Ohio University - Athena Yearbook (Athens, OH)

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America Leaves Vietnam Retrospection of Our Longest War s BY ROBERT P. TKACZ The end of wars in Indochina and the American involvement in those (no, they are not the same thing) would have marked the starting point for the volumes of thoughtful retrospection, unthinking recrimination and blamesaying that have traditionally followed this country ' s other military involvements. Would have — if our 20-odd years in Southeast Asia had been more normal, as normality in things like war goes. But it wasn ' t and not just because we lost this time. Neither is this to say there hasn ' t been retrospection, recrimination and blamesaying. There has, almost for as long as American money or ambassadors or advisors or armies have been there. From the advent of the American involvement in Indochina to the evacuation of the last 1,000 US embassy staffers on April 29, 1975, there has not been a moment when our policy was directed toward winning, at least under the normal definition of winning ' ' in things like war. We fought merely to stop the North Vietnamese from winning, not even to make them lose; the No-Win Policy. If they ' d only have gone back up north and left our dictator alone, we certainly would have stopped fighting and bombing them. But they didn ' t, so we couldn ' t until we were forced to. Confronted with this analysis, many good and ugly Americans might agree with Senator Barry Goldwater who once suggested that civilians, which in this case is to say politicians, did not allow our generals the freedom they needed to win ' ' in Vietnam. Those same Americans might not disagree with the suggestions by General Curtis LeMay to bomb North Vietnam (and maybe the South as well) back to the Stone Age. We could have, you know. So perhaps it is to our credit that some civilians, many of who were not politicians in this case, realized that if a country had to be destroyed to be saved from something, that particular form of salvation was not what it needed after all. Nonetheless, it having been America ' s want to save peoples and countries once we had decided they needed DID ANYONE EVER. STOP TO ASK (WHY WE WERE INVOLVED IN THIS FRATRICIDAL CRA2 NB55? DID ANYONE EVER CARS ABOUT THE VICTIMS? V V THE FINAL- ANALYSIS, WHERE DIP THE RESPONSIBILITY REALLY LIE? WHO MADE VIETNAM HAPPEN? MO WAS REALM TO BLAME?! WHO?! saving, regardless of their own particular opinions about their futures, the US took right up where the French quit. From just 16,000 advisors in South Vietnam during President John F, Kennedy ' s administration, American involvement rose to a high of 543,400 troops in April of 1969 (excluding US forces in Thailand, and sailors off-shore). Then there was the bombing, which actually began in December, 1964. Who will ever remember Operation Rolling Thunder? Not the Gene Autrey movie about the Texas Range wars, it was the code name for the sustained bombing of North Vietnam. Of course, bombs and advisors don ' t grow on trees, just generals, But never it let it be suggested that America doesn ' t pay for her wars with cold cash, among other things. It is doubtful, not to say irrelevant, that the financial cost of the US involvement in Vietnam will never be computed. Suffice it to note that by 1957 American aid to South Vietnam supported the whole cost of the Vietnamese Armed Forces, almost 80 per cent of all other government expenditures and almost 90 per cent of all imports to the country. But those bargain war days never last forever and by 1968, about the peak time of US involvement, the war was costing more than $70 million per day. One could go on for maudlin hours over Vietnam but that wasn ' t the only war in the hemisphere. There was Cambodia wherein American know-how and ingenuity 28

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and inflation, many people who had previously lived comfortably now had to tighten their belts just to break even. Economic forecasts for the immediate future provided little relief. It appeared that both unemployment and inflation were destined to get worse before they got better. The prospects for a quick upturn in the economy seemed remote, and people prepared for a long siege with hard times. The energy situation continued to loom in the background as a potential source of disaster. Although gasoline was readily available at prices far below those reached during the Arab oil embargo, concern for the future remained. The constant uncertainty of the volatile Middle-East situation served as a harsh reminder of the long lines at gas stations a year ago. Consumers were further frightened by Ford ' s attempt to conserve fuel through a steep oil import tax, as they were already paying dearly for this necessary commodity. Ford ' s efforts to establish a peaceful co-existence with Congress failed, and conflict ensued. His bill to tax imported oil was voted down overwhelmingly by Congress, as was his proposal to raise the price of food stamps. Many of Ford ' s other economic policies drew harsh criticism, including his plan for a tax rebate to encourage consumer spending. Congress favored a larger tax cut to be administered in a slightly different manner. Ford countered these setbacks by accusing Congress of being more concerned with censuring his programs than with taking constructive action to combat the economic dilemma. Locally, the effects of the economic situation were very evident. The university made large budget cuts to make up the deficit left by steadily declining enrollment. The enrollment drop itself may be partially attributed to the high cost of education. The immediate future gave little cause for optimism, and it appeared that tight money might remain a problem for quite a while. Americans have a reputation for standing firm in the fact of adversity, and this year ' s economic crisis gave the country another chance to prove it.

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ALL OF OF US? US ? ALL OF US IS RI6HT! accomplished in less than five years what had taken the US and France, with sundry assistance from South Korea, New Zealand, Australia and other nations almost 30 years to do in Vietnam. Computers would have shown — and undoubtedly did — that there was no way the Khmer Rouge could win the Cambodian War. They had fewer and more ancient weapons, fewer men, no warplanes, no gunboats. Their only major ally was China, weakest of the Super Powers. People should leave war to computers. Thus through the same bizarre, orientally inscrutable logic which lost Vietnam, (no one ever mentions when it was found) Cambodia which had been neutral, although used as a sanctuary by the Viet Cong, went American and fell. Yet there were differences between these Indochina debacles which may be important, if not interesting in the arena of retrospection and recrimination. Undoubtedly half-a-million or so American troops could have kept Cambodia non-Communist for much longer than the almost-five years between the US incursion there on April 30, 1970 and its evacuation on April 12, 1975. However, involvement in a second Vietnam while the first one was still in full tilt was too much even for the most super of the Super Powers. Besides, there would always be a Vietnam as long as we wanted to spend enough lives, time and money to sustain a puppet-dictator: The No-Win Policy. Perhaps our greatest illusion was that the US cared more for what was going on in Vietnam than the Vietnamese did, that we could pay a higher price. Ho Chi Minh had been fighting for Vietnamese nationalism since the end of World War II. In 1954 he defeated the French, and the leaders of American believed we could do what they, our allies backed by our money, could not. In 1966 Lyndon Johnson said, I believe there is light at the end of what has been a long and lonely tunnel, and then shipped more troops to Vietnam to make sure it was our tunnel. It never was. By 1970, Ho Chi Minh had been dead for three months. Johnson had been politically dead for more than two years, but Nixon had the key: Vietnamization. The only trouble was the North Vietnamese had used it first. The final flight of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam shocked and surprised many Americans. They had been told for years that we were winning or the ARVN was making progress, had finally become a real army. The North Vietnamese had always made more progress, but that wasn ' t what the government liked to talk about. Retrospection can be very enlightening. In this country it occurs after baseball games, elections, beauty contests and final exams, so why not after the longest war we ever fought? Recrimination can be fun. It too normally occurs after sports and political events. What is worse, the 1976 presidential elections offer a recriminator ' s dream, a prize to tempt the least acid-tongued politician who gets to heady a whiff of the White House. Yet recrimination rarely deals with the facts, that would be constructive criticism and the facts of the US involvement in Indochina are so overwhelmingly criticizable that the task may never find a proper master. A compliment (reverse logic) may then be in order. For such, read of David Halberstan, the American journalist who spent most of the 1960s in Vietnam, and who wrote in The Best and the Brightest of the US adventure there: It was, in effect, brilliant planning which defied common sense. 29