed in countries across the region; the mission cost the U.S. $5 million a day. Ultimately, the U.S. pledged nearly $900 million to tsunami relief. (By contrast, it has offered just $3.25 million to Burma.) But the risks would be greater this time: the Burmese government's xenophobia and insecurity make them prone to view U.S. troops — or worse, foreign relief workers — as hostile forces. (Remember Black Hawk Down?) Even if the U.S. and its allies made clear that their actions were strictly for humanitarian purposes, it's unlikely the junta would believe them. "You have to think it through — do you want to secure an area of the country by military force? What kinds of potential security risks would that create?" says Egelend. "I can't imagine any humanitarian organization wanting to shoot their way in with food."

Mr. Egeland seems to lack the imagination that others possess.

Once deemed a virtually dead concept- "so 1990s" - the "selfless" use of power seems to be making a comeback. Kenneth Roth wrote in a 2004 article in Harvard International Review:

The use of military force across borders to stop mass killing was seen as a luxury of an era in which national security concerns among the major powers were less pressing and problems of human security could come to the fore. Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone: these interventions, justified to varying degrees in humanitarian terms, were dismissed as products of an unusual interlude between the tensions of the Cold War and the new threat of terrorism. The events of September 11, 2001, supposedly changed all that by inducing a return to more immediate security challenges. Yet surprisingly, even with the campaign against terrorism in full swing, the past year has seen four military interventions that their instigators describe, in whole or in part, as humanitarian.

The tsunami aid rendered counts as a humanitarian intervention, according to Mr. Roth, but the invasion of Iraq does not, "Since the Iraq war was not mainly about saving the Iraqi people from mass slaughter..."

Selecting places in which humanitarian intervention are acceptable is tough work. However, if one begins with the premise that the intervening nations have nothing to gain by such intervention then justification seems to come easier to some minds. Intervening in Iraq = "bad" because it has oil. Intervening in Myanmar ="good" because it has nothing of use to the world. Go figure.

That a forced entry for "humanitarian" reasons might result in armed resistance by the ruling forces of the invaded land or by bands of clan-based groups(as in Somalia in the 1990s) and the deaths of soldiers of the invading forces seems not to bother the pro-humanitarian interventionists much, if at all.

Will they be keeping "body count" lists of those who fall? I wonder.

Back in July 2008, there was a debate of sorts on humanitarian intervention (HI) in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. Excerpts from here, the debate bearing the title "Why not invade Darfur?" From the "anti" HI side:

By the traditional standards of international law, which require state consent and conforming state practice for a customary law norm to emerge, the duty to protect remains much more of an aspiration than a law. It is difficult to understand why the protection of a foreign population should merit greater presumed legitimacy than the protection of one's own population, which underlies all national-interest-driven uses of force, including preemptive ones. After all, fair-minded critics of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars would agree that the Bush administration undertook these interventions to protect the security of the American people.

Notwithstanding the legal and moral hypocrisy associated with humanitarian interventions, there are, of course, instances in which humanitarian intervention is appropriate. There is no shortage of misery in today's world, including genocide, ethnic cleansing and rampant war crimes, poverty and starvation. Alleviating at least the worst cases is a worthy project.

Yet, international humanitarian interventions, whatever their moral appeal, have to be judged by the same hardheaded standards as traditional national-interest-driven interventions. How compelling is the humanitarian problem in a particular place compared with other places? Are the equities clear-cut or are all the sides of a conflict equally unsavory? How does one define success? Is regime change the objective? What are the likely costs of a successful intervention? How many casualties and how much collateral damage should be anticipated? Are sufficient military resources available? The important thing is not to become entangled in a halfhearted, indecisive mission with unclear or excessively soft rules of engagement, as was the case with the Clinton administration's deployment of U.S. forces to Somalia. Such interventions produce no good results. War is too serious of a business to be play-acting, and there is no substitute for victory, something those -- in Europe and elsewhere -- who call the loudest for humanitarian interventions should keep in mind.

From the "pro" HI side:

I would argue that we have as much of a strategic interest and moral duty to stop the genocide in Darfur as we did to stop the rule of Saddam Hussein. Morally, it is clear: Hundreds of thousands of people have been slaughtered in Darfur. We should stop this massacre if we can. Strategically, it is not as direct. That region of Africa does not impact our immediate national security interests -- which is why intervention there is not popular. Indeed, intervention in Africa is rarely considered in even the worst of situations.

Would the interests of developed nations not be served by a stable, democratic Africa as much as they would be by a stable and democratic Middle East? Are dictators such as Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir and Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, less dangerous than Hussein? David, you and many conservatives spent so much time demonizing Hussein that other threats started to pale in comparison. You seem to have said he was worse than Hitler or Stalin, for example, telling one interviewer in April 2003 in an effort to justify the invasion: "Despite the quite deplorable record amassed by people like Hitler or Stalin, I am not aware of instances where they have targeted their own civilians."

But do we have the resources to intervene? This is where we differ again, David. Your choices (Iraq, perhaps Iran) mean that almost all our military would be engaged in these battles, or what you call "the provider of security services" to the world.

Another question that almost always remains unanswered in suggesting the need for humanitarian interventions is which nations have the airlift and sealift capacity to conduct such operations and sustain forces in the field. Once again, good-hearted amateurs discuss tactics without bothering about logistics. In posts following the Christmas tsunami, I hit on the former UNer Mr. Egeland (see here and here)for his "magic happens" wish lists in humanitarian operations. And I've been to planning meeting at which, when the issue of logistics is raised, every eyeball turns to the U.S. representatives.

As usual in military matters, the self-interest of the country which is contemplating involvement ought to serve as a guide to any combat operation whether it is couched in terms of "humanitarian" or not. Asking American soldiers and sailors to risk death and spending the national treasure and limited military equipment on operations that do not serve the interests of the nation must be carefully considered before falling victim to some internationalist standard of a "responsibility to protect."

Initial thoughts. more to follow.

Photo Credit: Displaced children in South Darfur near the town of Nyala. [Photo archive UN/Evan Schneider]

Well, the time has come for more thoughts. You might enjoy reading this piece on A War We Don't Need: Why is America intervening in a Libyan civil war?:

Contrary to pithy bumper-sticker truisms, war is occasionally the answer. But can anyone explain why it's the answer now? At the moment, at least, polls insist that Americans are generally supportive of the United States' intervening in the civil war now raging in Libya, so someone must have an ironclad case.

President Barack Obama pins his rationale for intervention on a "humanitarian threat." A noble cause, no doubt. It's too bad that the folks in old Darfur missed out on those laser-guided missiles American and French fighter jets deploy to help avert massacre and man-made hunger. Maybe the victims didn't say please. Maybe the city dwellers of Pyongyang will be more convincing.

. Or Ben Stein's One World Government Obama:

Look at it this way: Where did Mr. Obama get the authority to commit United States forces to war in Libya? There was no declaration of war. There was no authorizing resolution by Congress allowing money to be spent on a war against Col. Gaddafi. As far as I know, there was no meeting of Mr. Obama and top leaders of Congress to discuss the subject in even rough form, let alone detail. There was no lengthy buildup in which the Congress was "allowed" to express the people's opinion on whether we want to be in a third concurrent war.

There was just a vote by the United Nations Security Council, a very far from unanimous vote, and suddenly, the President's Secretary of State, Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, solemnly announced that we were at war.

But, when did we amend the Constitution to declare that the United Nations had control over our military? When did we abolish the part of the Constitution that said Congress had the right to declare war? Now, I well know that in recent postwar conflicts, we don't have declarations of war. But we have Congressional debates. We have funding votes. We have a sense of the Congress or some kind of resolution.

So far no American servicemen or women have lost their lives in this "humanitarian intervention." If that changes, there should be a whole lot of questions about their sacrifice in an intervention in a civil war of another nation.You know, like all those who questioned our participation in the Vietnam "civil war."

A non-military intervention air strike? (Reuters photo)

UPDATE: Speaking of whom, how about old Senator (anti-war activist and Vietnam vet) John F. Kerry? Well, hurrmph hurrmph, "This is no intervention," he has declared. On Face the Nation (which face did he use?), Mr. Kerry stated:

"The last thing we want to think about is any kind of military intervention. And I don't consider the no-fly zone stepping over that line," Kerry said on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday."

Of course he wouldn't. {end update}

Oh, and the fact that the "coalition" is falling apart? Cobbled together by people who have never operated in a coalition environment, I guess, because it was predictable (and predicted) by those of us who have. Why the splits? No common purpose and a total lack of leadership. I hope Europe is ready for the fallout.