Happy Reunification Day!

Also Southern Liberation day! These are the same thing. Anyway, it’s a holiday, which makes it doubly nice.

Source: Tuan Truong

I haven’t talked about the Vietnam war much (at all), mainly because I don’t have anything to say. One comment though. About a year ago, I read Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden. It was excellent, and it tried to include a fair amount of insight from the Vietnamese side, which is not always the case with American writers.

Anyway, at the end of the book, Bowden (who is famous for writing Black Hawk Down, later turned into a movie), makes a pointed statement that the whole war was a complete waste for both sides:

[T]he battle of Hue and the entire Vietnam War seem a tragic and meaningless waste. . . . As some of the nation’s more recent wars have helped to illustrate, ‘victory’ in Vietnam would have been neither possible nor desirable.

To be fair to the time period, there were concerns about the domino effect, that a communist Vietnam would result in communism spreading to all of South East Asia. After the war, Laos was invaded by Vietnam, and better that less is said of the tragedy of Cambodia…But the rest of South East Asia did not become communist, and even Vietnam, despite being lead by the Party, is basically capitalist.

I don’t want to minimize the efforts and losses of those that fought on the South Vietnam side, but it seems clear to me that we should never have gotten involved.

There is dissent, of course. Some believe that the press lost it for the US (whatever that means). This review from Bing West in the National Review approvingly quotes Colonel Harry Summers’ view that nation building was a mistake and that it would have been better to just repel aggression from the North:

Source: New York Public Library

The American military could have rendered North Vietnam incapable of sustaining its offensive. Mining the harbors up north would have prevented Russian military aid. Bombing the dikes would have diverted manpower to subsistence farming. Large-scale ground attacks into Laos and north of the risible Demilitarized Zone would place the NVA army on the defense.

Of course, it is impossible to say for certain that this wouldn’t have worked, but given how strong north Vietnamese networks were in the south, it seems tough to imagine.

In my view, with the benefit of hindsight, the Vietnam war was a waste, especially given that just 45 years later, the US and Vietnam have extremely strong ties!