Opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal today.
I was a counterintelligence agent in Vietnam, not a combat soldier, but this interview strongly reflects my understanding and beliefs about the war that developed then and thereafter as well as some of my opinion about what has happened since.

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From Saigon to Kabul: The ambiguous legacy of commitment and then withdrawal lives on today in American views of war.

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Jim Webb

By Barton Swaim

Echoes of Vietnam, 50 Years Later
Arlington, Va.

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, popular culture had basically one message on the Vietnam War: that it was conceived in American arrogance, was perpetrated by American savages, and accomplished little but psychological devastation and national disgrace.

Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” (1986) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), Brian De Palma’s “Casualties of War” (1989)—these and a thousand other productions, documentaries and articles told my generation that the war had been a gigantic fiasco that turned those who fought it into war criminals and frowning, guilt-ridden drug addicts.

The war ended officially on Jan. 27, 1973, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. That’s 50 years ago next Friday—an anniversary that will likely occasion a round of retrospective think pieces and cable-TV segments on the war’s legacy. More will follow in 2025 to mark the final American pullout from Saigon in 1975.

The country has moved on since the ’80s. The Vietnam War no longer elicits the sort of ostentatious regret it did a generation ago. To confine the discussion to Holly-wood, “We Were Soldiers” (2002) was one of the first major films to portray the average American soldier in Vietnam as decent and valorous; more recently “The Last Full Measure” (2018), though indulging in the usual antiwar pieties, acknowledges the bravery and decency of American soldiers.

We’ve moved on in politics, too.

The great scourge of supposed American war crimes in Vietnam, John Kerry—the man who averred in 1971 that American soldiers serving in Vietnam perpetrated war crimes “in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan”—was the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2004. He felt obliged to refashion himself as a war hero, and he lost.

The Vietnam War doesn’t lend itself to unambiguous interpretations in the way many wars do.

But with media-generated myths no longer dominant, and with the pain of losing 58,220 servicemen subsiding, are Americans ready to think about the whole thing anew? “Maybe,” Jim Webb answers after a thoughtful pause. Mr. Webb, 76, who served as President Reagan’s Navy secretary (1987-88) and a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia from (2007-13), commanded a Marine rifle platoon in the Vietnam bush in 1969-70. “Maybe,” he says again, looking unconvinced.

The biggest myth, to my mind, holds that the ordinary Vietnam combat veteran was so scarred by the experience that he couldn’t get his life together back home. Think of Travis Bickle, the lonesome, deranged vet of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”

Is there any truth to the stereotype? Mr. Webb recalls an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1986 claiming to find that Vietnam veterans were 86% more likely than everyone else to commit suicide. “I read it,” he recalls, “I broke down all the authors’ numbers and figured out how they came to this conclusion, and it was total bulls—.” The paper considered only men born during 1950, 1951 and 1952, and only those who died in Pennsylvania and California between 1974 and 1983. That didn’t stop the press from touting the study, “in essence claiming if you served in Vietnam, you’re probably going to kill yourself.”

In 1979 Congress hired the Harris polling firm to survey Americans on what they thought about the war and its veterans. At the time Mr. Webb was counsel to the House Veterans Affairs Committee. “Of Vietnam veterans,” he recalls, “91% said they were glad they served in the military, and 74% said at some level they enjoyed their time in the military. And 2 out of 3 said they would do it again.”

Was the war worth fighting?

Mr. Webb thinks on balance it was. He recalls a meeting with Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore. “I asked him a similar question,” Mr. Webb says, “and in his view, America won—only in a different way. We stopped communism, which didn’t advance in Indochina any further than it reached in 1975. We enabled other countries in the region to develop market economies and governmental systems that were basically functional and responsive to their people. That model has stayed, and I like to think it will advance, even in Vietnam.”

But clearly a lot did go wrong between 1963 and 1975. In his autobiography, “I Heard My Country Calling” (2014), Mr. Webb writes of “the arrogance and incompetence of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his much-ballyhooed bunch of civilian Whiz Kids whose data-based ‘systems analysis’ approach to fighting our wars had diminished the historic role of military leadership.” He repeats the same criticism of the war’s civilian leadership, and he insists the military tacticians in the field—American and South Vietnamese— did their jobs superbly.

Mr. Webb describes two problems the U.S. military was largely powerless to solve. First, the North Vietnamese government’s policy of sending assassination squads into the South. “Bernard Fall, a great French journalist, writes about this in ‘The Two Vietnams,’ ” a book published in 1963, Mr. Webb says. “It had been happening since at least 1958. The Vietminh started sending these squads back into the South, particularly central Vietnam. They were extremely smart and ruthless about it. These guys would go in and execute anyone with ties to any part of the South Vietnamese government—government officials, teachers, social workers, anyone.”

Over time, these murders sapped the population’s loyalty to the government in Saigon, and there was very little the U.S. military could do about it.

The second problem was the one many readers will remember well: the radical left’s successful use of the war, with the news media’s complicity. “Take Students for Democratic Society,” Mr. Webb says. “They were founded before there was a Vietnam War. The Port Huron Statement of 1962”— the document that founded the SDS—“doesn’t say anything about Vietnam. The goal of these revolutionaries was to dissolve the American system, and they thought they would accomplish that through racial issues. They didn’t get any traction—until about 1965 and the Vietnam War.”

Mention of the news media raises the subject of class.

The journalists reporting on the war, interpreting events for the American public, “were articulate, were from good schools, had important family connections,” Mr. Webb says. “You could see it all coming apart.”

Coming apart?

Mr. Webb describes a “divorce” between “upper strata” Americans and the military’s base of enlistees. That divorce didn’t begin with the Vietnam War, but the war accelerated and exacerbated it. “The military draws mainly from people within a certain tradition. It’s a tradition of fighting for the country simply because it’s their country.” Mr. Webb’s first novel, “Fields of Fire” (1978), is in many ways an imaginative portrayal of this fragmentation.

The book, which captures the war’s brutality but carefully avoids criticism of its policy makers, follows the war experience of three American servicemen. One, a Harvard student, means to get a spot in the Marine Corps band as a horn player but winds up as a grunt. He begins his tour by viewing the whole conflict through the lens of Jean-Paul Sartre (“Suffering without meaning, except in the suffering itself”) and ends, permanently maimed, shouting into a microphone at antiwar protesters back in Cambridge: “ I didn’t see any of you in Vietnam. I saw . . . truck drivers and coal miners and farmers. I didn’t see you.”

The military’s present-day recruitment difficulties, Mr. Webb says, have a lot to do with this cultural stratification. When civilian political leaders announce they’re “going into the military to purge ‘whites with extremist views,’ do they know what they’re doing? A lot of the U.S. military comes from a certain cultural tradition, and right now a lot of parents are saying to their kids, ‘Don’t go. You want to have your whole life canceled because someone said you were at a meeting where there was a Confederate flag or whatever?’ ” Mr. Webb sought the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, although he dropped out before the end of 2015. At a CNN debate Anderson Cooper asked each of the candidates: “You’ve all made a few people upset over your political careers. Which enemy are you most proud of?” Others answered predictably: the National Rifle Association, the pharmaceutical industry, the Republicans. Mr. Webb’s response: “I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me, but he’s not around right now to talk to.” The liberal commentariat disparaged him for boasting that he’d killed a man, but Donald Trump won the general election by appealing to the sort of swing voters who weren’t offended by Mr. Webb’s remark.

Max Hastings, in “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy” (2018), writes of the Paris Accords that the U.S. “eventually settled on the only terms North Vietnam cared about, whereby its own troops remained in the South, while the Americans went home.” Mr. Webb, who speaks Vietnamese and has visited Vietnam many times as a civilian, agrees: “We did the same thing there as we did in Afghanistan: We cut our allies out of all the important decisions.”

“In 1972”—here he becomes animated—“ the South Vietnamese military was really starting to grow and become a lethal fighting force.” In the Easter Offensive, the North Vietnamese “ hit the South with everything they had.”

He picks up some nearby papers and reads figures: “14 divisions, 26 independent regiments and several hundred Soviet tanks hit South Vietnam. The Americans— we were nearly all gone by then. South Vietnam lost 39,000 soldiers; the communists admitted in their own records that they lost 100,000. They tried to take the South, and the South beat them.

And then, at Paris, we cut them out.”

Soon afterward, Richard Nixon resigned, Congress cut off funding, and Saigon fell.

“Then, of course,” Mr. Webb goes on, the communists “did the Stalinist thing—they put hundreds of thousands of the South Vietnamese finest into re-education camps. Two hundred forty thousand stayed there longer than four years. I have a good friend who was in a re-education camp for 13 years.”

Recalling a visit to Vietnam in 1991, Mr. Webb describes a night when hundreds of South Vietnamese Army veterans who had spent years in re-education camps gathered in a park near Saigon’s old railway station. “My Vietnamese friend told me many of these guys had been high-ranking officers. We could see some of them shooting heroin through their thighs. I thought to myself, ‘Wait a second— these were our people.’ ” Mr. Webb pauses for a moment, then recovers.

What have we learned from Vietnam? Not much, if the Afghanistan pullout is anything to go by. “The way they left was horrible, disgusting,” he says. “People said it looked like the fall of Saigon. No, it did not.”

As a military procedure, “the evacuation from Saigon was brilliant.

In 1975, we had refugee camps all over the place ready to take people in—Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, Camp Pendleton in California, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Operation New Life in Guam.

These places were ready to go before the fall. We got 140,000 people out of there. What this administration did was a disgrace. There was no excuse for it.”

Before I leave, Mr. Webb shows me various pictures and artifacts in his office. The leg injured by that grenade still troubles him; he walks around the office with a slight but discernible limp. One black-and-white photograph he particularly wants me to see.

Taken in 1979, it shows a much younger Jim Webb with two pals from his rifle platoon. Tom Martin, who enlisted in the Marines while a student at Vanderbilt and served as a squad leader, is in a wheelchair. Mac McGarvey, Mr. Webb’s fifth radio operator—three of the previous four were seriously wounded—has no right arm.

All three men in the photograph are smiling.

LINK

The war started out during a different time, the cold war post WW2 era.
We were doing it to stop the spread of communism, we thought. The domino theory they said. Vietnam was a French colony that had been taken over by the Japanese during the war and after, when the French were still dealing with post WW2, they got their asses kicked by the communists. We went in to rescue them and stop the perceived threat. Sort of like Korea a decade earlier where we did fight to a stalemate that still exists. Both times our "allies" in the home country were mostly crooks. But they were our non-communist crooks.
Somewhere during that time, things went off the rails. By the end it was clear we were not going to meet the objective of stopping the insurgency and creating a successful democracy there.
Now it just looks like a larger version of Afghanistan, including the withdrawal.
After we left, the region suffered through a much larger catastrophe as the north took over then nearby governments killed millions.
At that time lots was going on here with Watergate, Church Committee, etc. and the TV cameras covered that more and mostly skipped the genocide in Asia. The helicopter over the embassy is the most memorable TV moment after we (mostly) quit the war.
A terrible experience for those that dealt with it close up and also the country.

I just finished the book Saving Freedom by Joe Scarborough which is mostly about President Truman’s efforts to help Greece resist the Communist takeover of its country. I was vaguely aware of what the US did to make that possible, but it’s something that has received very little attention, IMO, and I knew few of the details. In short, though, by helping the country that was run by a bunch of very unsavory characters at the time (sound familiar?) the effort was concluded with a conclusive victory over the Reds and prevented what could have been a political disaster for the West.

After reading the book it occurred to me that that example of what was achieved in resisting Communist aggression with the major assistance of our support probably had a significant influence on our decision to initially attempt to do something similar in Vietnam.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
The war started out during a different time, the cold war post WW2 era.
We were doing it to stop the spread of communism, we thought. The domino theory they said. Vietnam was a French colony that had been taken over by the Japanese during the war and after, when the French were still dealing with post WW2, they got their asses kicked by the communists. We went in to rescue them and stop the perceived threat.
Somewhere during that time, things went off the rails. By the end it was clear we were not going to meet the objective of stopping the insurgency and creating a successful democracy there.
Now it just looks like a larger version of Afghanistan, including the withdrawal.
After we left, the region suffered through a much larger catastrophe as the north took over then nearby governments killed millions.
At that time lots was going on here with Watergate, Church Committee, etc. and the TV cameras covered that more and mostly skipped the genocide in Asia. The helicopter over the embassy is the most memorable TV moment after we (mostly) quit the war.
A terrible experience for those that dealt with it close up and also the country.

Although I live here in UK for most of the time, I nevertheless had two dear friends who served multiple times in Vietnam - both medics with decorations. One of them when pushed, admitted that he'd gotten himself 'blowed up' on an AMTRAK, much like Gunny Hathcock, and had the scars to show for it - he died last year, five years younger than me. The other one died from what we know now as the long-term ill-health brought on by exposure to Agent Orange. Both had experienced long-haired stay-at-homers spitting on them in the arrivals lounge and general maltreatment over the years. Both were two of the kindest and most caring people I've ever met in my life, and I miss them both greatly.

They both dearly loved their country and had risked their lives, multiple times, for their Army and Marine Corps buddies, and got SFA but insults and jeers for doing so.

Neither of them would pi$$ on a politician of any pursuasion, even if they found one on fire.

There doesn’t seem to be much interest in this topic; understandable, I suppose, but some of my own thoughts for those who may be:

The Vietnam War could be described as an insurgency at the beginning when much/most of the original Viet Cong were or had been residents of the South at one time. Later, though, it was a full scale invasion of one sovereign nation by another whose aggression was supported by at least two other despotic regimes. The ridiculous claim by the Left that the North and South were really just one country fighting a civil war makes as much sense as claiming that the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were one nation during the Cold War, or that the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are one nation and that was a civil war despite the massive invasion by Chinese forces.

As for not being able to win the war (whatever we call it), that becomes difficult when one major player (the US) just gets tired, says to the rest of its team, “Yeah, you’re on your own,” and goes home—despite having made real progress toward a win. And of course it was harder for the South to win after the US reneged on our promise and refused to support them with weapons and other materiel if (read: when) the North broke its agreement and attacked the South again.

Was our involvement in the war a mistake? That should be easy to answer after a loss due to our surrender and the South’s subsequent military defeat. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight very few war losers think, “What a good outcome that was!”

If the Communists had just been allowed to walk into the house, take what they wanted, settle down, and then run everything to their satisfaction as was true after the defeat, but without all that death, suffering, and loss of treasure, how would that not have been better? That’s something I’m a little less certain about, but we have no way of knowing what a supine, “Sure, do what you want,” might have led to, especially when considering what that policy has led to on other occasions. Even with the demonstration that the US could not always be trusted to adhere to its promises, perhaps what else it demonstrated was that similar aggressions might be a bit more costly than their perpetrators might have assumed otherwise.

Whatever else we may believe, however, we should keep in mind that it wasn’t the Republic of Vietnam and the United States of America that started that war and are due the blame for everything that happened as a result. The Left would have had us believe otherwise, just as many myopic individuals today manage to conjure up a reason to blame Ukraine for the present war that shares much with the conflict that supposedly ended some 50 years ago. It’s comforting to believe something like that because it helps avoid the natural pangs of conscience for opposing the efforts to stop the most immoral of human activity: aggressive war.

"There doesn’t seem to be much interest in this topic..."

No point in talking about Vietnam as, based on your previous posts elsewhere in the forum, it was inevitable that you would make this one about Ukraine also.

quote:

Originally posted by marksman41:
No point in talking about Vietnam as, based on your previous posts elsewhere in the forum, it was inevitable that you would make this one about Ukraine also.

Well, I have used that same type of cop-out excuse for not participating in discussions here so I can’t blame you for using it, but “inevitable”?

I just checked my previous posts and according to the search function I have had 1312(!) posts since 24 February 2022. In searching for those that include the word “Ukraine,” I found two (count ’em, 2) that were in threads in which I was the first poster to use the word. Further, one of those two resulted from my posting a newspaper opinion piece about an unrelated matter, and the author of which actually used the word, not I.

Your claim does sort of hit the mark about the single post in which I was the one to introduce Ukraine to the discussion, but as it was the last post of the thread that stopped at that point I hardly turned the overall thread into one about Ukraine.

You evidently believe I have an incredible influence over how discussions progress here. That’s flattering, but not a compliment I can in good conscience accept. It’s hard to believe that your experience with a maximum of 1 of 1312 of my posts since 24 February last year (and assuming you read that one) has given you any sort of sensible reason to claim that I inevitably “make” the threads I post in “about Ukraine.”

Or, are you perhaps thinking of someone else? Care to elaborate?

And if you did have something worthwhile to contribute to this thread, all I can do is suggest you hold your nose, ignore my egregious comparison, and contribute away. I am sure we would be happy to read it. I spent a tour there and have learned much more about the war in the years since, but there is nothing I cannot learn more about.

Despite the fact that this thread has evidently now been made to be about Ukraine.

Maybe I'm just getting touchy about Ukraine being brought up in threads where it doesn't need to be - like politics in non-political threads.

Or maybe I'm remembering your posts in the Ukraine thread and likening it to the Sudentland, then starting a "what-if" thread about stopping Hitler, then this thread about U.S. involvement in combating Communists around the globe (with an emphasis on Vietnam).

I get it - you're (correct use of apostrophe to whoever is keeping track) laying bread crumbs. Good counter-intel. tactics.

I always read your input and recognize your intelligence, but now I can't help having a jaundiced view of your posts about historical issues and events.

I never served in Vietnam but 1975 was an interesting year for me nonetheless. I was temporarily assigned to the American Embassy in Vienna, Austria which was an interesting place to say the least - both the Embassy and Vienna were very interesting at that time. I became friends with one of the MSG's from Saigon as Vienna was his new posting after the fall of Saigon. He was on the last Helicopter out of that Embassy. Also that year President Nixon resigned and we received a cable the day of his resignation (night in Vienna) to change the portrait of the US President which hung in the lobby. Myself and another Marine took down Nixon and replaced it with one of Ford.

quote:

Originally posted by 2PAK:
Myself and another Marine took down Nixon and replaced it with one of Ford.

That’s an interesting bit of history (which is what this thread is about: history and the impact of historical events and their relevance to the present). I’m curious why there was a portrait of Ford available for the purpose. Was it anticipated there would be a change due to either impeachment and conviction or resignation? Or was it just standard practice to have a picture of the VP for whatever reason?

No anticipation. The Embassy had good sized portraits for the President and the Vice President already hanging up. I think most of the Embassies I worked in had similar set up near its main entrance. We simply placed Nixon's in a side room off the lobby, if I remember correctly, and moved Fords to the where Nixon's was. Vienna's US Embassy is large so when you walked into the main Embassy Lobby its got the flags, Portraits, bling, etc. or at least it did in 1975.

quote:

Originally posted by 2PAK:
...1975 was an interesting year for me... Also that year President Nixon resigned

Point of fact just in the interest of accuracy, Nixon resigned in late summer 1974.

You're correct. My mistake. 1974, not 1975.

Just to add a point regarding the iconic photograph of the Huey picking people up off the roof top; that was not the embassy. It was the Pittman apartment building which was a CIA safe house. It was being flown by one Robert Caron. I met Mr. Caron by chance at the Wal Mart in FWB a few years back. Quite the character.

An old friend and my former chief pilot, a fella named George Taylor, claims to have been flying that bird. He was flying for Air America at the time. I have no reason to not believe him.

Multiple Air America helicopter flights were made to evacuate a number of people from the Pittman Apartments, but the official account of these specific iconic photographs is that this particular Huey was flown by Robert Caron and Jack Hunter. So Mr. Taylor very well did fly to the Pittman Apartments that day, just not at the exact moment of these photos.

I'll be glad to give any of those pilots flying those helicopters that day a pass for making that claim.
Close enough. I'm sure there's a number of people glad they were there.

My older brother doesn't speak of Vietnam.

He was in intelligence sending out false weather reports.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund: There doesn’t seem to be much interest in this topic...

I'm interested but was born 11/63 and will leave it to others that experienced it or have studied the subject at length to post.

quote:

Both had experienced long-haired stay-at-homers spitting on them in the arrivals lounge and general maltreatment over the years. Both were two of the kindest and most caring people I've ever met in my life, and I miss them both greatly.

^^^^^^^^^^^^
Fortunately not all Vietnam vets experienced the maltreatment. Depends where you lived and where you hung out. I would agree they never received the ticker tape parades like the World War II vets.