Michael Griffith

For those who are interested, here are two excellent videos on the Vietnam War produced by the Atlanta Vietnam Veterans Business Association (AVVBA). The first video, made in 2018, focuses on Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary. The second video is an AVVBA symposium held in 2019 at the Atlanta History Center that featured three of the better scholars who defend the war (Dr. Robert F. Turner, Dr. Michael Kort, and Dr. Mark Moyar). They addressed the suicidal restrictions placed on our military operations, the news media’s misleading coverage of the war, the Domino Theory, the Tet Offensive, and the Geneva Accords, among other issues.

2018 video

2019 video

Another Vietnam veterans group that is active in Vietnam War scholarship is the Vietnam Veterans for Factual History. Their website is one of the best online sources for factual information about the war. I would especially recommend their extensive Myths & Lies page. Here is some of the information that you’ll find documented on that page:

-- By 1968, 83% of the North Vietnamese army (NVA) were conscripts (i.e., they did not volunteer but were drafted). In contrast, only 33% of the American soldiers who served in Vietnam were conscripts. Also, 70% of the American troops who died were volunteers.

-- By 1966, NVA conscripts had an indefinite term of service, whereas American draftees only had to serve for two years.

-- NVA soldiers deserted in large numbers. I’ve already mentioned that at Khe Sanh, the NVA desertion rate was an astounding 20-25%.

-- Approximately 250,000 NVA soldiers surrendered over the course of the war. More would have surrendered had it not often been so dangerous to try to surrender because of the draconian, iron discipline imposed on NVA soldiers by their officers.

-- During the Vietminh’s war with the French, Chinese generals planned and managed the Vietminh war effort. Even General Giap could be overruled by the Chinese generals. By 1954, the Chinese Communists were supplying the Vietminh with 4,000 tons of supplies per month. Between April and September 1950 alone, the Chinese supplied North Vietnam with 14,000 guns, 1.700 machine guns and recoilless rifles, 300 bazookas and 150 cannons.

-- During North Vietnam’s war with South Vietnam and the U.S. (and South Korea and Australia), the Soviet Union and China supplied massive amounts of weapons and supplies.

As early as 1964, Soviet officers and specialists were sent to North Vietnam to train anti-aircraft (AA) units in the use of Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Starting in 1964, North Vietnamese fighter pilots and anti-aircraft gunners were being trained in the Soviet Union, and Soviet advisors were being stationed in North Vietnam. When NVA troops were still learning how to use the new Soviet AA batteries, Soviet crews manned the guns themselves. One such Soviet battery reportedly downed six American planes. Released Soviet records indicate that these AA crews served for much of the war.

Soviet Spetsnaz special forces took part in at least one ground combat operation in Vietnam. In 1968, a Spetsnaz team attacked an American base on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, destroying three Cobra attack helicopters and stealing another. This operation was confirmed after the fall of the Soviet Union. (Soviet Aid to North Vietnam (globalsecurity.org, The Little-Known Role of the Soviet Union in the Vietnam War | by Paul Combs | Perceive More! | Medium).

-- The National Liberation Front (i.e., the Vietcong) was in reality a front group that was under the control of the North Vietnamese. (Former NLF official Truong Nhu Tang confirmed this in his book A Vietcong Memoir.)

 -- The Vietcong frequently used extreme violence in an effort to subdue and control South Vietnamese villagers, killing and torturing tens of thousands of innocent South Vietnamese in the process.

 -- “Fraggings” by American enlisted soldiers against their officers were rare. Of the 7,881 officers who died in Vietnam, only 56 were killed by fragging. That amounted to seventh-tenths of one percent. The vast majority of fragging incidents occurred in rear areas and were done by malcontents who didn't want to be in Vietnam. Ironically, most were of the offenders were volunteers.

-- Opinion surveys done among Vietnam veterans in the 1980s and 1990s found that 80-90% said they were proud of their service in Vietnam.

7 hours ago, Henry Frost said:

Dulles was also involved in Operation Paperclip since his OSS days.  Not only did thousands of German engineers and scientists come to the West, but also German intelligence and counter-intelligence agents.

I often wonder how much influence these imported fascists had on the social and political institutions in the West.

Yes, I knew about Paperclip. I think that operation was defensible, but not suppressing Holocaust evidence and protecting SS men who had directly helped kill Jews.

On 6/1/2020 at 7:35 PM, Paul Brancato said:

Has anyone, besides Doug Caddy, watched this film? I think the subject of UFO/alien contact, presented as it is in this movie, is germane. Of course they won’t mention E Howard Hunt’s parting words to Mr. Caddy that JFK was killed because of the ‘alien question’. But it turns out that Hunt wasn’t the only one that believed JFK’s death was connected to his willingness to end the secrecy on UFO’s. British Admiral Gordon Creighton suggested the same. The movie confronts the government secrecy head on, and not just on this issue. 

I've watched it. I think the first 3/4 of it is credible, but I think it goes off the rails for the last 1/4.

How would E. Howard Hunt have known that JFK was going to end the secrecy about UFOs? How? 

19 hours ago, Henry Frost said:

In December 2021, President Biden said this about the JFK assassination files still being held back:

“Temporary continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

Since the CIA and the FBI managed to talk Trump into believing this nonsense, we can't be too shocked that they were able to do the same thing with Biden. It's very disappointing and frustrating.

54 minutes ago, Ron Ege said:

Dulles was not alone.

Richard Cohen: FDR’s moral failure on the Holocaust - The Washington Post

Oh, I totally agree. David Wyman's 2018 book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 is a devastating indictment of FDR's feckless, immoral response to the Holocaust.

33 minutes ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Michael, the Kudlaty issue has been debated here multiple times. His assertions are clouded by the fact that he appears to have been coached by Jack White. This is an interesting read as well from Tracy Parnell's site.

Well, Patoski thought he was credible, even though Patoski approached the subject with scorn and disbelief. 

On 7/15/2020 at 3:54 PM, Rick McTague said:

Kathy,

THANK YOU for doing this.  Not all of us here are against Trump or blindly for him, most of us do our research, think for ourselves and support/vote accordingly.  Seeing all the anti-Trump posts here was getting very tiresome, just as seeing anti-Clinton or anti-Biden posts would be.  Now there's a separate playground for all that and this forum can go back to focusing on the coup that happened in 1963.

EXACTLY. Many liberal conspiracy theorists seem more interested in attacking conservatives, and in advancing their personal political agenda, than they are in spreading the truth about JFK's death. 

Speaking for myself, Trump was my fourth pick among the candidates in the 2016 GOP primary. I preferred Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich ahead of Trump. I was also interested in Democrat James Webb. I was hoping Webb would gain some traction in the 2016 Democratic primary, but the party had already drifted too far left for a genuine centrist like Webb to stand a chance. 

Anyway, it came down to a choice between Trump or Hillary, a truly miserable selection. I opted for Trump, partly because he chose Mike Pence as his running mate. If Webb had gotten the Democratic nomination, I may well have voted for him over Trump.

I've done no research about "two Marguerites," and the idea strikes me as outlandish on its face.

However, there may be something to the Two Oswalds theory. When journalist Joe Patoski decided to write an article about the Two Oswalds theory for Texas Monthly, he did so only because he thought it was ludicrous and crazy. But, after spending some time looking at the evidence, he came away stunned by some of it and concluded there might be something to it. Patoski was impressed by two pieces of evidence: Hoover's 1960 memo about someone possibly using Oswald's birth certificate and the account of Frank Kudlaty that Oswald attended a junior high school in Fort Worth and that he handed over Oswald's school records to the FBI. Patoski tracked Kudlaty, and Kudlaty confirmed the account (https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/the-two-oswalds/).

Last week I finally got around to reading David Talbot's 2016 book The Devil's Chessboard: Alan Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. I had watched three of Talbot's presentations on the book on YouTube, but I didn't get around to reading the book until last week. What an incredibly educational book. I'm going to add it to my list of recommended books on my JFK site.

As someone who is ardently pro-Israeli, I was stunned and disgusted to discover that Dulles suppressed evidence of the Holocaust during WW II. I was raised Jewish for part of my early childhood. I was a Hebrew linguist for 13 of my 21 years in the U.S. Army. And, I was lucky enough to live in Israel for a short time. Thus, I was thoroughly appalled to read about Dulles's suppression of Holocaust evidence during the war and about his coddling of murderous Nazis after the war.

Asia scholar Jacqueline Desbarats’ chapter in the 1990 book The Vietnam Debate presented some of the results of her research into the bloody aftermath of the Vietnam War. Among other findings, she concluded that about 65,000 South Vietnamese were executed by the communists, and she added that this was probably an “underestimate.” Here is a portion of her chapter, which was titled “Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation”:

Careful examination of public records does indeed supply evidence that there was an execution program after 1975. It also supplies evidence that the execution program was political in its intent rather than merely concerned with dealing with the crime wave that swept South Vietnam after the liberation. Who, then, were the victims of these summary executions? Among the victims brought to my attention were a number of government officials of the former regime: province chiefs, district chiefs, mayors, members of the police, high ranking members of the army, and members of the intelligence community. The victims also included a handful of members of the compradore bourgeoisie, a few leaders of popular, ethnic, or religious groups, including a couple of Hoa Hao, a number of people who tried to escape from the country, and a large number of people who tried to escape from reeducation camps. But by far the most widespread alleged reason for those executions was "antigovernment resistance." This reason alone accounted for forty nine percent of all the executions, including both armed resistance and passive resistance, such as refusal to register for reeducation.

The empirical data collected in the interviews allows one to look at the pattern of executions over time and space. Two thirds of the executions occurred in 1975 and 1976, at which time the number of executions seems to have tapered off. A secondary peak occurred in 1978 at the time of the nationalization of commerce and business in South Vietnam. Over geographic space, we also find a rather clear pattern. Almost two thirds of the reported executions occurred in the Saigon and the Delta areas, and those were mostly executions that took place very soon after liberation. Subsequently, there is a geographic diffusion phenomenon, whereby executions started to spread to the areas north of Saigon. Those coastal areas became especially important after 1976. We also find a pattern in the kinds of reasons given for the executions. For instance, the executions motivated by anti­ government resistance were practically ubiquitous, as we find them everywhere, though mostly after 1976. On the other hand, executions of high­ranking officers are essentially found in the Mekong Delta area and occurred very soon after liberation, most of them in 1975. Executions of people who tried to escape from reeducation occurred mostly in the areas north of Saigon, and those are also widely spread over the ten year period examined.

What are the numbers involved in extrajudicial executions? Looking only at deaths that were due to active willful acts rather than passive neglect, and using highly conservative coding and accounting procedures in the study's sample estimation, I came to an estimate of approximately 65,O00 persons executed.[9] I suspected all along that this probably was an underestimate. But I am more convinced now that it is an underestimate because the computations are based in part on the assumption that no more than one million people were processed through reeducation camps. As a matter of fact, we know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation. The change in statistical parameters resulting from that recent admission would indicate that, in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years. (Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (reaction.la))

In 2017, the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada published an excellent article on North Vietnam’s harsh post-war treatment of the South Vietnamese titled “Vietnam After the War.” The article is carried on the foundation’s Asia Pacific Curriculum website (Vietnam After the War | Asia Pacific Curriculum).

Among other things, the article notes that about one million South Vietnamese were subjected to “reeducation.” It notes that some prisoners in the detention camps were tortured, subjected to brainwashing, and forced to do hard labor, and that some of the prisoners “were never seen again.” It notes that North Vietnam quickly broke its promises to its southern allies (such as the NLF) about power-sharing and some level of autonomy for the South. And it notes that when the North Vietnamese took over the South, they took control of the news media, schools, and religious institutions. The article adds that the communists persecuted Christians and Buddhists, closed some religious buildings, began keeping lists of people who attended religious services, shut down schools and newspapers that they found unacceptable, fired teachers whom they considered suspect, and even burned books that they found objectionable.

Here are some portions of the article:

One thing standing in the way of reconciliation was the North Vietnamese government’s deep suspicion of many people in the south and their doubts about southerners’ loyalty to the communist regime. As will be discussed later, its approach to building a sense of loyalty was often heavy-handed and often had the effect of alienating people rather than winning them over. 

The North quickly made clear that previous agreements for sharing power with allied groups in the south were no longer valid. According to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords (another set of negotiations that aimed to bring an end to the conflict), South Vietnam “was supposed to continue to exist as a separate and sovereign state” until the northerners and the southerners could agree on how to “unite the two Vietnams via elections or negotiations.”⁷ Several NLF leaders believed that they could carve out and maintain some sort of neutral, non-communist southern state. At first, they had reason to be optimistic: the North had made repeated promises “that they were in no rush to communize the south.”⁸

For soldiers and higher-ranking officials in the South Vietnam government, and for anyone else viewed with suspicion, “re-education” was longer and more severe. Some people spent several years in camps. They were subjected to torture and brainwashing and forced to do hard labour in inhospitable areas of the country. Some who were taken away to the camps were never seen again.¹² In total, about a million people in the former South Vietnam were subjected to some form of “re-education.”

One tool the government used to identify so-called “bad elements”—those who were opposed to the North’s communist ideology—was the personal dossier. These were written biographies that included a person’s name and the names of his or her family members, as well as his or her ethnicity, religious affiliation, and current job. The government used this information to categorize people as “good” or “bad.” If a person had a sister, father, or uncle who had worked with the French, American, or South Vietnamese government, for example, he or she would likely be put in the “bad” category. Similarly, if someone’s family owned a business or other property, it meant that person was a capitalist, which was also bad. In total, the number of people who were believed to have such affiliations was estimated to be one-third of the south’s population.¹⁴

The media, schools, and religious institutions were brought under government control. All of these represented potential challenges or alternatives to socialism and were therefore seen as threats. Newspapers were shut down and the government started keeping records of who attended religious services. The government was especially suspicious of Christianity, which it saw as a holdover from the colonial years. But even non-European religions like Buddhism were viewed with suspicion. Some religious buildings were closed down or required to place a portrait of Ho Chi Minh on their altars.¹⁶ The government also burned books that it felt were not supportive of the revolution, and it replaced many teachers in the south with teachers from the north, who they believed would be more loyal. 

On 9/5/2022 at 4:58 PM, James DiEugenio said:

 

When Harry Summers told Giap that the NVA never defeated the Americans on the battlefield, Giap replied: "That may be true, it is also irrelevant." Don't you understand anything about Vietnam Mike?

You keep making these superficial arguments and keep missing the key points. Why did our battlefield success end up being irrelevant? Here are the main reasons this happened:

(1) Congress, under your party's control, drastically cut our aid to South Vietnam at the same time that the Soviet Union and China were still pouring in massive amounts of weapons and supplies to North Vietnam. 

(2) Congress, under your party's control, gave North Vietnam a big flashing green light to invade by passing the Case-Church Amendment barely six months after the Paris Peace Accords, even though the Soviets and the Chinese were still giving North Vietnam massive amounts of military equipment and supplies.

(3) When, in plain violation of the Paris Peace Accords, North Vietnam launched a massive invasion of South Vietnam in late 1974, Congress, controlled by your party, refused to honor our promise to aid South Vietnam if the North invaded again. As the situation grew worse, President Ford, to his great credit, called a joint session of Congress and publicly pleaded for Congress to allow him to at least give South Vietnam weapons and supplies, but Congress said no.

If your party had not sided with North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and China and had not betrayed South Vietnam, our battlefield success would have been very relevant; South Vietnam would be another South Korea today; and the horrors that the communists inflicted on the South Vietnamese never would have happened.

Giap was not trying to get a battlefield victory.  That was not central. The main point was to sap the will of the American army and, through that, to wreck the political consensus behind the war at home. Giap did both.

Giap most certainly was trying to win on the battlefield, but he also soon realized that people who shared your views in our press and on our college campuses were powerful allies because they could be counted on to turn American victories into perceived defeats and propaganda coups, because they could be counted on to demonize South Vietnam's government while whitewashing North Vietnam's murderous regime, and because they could be counted on to smear the American war effort. 

Giap's army got decimated in the 1972 Spring Offensive, even though all the ground fighting was done by South Vietnam's army (ARVN). The Spring Offensive proved that we could keep South Vietnam free without having troops on the ground but just by providing air cover and war material. It proved that ARVN could hold their own against, and even defeat, Giap's army, as long as we provided air cover and continued to resupply them as needed. It was a great testament to how much ARVN had improved.

Take a look at the book Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse.  In that book, he shows how the Pentagon worked out a secret plan to hide a plethora of war atrocities.  There were many; into the hundreds.  There was also the study of the rising incidence of fraggings.  Which, by about 1970, there were  over two hundred yearly.(Col. Robert Heinl, July 1971 Armed Forces Journal)  How does one conduct a war with that many mutinies?

Or take  the two Winter Soldier conferences in Detroit and Washington. About 109 veterans ended up testifying about war crimes. 

Oh, wow. Turse? The Winter Soldier stuff? 

Even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that every claim you make here is valid, the conduct of our soldiers in Vietnam would still be far better than the conduct of the North Vietnamese army (NVA) and the VC. For every single real or alleged American war crime, there were three or four NVA/VC war crimes. This gets back to the point that every criticism of the Vietnam War can be made against the Korean War and World War II.

Have you actually read Turse’s book? I have. Have you read any of the critical reviews of Turse’s book, about Turse’s selective, misleading use of his sources, and about his narrow, one-sided approach? Will you ever read any works that defend the conduct of our soldiers in Vietnam, such as Burkett’s Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and History or Scruggs’ Lessons from the Vietnam War: Truths the Media Never Told You, or Moyar’s Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam, to name a few books that could be cited?

It is especially revealing that you would cite the Winter Soldier conferences. Do you have any idea how many of those 109 were exposed as outright frauds, were exposed as not having served where they said they served, or who refused to provide verifiable specifics when asked to do so? No. Because you’ve only read one side of the story and refuse to read the other side.

For starters, I would invite you to read Vietnam War scholar Phillip Jenning's section on the Winter Soldier claims in his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War. 

And, it should be noted that those 109 Vietnam vets constituted a tiny fraction of the 2.7 million American military personnel who served in Vietnam.

So in the face of this, how can anyone call anybody else a thug?  I mean the cover up about Calley was kind of sickening, don't you think?

So you can’t even admit that Giap was a murderous thug? Yikes. What you clearly seem to be saying here, and elsewhere, is that our military in Vietnam was just as bad as the NVA and the VC, which is a slanderous, baseless position.

There was no specific “cover-up about Calley.” Initially, there was a cover-up of the My Lai Massacre, which was an inexcusable crime in which Calley played a role. Calley and the few dozens of other soldiers who took part in the massacre deserved to be punished, but it was shameful that Calley was singled out for punishment while his equally guilty commanding officer, Captain Medina, was not prosecuted. (And, no, I do not agree with Nixon’s pardon of Calley.)

Why don’t you ever talk about the far bloodier Hue Massacre carried out by the VC at the end of the Tet Offensive? Why don’t you talk about the other massacres and war crimes committed by the NVA and the VC? Our troops behaved like Boy Scouts compared to theirs.

This gets back to the point about selectivity and balance. Every attack you can make on the Vietnam War can be made against the Korean War and World War II. Some American soldiers committed war crimes during those wars. Yet, no rational person would argue that our soldiers in the Pacific were as barbaric as were Japanese soldiers, or that our soldiers in Europe behaved as badly as did SS soldiers (or Soviet soldiers), or that our soldiers in Korea committed anywhere near the number of war crimes that North Korean and Chinese soldiers committed.

And please do not give me that stuff about abandoning Vietnam to communism.  I don't see how Ben and Jerry's, Bank of America, McDonald's, a banking university etc constitute communism. 

HUH???! That “stuff about abandoning Vietnam to communism”? FYI, that “stuff” happens to be undeniable historical fact. What in the world are you talking about? I can honestly say that in all the hundreds of online discussions I’ve had on the Vietnam War, you are the first person I’ve encountered who has denied that the U.S. abandoned Vietnam to communism. Perhaps you misspoke.

I can’t believe you are still repeating the bizarre argument that a brutal communist regime isn’t really a brutal communist regime if it allows some Western fast-food chains and banks to operate within its borders. Would you apply this amoral logic to Russia and China? It is as if you’re saying, “Never mind the suppression of basic human rights. Never mind the murdering and jailing of dissidents. Never mind the lack of justice and due process. Never mind the control of the news media. Just never mind all that because they allow some Western restaurants and banks to operate within their borders!”

Again, go read the Human Rights Watch report on current-day Vietnam. The last time I checked, nobody has ever suggested that Human Rights Watch is a right-wing organization.

And it would have all happened decades earlier if the US had not broken the Geneva Accords. A point you wish to ignore. For what reason?

I’ve addressed this old communist talking point, but you just keep repeating it. Again, the country that most egregiously violated the Geneva Accords was North Vietnam, not the U.S. and not South Vietnam.

I asked if you knew what JFK himself said about the Geneva Accords, but you never replied. Here is some of what he said on the subject in 1956, two years after the Geneva Accords had been enacted:

I include in that injunction a plea that the United States never give its approval to the early nationwide elections called for by the Geneva Agreement of 1954. Neither the United States nor Free Vietnam was a party to that agreement – and neither the United States nor Free Vietnam is ever going to be a party to an election obviously stacked and subverted in advance, urged upon us by those who have already broken their own pledges under the Agreement they now seek to enforce. (Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at the Conference on Vietnam Luncheon in the Hotel Willard, Washington, D.C., June 1, 1956 | JFK Library)

And, tell me, what would have “all happened decades earlier”? 60,000-plus South Vietnamese executed? Thousands more killed via forced labor, starvation, and lack of medical treatment in communist concentration (“reeducation”) camps? Plunging the South into the same poverty as the North? At least 800,000 people fleeing for their lives rather than live under communist tyranny?

The basic difference between us boils down to this: You regret that South Vietnam did not fall to communist tyranny decades earlier, whereas I regret that South Vietnam did not remain free.

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Thanks for that bit of background, Michael. My parents were divorced when I was 7. My father wasn't around much. But my uncle and his Marine buddies used to come up from Pendleton on the weekends and they became, in effect, my surrogate fathers and older brothers. A couple of these guys had been to Nam. They used to show me Polaroids they'd taken of dead "gooks". One of them gave me a hat that he'd worn in-country, that had "Sorry About That, Vietnam" stitched into the side. Being around these young men, and seeing how it affected their psyches, led my mom to reject the war. To this day, she can't say "McNamara" without her face scrunching up with scorn.

But my point is that these guys themselves never denounced the war. Most of them were drafted to fight in a war they didn't believe in, but through their military training they came to see themselves not as expendable cannon-fodder for the military-industrial complex, but as soldiers--modern day warriors designed to kick-ass. The movie Full Metal Jacket depicts this brilliantly, IMO. 

So my larger point is that people who serve--even those drafted into serving--come away believing there's a military solution for everything...and sometimes even that their newly-acquired skill set and training is applicable to everyday life. Well, our founding fathers--presumably Washington himself, knew this. That is why the Secretary of Defense is a civilian. Because the military, while willing to do what must be done, is not properly equipped to decide what should be done. They just aren't. Their answer is always more soldiers, more firepower, more death, more war... 

Now, as this pertains to Vietnam. The U.S. military establishment are the sorest of losers. They never came to grips that they "lost" a new kind of war. They have since day one alibi-ed that they could have won if only they'd been given the ability to do so. And this is largely irrelevant. And kinda embarrassing... OF COURSE we could have "won" if we'd given the butchers more knives and more meat to cut. But someone somewhere had to make a decision when to cut and run. Someone somewhere had to take a look at the BIG PICTURE, and see where the war was leading, if not more and more slaughter. After 20 years, South Vietnam had become less stable, and North Vietnam had become a heroic little nation with some mighty big friends, that showed no signs of going anywhere. Our continued presence in SE Asia had damaged us internationally, created a rift internally, and blackened the souls of a generation of young men...who used to dream of sports cars and surf boards but who now delighted in showing 7 year-olds Polaroids of dead "gooks". Enough was enough. 

And that is where congress comes in... Bowing to the will of the people, congress restricted the military's ability to resurrect the war, and prolong the slaughter. This is what they were supposed to do. They deferred to the wishes of President Johnson, and President Nixon, but when it became clear a third President was itching to throw more meat on the fire, they said "NOPE!" 

And that was a good thing. Almost everyone now thinks so... Almost everyone now knows so... Although some perished at the hands of the North Vietnamese, it is not nearly the number that would have perished should the war have continued... And may very well not have been nearly the number that would have perished at the hands of a "friendly" South Vietnamese government. In the guise of supporting strong anti-Communist governments, after all, we have propped up many a murderous regime, some no doubt more murderous than the current regime in Vietnam.

 

 

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Thanks for that bit of background, Michael. My parents were divorced when I was 7. My father wasn't around much. But my uncle and his Marine buddies used to come up from Pendleton on the weekends and they became, in effect, my surrogate fathers and older brothers. A couple of these guys had been to Nam. They used to show me Polaroids they'd taken of dead "gooks". One of them gave me a hat that he'd worn in-country, that had "Sorry About That, Vietnam" stitched into the side. Being around these young men, and seeing how it affected their psyches, led my mom to reject the war. To this day, she can't say "McNamara" without her face scrunching up with scorn.

But my point is that these guys themselves never denounced the war. Most of them were drafted to fight in a war they didn't believe in, but through their military training they came to see themselves not as expendable cannon-fodder for the military-industrial complex, but as soldiers--modern day warriors designed to kick-ass. The movie Full Metal Jacket depicts this brilliantly, IMO. 

So my larger point is that people who serve--even those drafted into serving--come away believing there's a military solution for everything...and sometimes even that their newly-acquired skill set and training is applicable to everyday life. Well, our founding fathers--presumably Washington himself, knew this. That is why the Secretary of Defense is a civilian. Because the military, while willing to do what must be done, is not properly equipped to decide what should be done. They just aren't. Their answer is always more soldiers, more firepower, more death, more war... 

Now, as this pertains to Vietnam. The U.S. military establishment are the sorest of losers. They never came to grips that they "lost" a new kind of war. They have since day one alibi-ed that they could have won if only they'd been given the ability to do so. And this is largely irrelevant. And kinda embarrassing... OF COURSE we could have "won" if we'd given the butchers more knives and more meat to cut. But someone somewhere had to make a decision when to cut and run. Someone somewhere had to take a look at the BIG PICTURE, and see where the war was leading, if not more and more slaughter. After 20 years, South Vietnam had become less stable, and North Vietnam had become a heroic little nation with some mighty big friends, that showed no signs of going anywhere. Our continued presence in SE Asia had damaged us internationally, created a rift internally, and blackened the souls of a generation of young men...who used to dream of sports cars and surf boards but who now delighted in showing 7 year-olds Polaroids of dead "gooks". Enough was enough. 

And that is where congress comes in... Bowing to the will of the people, congress restricted the military's ability to resurrect the war, and prolong the slaughter. This is what they were supposed to do. They deferred to the wishes of President Johnson, and President Nixon, but when it became clear a third President was itching to throw more meat on the fire, they said "NOPE!" 

And that was a good thing. Almost everyone now thinks so... Almost everyone now knows so... Although some perished at the hands of the North Vietnamese, it is not nearly the number that would have perished should the war have continued... And may very well not have been nearly the number that would have perished at the hands of a "friendly" South Vietnamese government. In the guise of supporting strong anti-Communist governments, after all, we have propped up many a murderous regime, some no doubt more murderous than the current regime in Vietnam.

Pat,

I think it is a vast exaggeration to say that "almost everyone now thinks" that the war was a mistake and that it was a good thing we did not keep supporting South Vietnam. I'm sure that "almost everyone" in liberal circles thinks this way, but they don't constitute "almost everyone" in the population as a whole. Go to any of the major online forums that discuss the Vietnam War and you'll see that a great many people disagree with the liberal view on the war. Scholarly books that defend the Vietnam War continue to be published. 

I would answer your other comments by making the following points, which I think your comments avoid:

-- North Vietnam was the aggressor. South Vietnam did not invade North Vietnam, but North Vietnam repeatedly invaded South Vietnam.

-- For all its faults and problems, South Vietnam's government was far less corrupt and oppressive than North Vietnam's government. It is sadly ironic that so many VC/NLF/PRG members realized this only after South Vietnam fell.

-- We could have won the war in a matter of months, if not weeks, if our military had not been hamstrung by so many ridiculous rules of engagement that placed suicidal restraints on our operations. We know from North Vietnamese sources that when Nixon allowed a reasonable and effective use of our air power in Operation Linebacker II in late 1972 for just 12 days, Hanoi's defenses were on the verge of collapse and Hanoi's leaders were desperate and were considering capitulation. This fact alone destroys the leftist myth that the war was unwinnable.

-- Even during Linebacker II, we made every reasonable effort to minimize civilian casualties. Our air raids, even Linebacker II, did not violate the standard rules of war and were nothing like the criminal air raids that LeMay launched against Japan.

-- In the first two to three years after South Vietnam fell, the North Vietnamese executed over 60,000 South Vietnamese and killed a bare minimum of 5,000 others in the brutal "reeducation" camps. In contrast, during our 12 years in Vietnam, we lost just over 58,000 troops.

-- Some former reeducation camp prisoners argue that well over 100,000 South Vietnamese died in those camps, based on their personal observations that in the camps where they were kept, the death rate among prisoners ranged from 1 in 20 up to 1 in 6, due to the harsh conditions and cruel treatment (see, for example, reeducation camp survivor Quang Hong Mac's book The Bloody Experiences in Hell's Reeducation Camp) . If we take the lowball figure of 800,000 for the number of prisoners in those camps and assume that "only" 1 in 20 died, that gives us a death figure of 40,000.

-- The Communist Bloc, especially North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union, carried out a massive worldwide propaganda campaign from 1954 until the end of the war in order to smear South Vietnam and the U.S. war effort, and most American and European media outlets uncritically repeated much of that propaganda. To this day, liberal books on the war repeat many of the talking points that the communists put out during the war.

-- Every argument that critics make against the Vietnam War can also be made against the Korean War--and I mean every single argument. The difference was that we did not impose suicidal restrictions on the use of air power in Korea, and that our news media did not smear the war effort and did not demonize the South Korean government.

Great post. And let's not forget what WC attorney Wesley Liebeler said about Oswald's rifle skills and the rifle in his 9/6/64 internal memo to Rankin wherein Liebeler expressed concerns about the draft of a portion of the Warren Report:

1. The purpose of this section is to determine Oswald's ability to fire a rifle. The third word at the top of page 50 of the galleys, which is apparently meant to describe Oswald, is "marksman." A marksman is one skilled at shooting at mark; one who shoots well. Not only do we beg the question a little, but the sentence is inexact in that the shot, which it describes, would be the same for marksman as it would for one who was not a marksman. How about: the assassin's shots from the easternmost window of the south side of the Texas School Book Depository were at a slow-moving target proceeding on a downgrade virtually straight away from the assassin, at a range of 177 to 266 feet."

2. The last sentence in the first paragraph on galley page 50 should indicate that the slope of Elm Street is downward.

3. The section on the nature of the shots deals basically with the range and the effect of a telescopic sight. Several experts conclude that the shots were easy. There is, however, no consideration given here to the time allowed for the shots. I do not see how someone can conclude that a shot is easy or hard unless he knows something about how long the firer has to shoot, that is, how much time allotted for the shots.

4. On the nature of the shots--Frazier testified that one would have no difficulty in hitting a target with a telescopic sight, since all you have to do is put the crosshairs on the target. On page 51 of the galleys, however, he testified that shots fired by FBI agents with the assassination weapon were "a few inches high and to the right of the target * * * because of a defect in the scope." Apparently no one knows when that defect appeared, or if it was in the scope at the time of the assassination. If it was, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary one may assume that it was, putting the crosshairs on the target would clearly have resulted in a miss, or it very likely would, in any event. I have raised this question before. There is a great deal of testimony in the record that a telescopic sight is a sensitive proposition. You can't leave a rifle and scope laying around in a garage underfoot for almost 3 months, just having brought it back from New Orleans in the back of a station wagon, and expect to hit anything with it, unless you take the trouble to fire it and sight the scope in. This would have been a problem that should have been dealt with in any event, and now that it turns out that there actually was a defect in the scope, it is perfectly clear that the question must be considered. The present draft leaves the Commission open to severe criticism. Furthermore, to the extent that it leaves testimony suggesting that the shots might not have been so easy out of the discussion, thereby giving only a part of the story, it is simply dishonest.

5. Why do we have a statement concerning the fact that Oswald's Marine records show that he was familiar with the Browning automatic rifle, .45-caliber pistol and 12-gage riot gun? That is completely irrelevant to the question of his ability to fire a rifle, unless there is evidence that the same skills are involved. It is, furthermore, prejudicial to some extent.

6. Under the heading "Oswald's Rifle Practice Outside the Marines" we have a statement concerning his hunting activities in Russia. It says that he joined a hunting club, obtained a license and went hunting about six times. It does not say what kind of a weapon he used. While I am not completely familiar with the record on this point, I do know for a fact that there is some indication that he used a shotgun. Under what theory do we include activities concerning a shotgun under a heading relating to rifle practice, and then presume not to advise the reader of the fact?

7. The statements concerning Oswald's practice with the assassination weapon are misleading. They tend to give the impression that he did more practicing than the record suggests that he did. My recollection is that there is only one specific time when he might have practiced. We should be more precise in this area, because the Commission is going to have its work in this area examined very closely.

8. On the top of galley page 51 we have that statement about Oswald sighting the telescopic sight at night on the porch in New Orleans. I think the support for that proposition is thin indeed. Marina Oswald first testified that she did not know what he was doing out there and then she was clearly led into the only answer that gives any support to this proposition.

9. I think the level of reaching that is going on in this whole discussion of rifle capability is merely shown by the fact that under the heading of rifle practice outside the Marine Corps appears the damning statement that "Oswald showed an interest in rifles by discussing that subject with others (in fact only one person as I remember it) and reading gun magazines."

10. I do not think the record will support the statement that Oswald did not leave his Beckley Avenue roominghouse on one of the weekends that he was supposedly seen at the Sports Drome Rifle Range.

11. There is a misstatement in the third paragraph under rapid fire tests when it says "Four of the firers missed the second shot." The preceding paragraph states that there were only three firers.

12. There are no footnotes whatsoever in the fifth paragraph under rapid fire tests and some rather important statements are made which require some support from someplace.

13. A minor point as to the next paragraph--bullets are better said to strike rather than land.

14. As I read through the section on rifle capability it appears that 15 different sets of three shots were fired by supposedly expert riflemen of the FBI and other places. According to my calculations those 15 sets of shots took a total of 93.8 seconds to be fired. The average of all 15 is a little over 6.2 seconds. Assuming that time is calculated commencing with the firing of the first shot, that means the average time it took to fire the two remaining shots was about 6.2 seconds. That comes to about 3.1 seconds for each shot, not counting the time consumed by the actual firing, which would not be very much. I recall that chapter 3 said that the minimum time that had to elapse between shots was 2.25 seconds, which is pretty close to the one set of fast shots fired by Frazier of the FBI.

The conclusion indicates that Oswald had the capability to fire three shots with two hits in from 4.8 to 5.6 seconds. Of the 15 sets of 3 shots described above. only 3 were fired within 4.8 seconds. A total of five sets, including the three just mentioned were fired within a total of 5.6 seconds. The conclusion at its most extreme states that Oswald could fire faster than the Commission experts fired in 12 of their 15 tries and that in any event he could fire faster than the experts did in 10 of their 15 tries. If we are going to set forth material such as this, I think we should set forth some information on how much training and how much shooting the experts had and did as a whole. The readers could then have something on which to base their judgments concerning the relative abilities of the apparently slow firing experts used by the Commission and the ability of Lee Harvey Oswald.

15. The problems raised by the above analyses should be met at some point in the text of the report. The figure of 2.25 as a minimum firing time for each shot used throughout chapter 3. The present discussion of rifle capability shows that expert riflemen could not fire the assassination weapon that fast. Only one of the experts managed to do so, and his shots, like those of the other FBI experts, were high and to the right of the target. The fact is that most of the experts were much more proficient with a rifle than Oswald could ever be expected to be, and the record indicates that fact, according to my recollection of the response of one of the experts to a question by Mr. McCloy asking for a comparison of an NRA master marksman to a Marine Corps sharpshooter.

16. The present section on rifle capability fails to set forth material in the record tending to indicate that Oswald was not a good shot and that he was not interested in his rifle while in the Marine Corps. It does not set forth material indicating that a telescopic sight must be tested and sighted in after a period of nonuse before it can be expected to be accurate. That problem is emphasized by the fact that the FBI actually found that there was a defect in the scene which caused the rifle to fire high and to the right. In spite of the above the present section takes only part of the material in the record to show that Oswald was a good shot and that he was interested in rifles. I submit that the testimony Delgado that Oswald was not interested in his rifle while in the Marines is at least as probative as Alba's testimony that Oswald came into his garage to read rifle--and hunting--magazines.

To put it bluntly that sort of selection from the record could seriously affect the integrity and credibility of the entire report.

17. It seems to me that the most honest and the most sensible thing to do the present state of the record on Oswald's rifle capability would be to write a very short section indicating that there is testimony on both sides of several issues. The Commission could then conclude that the best evidence that Oswald could fire his rifle as fast as he did and hit the target is the fact that he did so. It may have been pure luck. It probably was to a very great extent. But it happened. He would have had to have been lucky to hit as he did if he had only 4.8 seconds to fire the shots. Why don't we admit instead of reaching and using only part of the record to support the propositions presently set forth in the galleys. Those conclusions will never be accepted by critical persons anyway. (11 HSCA 230-232; 9/6/64 memo)

7 hours ago, David Lifton said:

The source for this allegation is Paul K. O'Connor.  I first interviewed PKO in Aug 1979.  In that original interview, he mentioned nothing about Curtis LeMay being at the autopsy.   As I recall, that claim wasn't first made until he became a fixture on the lecture circuit -- i.e., was invited to speak at Lancer.  Only then did he modify his account to include the assertion that LeMay attended the autopsy.  Based on my original telephone interview with O'Connor (Aug 1979), plus my filmed interview with him (a few months later), I would not give any credence to this claim. 

One other thing: It is highly unlikely that LeMay attended the autopsy for still another reason:  LeMay's  presence surely would have been noted in the FBI report written by SA's James Sibert & Francis O'Neill, who kept a list of who attended the autopsy.

Regarding LeMay's possible foreknowledge. Like you, "I don't know."  DSL

Have you read Doug Horne's research on LeMay's possible presence at the autopsy? 

O'Connor may not have realized who LeMay was or why his presence was important, so I don't think it is necessarily discrediting that he didn't mention this until later. And I'm not certain I would insist that Sibert and O'Neill's list of attendees is complete. 

Anyway, if it turns out that LeMay was not at the autopsy, so be it, but I'd be curious to get your take on Horne's research on the issue.

7 hours ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

What do you say to a guy, who had such titanic aspirations for complete victory in Vietnam and despite 50 years of history to learn from, still is convinced as to the possibility everything could have gone completely right, and now 50 years later seems to have massive regret?

Sandy's answer to this I thought was correct. But i recall the average response to the buildup in Viet Nam was "where's Viet Nam?"

Paul::Do you think there would be military victory possible anywhere in the world now? Afghanistan? Ukraine? Taiwan?

This is a great question, because IMO, it doesn't seem  that you've learned much in the last 50 years, Michael..

But to your general outlook that we could have made a great difference for many years to come. I do think there were more complete, lasting  victories during WW2 , because as time went on, the stakes got greater, and so much was invested that the losers just had to be bombed into complete submission, and by that point the parties were so exhausted with war, they were ready to carry on with the new world.

But even as early as the Korean War. It started becoming obvious complete victory was an illusion.

Having lived through it, but apart from living through it,  I think the Vietnam war was a terrible mistake, ending in great loss of life and displacement for generations to come..

I remember we spent a lot of time here reviewing Ken Burn's "Viet Nam" and I didn't find some of the personal reviews here that accurate and found some people sort of skewing info to their personal narrative. But I'm probably not presupposed to do much research on it,so who am I to say?  Similarly in your case I'm not presupposed  to spend time taking book tips to become more informed about how we could have won the Vietnam War.  Because in this situation, it is just one author against another author and what your outlook is.

But I commend that you do, Michael, you've obviously spent so much time on this subject. Despite it obviously being a topic of some consternation for you. If I may ask, What's your stake here? Does your family have a military background? Did you have to contend with a draft?or was this before your time? Why such interest?

Thanks

Kirk,

I was not of draft age during the Vietnam War, but I had friends whose older brothers were drafted. My family does not have a military background, but I was in the U.S. Army for 21 years. The Vietnam War has been a research interest of mine for over 20 years.

When I went through Army basic training, I had no views about the Vietnam War. A number of my drill sergeants had served in Vietnam. It made an impression on me when all of them said that the war was an honorable endeavor and that they were proud of their service in it. 

I do not believe the war was a terrible mistake. I believe it was a valid, noble effort to keep 18 million people from falling under communist tyranny. I believe it was every bit as valid and noble as our effort to keep South Korea free. I believe the evidence is undeniable that the Vietnam War was entirely winnable. 

I think it is sad and repulsive that so many American liberals minimize or deny the brutality and terror that North Vietnam unleashed on the South Vietnamese after the war. I suspect they do this because they don't want to acknowledge the terrible consequences of the betrayal of South Vietnam.

I find it especially sad to see American liberals repeating communist talking points about the Geneva Accords, about who violated those accords more severely, about who the aggressor was and who the victim was, and about key events during the war. I find that, virtually without exception, liberals who repeat those talking points are unaware of what we have learned from released North Vietnamese archives and from the writings of former North Vietnamese and Vietcong officials and officers. 

5 hours ago, David Lifton said:

Michael: 

I agree that LeMay had the mentality you describe.  Furthermore -- and on that score-- wasn't there an episode with JFK where-- rejecting some advice offered by LeMay- JFK left his presence and (thoroughly exasperated) remarked, "And they call us the civilized world." (Source, A M Schlesinger, I think).  The problem -- i.e., "my problem" --with including LeMay in a plot (or in  "the" plot) is that I don't see any specific role for him to play; no specific function for him to fulfill.

DSL

9/5/22 - 10:40 AM PDT

Yes, as I said, I don't know if LeMay was one of the plotters or if he just knew about it, or if he didn't even know about it. I don't know. I do find it very odd that he went to the trouble of attending the autopsy. 

13 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

MG-

Ben, let me first address something James said in the reply after yours:

General Giap claimed Khe Sanh was never of particular importance to the North Vietnamese. 

So now you're relying on a murderous communist thug like Giap? If Khe Sanh was "never of particular importance" to the NVese, why did Giap commit 40,000 troops to it and divert large numbers of artillery pieces that would be sorely missed during the Tet Offensive? (Some put the number of Giap's forces at closer to 100,000). If you had bothered to read the articles I linked, you would have read a refutation of the NVese claim that they didn't really care about Khe Sanh.

In fact, the NVese also later claimed that they were not even trying to take the base but were merely trying to tie down American forces there, a laughable claim given the number of suicidal ground assaults they launched against the base.

Ben, now to your reply:

Yes, I watched the film I posted, that's why I posted it 

But you forgot to mention that the film said we won a resounding victory at Khe Sanh, and that when we counterattacked and pursued them, they were forced to leave behind huge amounts of war material, something they usually never did. 

The film, produced by the US Marines, describes Khe Sanh as under constant fire, so much so supplies were air-dropped. 

No, it does not. It includes several segments that show periods when Khe Sanh was not under fire. Will you ever watch the two-part AIM documentary Television's Vietnam, which includes a long segment on Khe Sanh? It includes interviews with soldiers who were at Khe Sanh during the battle. They were able to take leave and come back. Journalists were able to fly in and out. We had complete control of the air over Khe Sanh. Etc., etc., etc.

The NVese fired a huge amount of shells at Khe Sanh. Yes, certainly, there were times when the shelling made the air strip "hot" and forced our troops to take cover, but there were also plenty of times when firing was minimal or non-existent. There were frequent long breaks in the shelling because we had destroyed so many NVese artillery pieces and it took time for them to bring in more artillery pieces. And, as mentioned earlier, many of their shells were off target and landed too far away to do any damage at all, because they were forced to fire from less-than-optimal ranges.

I should add that we purposely allowed Giap to surround Khe Sanh. This was a conscious strategy to bait him into committing a large force to try to take the base:

Khe Sanh was a purposely orchestrated event by General William C. Westmorland
designed as bait to entice General Vo Nguyen Giap into a classic set-piece battle in an effort to destroy his army. (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1019240.pdf, p. 4)

Oh, and the film was not made by the Marines but by the Air Force. If you watch the film, the opening credits state that it was made by the Air Force (0:01 to 0:06 in the film).

Here is a very good Marine Corps video on the battle of Khe Sanh: Click Here.

In 1967, the NV/VC were routed, and retreated---but came back.

The battle occurred in 1968. The NVese hastily fled when we launched a ground counterattack.

Oh, yes, the NVese came back, after they saw that we were leaving, and they were careful to keep their distance when they came back, and they came back in much smaller numbers than they had during the battle.

Also, after the ammo dump got hit, our troops dug a huge complex underground to house the new ammo dump, a hospital, etc., and key parts of the base were connected by a series of tunnels and deep trenches. This was one reason that our casualties were so low.

To appreciate the ineffectiveness of the NVese artillery, we should consider the number of flights--both fixed-wing and helicopter--and the amount of supplies they delivered during the battle:

Throughout the siege, the smaller C-123s and C-7s landed on the airstrip to deliver their supplies and evacuate the wounded. All told, 12,430 tons of supplies were delivered and 4,250 passengers transported by USAF aircraft in 1061 sorties. In addition to these numbers, Marine helicopters transported 14,562 passengers and 4,661 tons of cargo keeping the overlooking hilltops in Marine’s hands.(https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1019240.pdf, p. 7)

The final chapter, not in the contemporary film, is Marines abandoning the base under gunfire. 

This is the same distortion that North Vietnam and our news media peddled. If you want to call the long-range shelling that the NVese did while we were dismantling the base after we had chased their forces out of the area--if you want to call that "abandoning the base under gunfire," that's your prerogative. Strictly technically speaking it's accurate, but it's also misleading.

Even after the bulk of our forces were gone and we had only a small force on Hill 689, the NVese did not dare launch any major attacks but only minor harassing attacks. Why do you suppose that was?

Moreover, our forces continued to patrol the entire Khe Sanh plateau for over a year after we dismantled the base. Also, later that year, in October, we reoccupied the area for two weeks with South Vietnamese forces, and they encountered only minimal opposition. Now, why do you suppose that was?

But that's not all. The Marines continued to hold Hill 950 overlooking the Khe Sanh plateau until September 1969. What happened when the NVese launched a major assault on the hill? Well, they never did that. Why do you suppose that was?

Khe Sanh is in many ways a small version of the whole war---the insanity, with Westmoreland suggesting nuclear arms were needed to secure Khe Sanh, which was absolutely vital to the war effort.

More distortion. Westmoreland never said nukes were needed to secure Khe Sanh. You are talking about Westmoreland's internal statement that IF the situation at Khe Sanh or near the DMZ severely deteriorated, low-yield nukes "might" need to be used. But the situation never even got close to that point.

And I suspect that this will shock you, but dropping one or two low-yield nukes around Khe Sanh would not have been the end of the planet. The blast radius of the low-yield nukes at the time was about 8,000 feet, and the worst destruction would have occurred within about 4,000 feet of the center of the explosion, gradually and substantially tapering off from that point. I am not suggesting that we should have done this, but I am saying that it was not a crazy, reckless option when talking about areas that were miles away from any sizable populations.

Then the US retreating from the Khe Sanh base later.   

Okay, I'm guessing you didn't bother to read any of the articles I linked, right? We did not "retreat" from Khe Sanh. In military terminology, our withdrawal from Khe Sanh was not a "retreat." We left Khe Sanh because the NVese changed their tactics in the area after incurring such a terrible slaughter when they tried ground assaults. Plus, we no longer needed a fixed base such as Khe Sanh because we now had enough helicopters in the area to carry out mobile operations in the region. And, I repeat that we continued to patrol the entire Khe Sanh plateau for over a year after dismantling the base, and that we held Hill 950 until September 1969 for recon purposes because the hill provided a view of the entire plateau.

Another reason that we closed the base--actually, the main reason we did so--was that General Abrams had taken over command of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and closing the base was part of his successful Vietnamization strategy. Westmoreland recommended maintaining the base, but Abrams did not believe in Westmoreland's search-and-destroy approach. Therefore, he saw no need to maintain a base that was far removed from population and whose function could be done without maintaining it.

The huge US military advantage, incredible losses for the other side, but ultimate defeat. 

That was the warped spin put out by the communists, our news media, and our anti-war movement. How was Khe Sanh a "defeat" when we continued to patrol the entire plateau at will and held a key observation point overlooking the plateau for over a year after slaughtering Giap's forces when they tried to take the base?

"American commanders considered the defense of Khe Sanh a success, but shortly after the siege was lifted, the decision was made to dismantle the base rather than risk similar battles in the future. On 19 June 1968, the evacuation and destruction of KSCB began. Amid heavy shelling, the Marines attempted to salvage what they could before destroying what remained as they were evacuated."---Wikipedia

Of course Wikipedia repeats the leftist line on Khe Sanh. "Amid heavy shelling"? Well, amid heavy long-range and ineffective shelling. This was more harassing fire than anything else; it did not impede our dismantling and withdrawal operations. And, incidentally, that "heavy shelling" was intermittent because Giap had to keep moving his artillery periodically to avoid the kinds of devastating air attacks he had suffered during the battle. 

As for the claim that we did not want to "risk similar battles in the future," this was a PR-based statement because of the media-hyped negative perception of an American base being surrounded and cut off, even though we purposely allowed the base to be surrounded, and even though we inflicted horrendous losses on the enemy. In actuality, our commanders would have been only too happy to have had "similar battles in the future" where we baited the NVese to surround a position and then decimated their forces with air and artillery attacks and forced them to flee so quickly that they left behind massive war supplies. 

One of the reasons we withdrew from and dismantled the Khe Sanh base was that we realized that Giap was not going to be dumb enough to try a ground assault on the base again. But liberal sources never mention this; instead, they prefer, for some reason, to repeat communist talking points about Khe Sanh. Liberal sources also never mention that we continued to patrol the entire Khe Sanh plateau and held a key observation point for over a year after the battle.

Kissinger summed it up, when he said the problem with guerrilla warfare is the bad guys never do what you want them to. They fade when weak, they attack where vulnerable. 

Kissinger's comment has nothing to do with Khe Sanh. Giap's assault on Khe Sanh was not "guerilla warfare" but a traditional set-piece attack.

Much as I loathe, detest and revile communist dictatorships (including the one in Beijing toasted by US multinationals, academic and financial elites). . . .

I certainly agree with you on this point, but a few folks argue that brutal communist regimes are actually not all that bad if they have KFC, Domino's, McDonald's, and have schools of banking and finance.

what can you say about the NV/VC soldiers? Do you suppose they showed a lot of determination? 

Actually, NV/VC soldiers surrendered whenever they had the chance to do so, i.e., if they could surrender without being shot by their officers while trying to escape. You should read the accounts of former NV/VC soldiers about the draconian discipline imposed on them by their officers. During the war, over 200,000 NV/VC soldiers surrendered and became POWs.

In addition, it is worth noting that during the battle of Khe Sanh, NVese soldiers deserted in large numbers. Documents captured when we overran Giap's positions revealed that his desertion rate was an astounding 20-25%. This is mentioned in the Marine Corps documentary on Khe Sanh.

If the US ultimately loses in Khe Sanh...what does that tell you? If US soldiers (understandably) just want to serve their tour and get out, what does that tell you? If Khe Sanh is a US victory....

It is Orwellian spin to say that we "lost" at Khe Sanh. If you were to get 10 military experts in a room and describe the events at Khe Sanh as a hypothetical scenario, I'd bet good money that every one of them would say that the force that occupied the base, that decimated the attackers, that forced the attackers to flee, and that continued to do recon patrols in the area at will was the force that won.

As for the argument about U.S. soldiers, that is a sad head-shaker. Of course, of course, of course, most of our soldiers just wanted to serve their tour and get out. The same was true of our soldiers in the Civil War, in World War II, and in the Korean War. Most soldiers in any war, especially the draftees, do not want to be in a combat zone any longer than required, and naturally they are anxious to get back to their civilian lives. This universal reality does not change the fact that Khe Sanh was a resounding defeat for the North Vietnamese. 

3 hours ago, Gerry Down said:

This is the first time i've heard of the N a z i claims. But Oswalds pro communist beliefs are not something we depend on Thornley to tell us about. LHOs own diary talks about his communist leanings. He even wrote to the CPUSA in March 1963 looking to join. 

I think the evidence indicates that Oswald's expressions of communist/Marxist leanings were part of his cover story. We have a number of accounts from others who knew him in which he was heard attacking communism/Marxism, defending democracy, and saying capitalism was better than socialism. And there's the speech that Oswald gave at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, in which he expressed very non-communist/Marxist views, strongly criticized the Soviet Union, and said capitalism, though flawed, was better than socialism. He also gave a conservative-leaning speech in Louisiana.

Lee Oswald: Speech at Spring Hill College in Alabama : The JFK Assassination (22november1963.org.uk)

As Lamar Waldron notes, it is very interesting, and perhaps revealing, that Oswald never tried to contact any local communist or pro-Castro organizations. He would write letters to a national HQ but made no effort to contact local chapters.

10 hours ago, Gerry Down said:

Is the point here that Posner tried to suggest that McClellend was wrong about the large wound on the back of the head using Dr. Perry, even though in other testimony Dr. Perry concurred there was indeed a large hole there?

I have not read this section of Case Closed in a while so I'm not sure of the full context of this part of the book.

Posner repeatedly deceives. His treatment of McClelland and the large head wound is just one of numerous examples of what appears to be intentional deception.

One glaring example of Posner's deception is his use of Kerry Thornley to attack Oswald. As part of his effort to portray Oswald as a glory-seeking, lackluster, Marxist Marine, Posner uses Thornley's unflattering testimony about Oswald. But Posner never tells his readers that Thornley claimed that he was a N a z i breeding experiment, that a bugging device was planted on him at birth so that N a z i cultists could monitor him as he grew up, and that Oswald was a N a z i breeding experiment too (for more on Thornley, see Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes, New York: Dell Publishing, pp. 18-19).

Posner rejects numerous pro-conspiracy witnesses who had infinitely fewer and less severe credibility issues, but he uses a basket case like Thornley to attack Oswald and never tells his readers about Thornley's nutty beliefs.

8 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

 

Boy, this incredible short film was produced not by leftists, but by the US Marine Corp, when Khe Sanh was Khe Sanh, and the mission was being lionized not demonized. The short film concludes that Khe Sanh is a US victory.

But who can watch this film and not wonder how on earth the US expected to win the VW? 

With every intel and material advantage, the US forces bombed enough around Khe Sanh to make you wonder if any bugs or shrubs were left alive, let alone people. 

Yet the Marine Corp film moderator informs viewers that soldiers in Khe Sanh are under constant fire. Planes cannot land. 

Westmoreland repeatedly described Khe Sanh as vital.

Even vital enough to use nukes: 

Journalist Richard Ehrlich writes that according to the report, "in late January, General Westmoreland had warned that if the situation near the DMZ and at Khe Sanh worsened drastically, nuclear or chemical weapons might have to be used." The report continues to state, "this prompted Air Force chief of staff, General John McConnell, to press, although unsuccessfully, for JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) authority to request Pacific Command to prepare a plan for using low-yield nuclear weapons to prevent a catastrophic loss of the U.S. Marine base."--Wikipedia.

Westmoreland put that in a book he wrote, as well. 

In the end, the US ended up withdrawing from Khe Sanh, still under gunfire, and saying that Khe Sanh was not that important anyway. 

It may be that Giap outsmarted the American generals, and his troops certainly outlasted US troops. 

If US soldiers were brave, then how to describe the NV and Viet Cong? 

Some wars are better avoided. 

WHAT???!!! This is utterly erroneous. Good grief, we decimated Giap's forces at Khe Sanh, and they eventually were forced to flee in such haste that they left behind huge amounts of war material, something they had never done before. 

Did you even watch the video that you linked? I ask because the video documents--and says--that Khe Sanh was an American victory, a resounding one.

I'm genuinely baffled as to how you could say that the video you linked indicates the war was unwinnable or that we lost the battle of Khe Sanh. Among other things, the video notes that our air supply operations to the base were never cut--"the air bridge is never cut" (starting at about 3:10 in the video). The video also points out that we were able to maintain continuous C-130 surveillance flights over Khe Sanh to direct attacks on the North Vietnamese forces (starting at about 10:15 in the video).

The video also notes that toward the end of the battle we actually attacked the North Vietnamese and pursued them, and that when we overran their base "the extent of the communist defeat becomes more apparent"--partly because they left behind huge amounts of war material (starting at about 13:15 in the video).

I'm guessing that you still haven't bothered to watch the two-part AIM documentary on the Vietnam War. The AIM documentary has a long segment on Khe Sanh that debunks the misleading reporting that our news media did on the battle at the time. The media's dishonest, Orwellian spin on the battle is another sad example of our news media reporting an American victory as a defeat. 

Let's get some facts straight about Khe Sanh:

First off, we withdrew from Khe Sanh only after we devastated the North Vietnamese and forced them to flee.  Good grief, Giap's forces lost over 50% of their troops in the battle. One NVese regiment lost 75% of its soldiers.

The air strip at Khe Sanh remained operational through the battle. During the months-long battle, the North Vietnamese managed to shoot down only four of our planes! Yes, just four. We continued to supply Khe Sanh by air at will and had no trouble air-evacuating our wounded. Moreover, unlike the French at Dien Bien Phu, we always maintained control of the high ground around Khe Sanh, which gave us a crucial advantage because we had the entire area surrounding the base ranged for artillery.

Not only did we control all the high ground and have the area around the base ranged for artillery, but we had additional--and tremendous--long-range artillery support from Army bases that were far out of range of Giap's artillery. The video that you linked talks about this fact as well. 

The North Vietnamese could never even get close enough to launch a ground assault ala Dien Bien Phu because of our air raids and artillery. There was never any hand-to-hand fighting at Khe Sanh because the NVese forces could never get that close. 

And because we controlled the high ground, the NV had to fire their artillery from long ranges. The only significant hit they ever scored was when one of their shells hit the ammo dump. Of course, our news media showed endless clips of the ammo dump exploding and smoking, usually without explaining the rest of the story, such as the fact that this was a one-off success and that their artillery was ineffective the vast majority of the time.

No, Giap did not outsmart us. Our commanders at Khe Sanh outsmarted him. They anticipated nearly his every move, and as a result were able to inflict horrendous damage on his forces.

Also, our forces were not "constantly under fire" at Khe Sanh. There were plenty of lulls in the action, partly because it took the NVese troops time to recover from each disastrous assault they launched. Again, the NVese forces lost over half of their manpower because they got slaughtered so badly every time they would pop up and attack us and because of our air raids and artillery barrages. There were also lulls in the NVese artillery bombardments, and many of their rounds landed too far away to harm anyone.

We know from North Vietnamese sources that our air raids around Khe Sanh were so effective against Giap's supply lines that his troops were nearly starving. NVese soldiers who were captured at the time said the same thing. The NVese POWs reported that there were several days when they had no food whatsoever, and that their rations had been cut to near-starvation levels.

Another revealing fact is that because of our counterattack and pursuit, Giap's forces were forced to flee so hurriedly that, as mentioned, they left behind huge amounts of war material. This is revealing because the NVese were known for never leaving anything behind when they withdrew. 

And when I say that Giap's forces left behind "huge amounts" of war material, I mean really huge. Specifically, they abandoned 182 rockets and mortars, 260,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, 13,000 rounds of larger-caliber ammunition, and 8,700 hand grenades and mines.

If you are interested in reading the other side of the story, here are some articles you should read:

Right Marine at the Right Place | Naval History Magazine - April 2021 Volume 35, Number 2 (usni.org)

Airpower at Khe Sanh - Air Force Magazine

AIR POWER & THE FIGHT FOR KHE SANH (defense.gov)

Dr. Peters himself said in a 1997 interview that the large head wound was "in the occipital parietal on the right side of the head" (Item 04.pdf (hood.edu).

JFK was on the operating table in the trauma room for at least 20 minutes. In his 1997 interview, Peters said McClelland was standing next to Dr. Kemp Clark, the neurosurgeon, on JFK's left side. Dr. Clark "examined" JFK's head and saw the same wound that McClelland described, so Clark would have had to have moved in order to examine the head. McClelland may have moved around at times as well. He may not have stayed on the president's left side the entire time. 

Plus, once the doctors gave up trying to save Kennedy, McClelland would have surely moved around and would have had had ample opportunity to view the large head wound. 

Dr. Perry also said the large wound was in the "right occipital-parietal area" (Warren Commission, Volume VI: Dr. Malcolm Oliver Perry (history-matters.com).

Thus, McClelland described the same wound--the large right occipital-parietal wound--that Peters and Perry described. So I don't see this as a major issue. 

5 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Right. But nowhere does it promise anything beyond 1965!

 

But the statements that I cited straight from NSAM 263 alone prove that there was no fixed, unalterable plan to totally disengage from South Vietnam regardless of the situation on the ground. Of course it doesn't promise anything beyond 1965, because the "objective" was to have "the bulk" of U.S. forces out of Vietnam by the end of 1965--but, again, this was clearly, indisputably made conditional on the situation. IF South Vietnam's armed forces were enlarged enough and able to defend the country on their own, then and only then would the end-of-1965 objective be able to be met. 

There was no indication that JFK held the view that "we are getting out of South Vietnam by the end of 1965 no matter what, regardless of the situation on the ground." There was not even a hint of any such position. On the contrary, NSAM 263 argues strongly against that view, and JFK made it very clear in numerous other statements that he was determined to keep South Vietnam from falling to the communists.

I don't think you folks realize how bad it sounds to many Americans when you talk as though it would have been a great and wise act of statesmanship if JFK had handed over 18 million South Vietnamese to communist tyranny after he was reelected. What makes this position especially unfortunate is that JFK had no such intention. You are doing a disservice to his memory and are misrepresenting his intention when you claim that he would have abandoned South Vietnam regardless of the situation and the consequences.

Have you or any of those who agree with you bothered to watch Dr. Selverstone's 2016 video yet? 

2 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

Michael, Please read the postscript more carefully. The America First material is sound and well sourced. That it offends your own political bias hardly constitutes factual inaccuracy.  

Regarding the Amerasia Spy Case: We cite primary source material including the Dictionary of American History and the highly disenchanted former Communist Freda Utley, author of the The Dream We Lost in which she expresses disgust with the system and with the Soviet Union. Ultley also assisted Joseph McCarthy compile his lists of Communist suspects.  

What I find interesting in your consistent approach is that instead of informing your peers of the significance of the Amerasia Case, and why it might be a factor in understanding this investigation, you opt to deflect by reviewing the material through what I believe is a fairly transparent political bias.

For your edification, the Coup manuscript is copyrighted as a joint work manuscript; perhaps you might read up on the definition. However, to defuse any suggestion that Hank fell short of expectations, I am the author of the section; I did the research, Hank read the final draft, and we both agreed it was revelatory and belonged in the book.  

It was revelatory because it identifies Archbold van Beuren as having been johnny on the spot at the Amerasia office.  van Beuren was the Chief of Security for William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the OSS.  

Donovan and Dulles established the World Commerce Corporation and recruited SS Otto Skorzeny (and his wife Ilse) to run a number of operations under that banner from their perch in Madrid after the war. To suggest van Beuren didn't meet Otto Skorzeny seems patently absurd.

Before the outbreak of WWII, Archbold van Beuren had co-founded the highly popular NY based Cue Magazine. Following his service in the OSS directly under Donovan, he returned to Cue and Previews Inc., the global real estate firm he and his partners had created. Ilse Skorzeny was then brought on board Previews — a gig which served her very well over the years. She was able to navigate International travel fairly unimpeded. Not only did she profit as a r.e. agent, she pursued the interests of Otto — whose travel was somewhat limited after the Dachau trial! — with very little, if any interference. Previews Inc. was her cover.  The president of Previews used the Adolphus Hotel as an adjunct office — networking with Dallas powerbrokers —until the firm opened an office in the Oak Lawn neighborhood in the spring of 1963, despite already having a strong presence in the region near the campus of TCU in Fort Worth. 

Pierre Lafitte notes in his datebook the NYC address of van Beuren's Previews, Inc. in context of key meetings in 1963. He also notes that Ilse Skorzeny dined with her "uncle" Hjalmar Schacht, 'Hitler's Favorite Banker,' at the Old Warsaw in Oak Lawn the second week of November 1963, just blocks from her new office while in town.

Surely you recognize the significance and accept that the aforementioned — regardless of your interpretation of the actual Amerasia incident  — was a critical aspect of Hank's investigation. He certainly did.  

I don't think your attacks on America First are sound or well sourced. Ditto for your sweeping, tar-brush attacks on Trump supporters. Why, why, why include material in your book that is going to turn off and alienate a large chunk of your potential audience? Why imply that one cannot really care about JFK's death if one believes in America First and supports Trump? 

Your conclusion that the Amerasia spy case was much ado about nothing is contradicted by very strong evidence. Citing the fact that Truman's Justice Department swept the matter under the rug is not at all convincing. 

Just FYI, when I first reviewed CID on Amazon, I gave it five stars. At that point, I was 2/3 of the way through the book and had not encountered the large amount of liberal preaching that comes in the last third of the book. I was so surprised and disappointed by the liberal preaching that reduced my rating to one star, although I still said that the book is a very important and worthwhile work. 

I would love to believe Judyth Baker's story. I read Haslam's book Dr. Mary's Monkey, and I read McAdams' article on her. My only big objection to her account is her claim that when Oswald went to Mexico City, he was carrying a biological weapon to kill Castro. That strikes me as far-fetched. Beyond that, her account just strikes me as too pat, as too good to be true. I do not categorically reject it as impossible, but I am skeptical of it.