Oliver Stone's New JFK Documentaries and the Vietnam War

[Kirk Gallaway]

Noted Sandy: Sorry. I couldn't highlight and erase your  name, so I just put in Michael's.

[James Wilkinson]

On 9/6/2022 at 12:42 PM, James DiEugenio said:

To Draper, it was the equivalent to the mythology the Nazis had created  after WW I: Germany did not really lose the war, it was stabbed in the back by certain politicians and high officials in the military.

I was so glad to see this reference, because its parallels with Michael's regurgitation of the Lewy/Podhoretz lost-cause Vietnam variation aren't coincidental.

It's in the nature of warfare that the retreating side's finger-pointing will include blaming the architects. Only where some elements rightly blame the war planners for making war in the first place, other more short-sighted factions will invariably limit their criticisms to tactics and strategy -- ANYTHING but the overall mission, let alone the true agendas of the special interests behind it all.

Recognizing this universal impulse doesn't automatically negate all such arguments, of course, but it should make one suspicious of such inevitable bellyaching wherever its balmy revisionisms invariably surface. And our suspicions are entirely justified in this Vietnam debate (just as they were during the last Weimar Republic's Great War blame-shift) because not only does the overwhelming weight of the evidence as cited argue against having propped up S. Vietnam, but Michael's pro-war argumentation resorts to Aristotlean logical fallacies when all else fails.

Things like: They violated international law more than we did.

Or: Your arguments are much less popular with people than you seem to think.

That's just a sample, but I could go on. Logical fallacies are debate-losers, because they expose pseudo-arguments gussied up in the guise of appealing rhetoric.

Michael's Operation Linebacker argument is straight out of Craig Roberts' pro-conspiracy Kill Zone book from '94. I'm assuming you've read that one, Michael, am I right? If so, would you say he's right about everything right up to when he starts pushing Rothschild conspiracies in chapter 19... or do you think he's onto something with that too?

 

Edited September 8, 2022 by James Wilkinson

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks James. 

I am glad someone recognized how all this started, with Lewy and Podhoretz, and that whole stab in the back concept.

I wish there was a way to link to Draper's decimation of Podhortez.  It was powerful.

As I recall, his main point was that the USA had turned a colonial war into a civil war by dividing up the country.  

[Michael Griffith]

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. 

 

[James Wilkinson]

You left out the second part of your argument, Michael, that the millions of Indochinese peasants that U.S. forces slaughtered simply weren't enough, that maybe a million or two more deaths would have been justified.

It's curious that you prefer to leave this part as unstated and as implied as possible.

That doesn't even get into the counterargument that Vietnam's repressive regime was greatly exacerbated by the U.S. and French massive bombings of their country's people and infrastructure -- similar to the Khmer Rouge's rise and brutality.

Though this may be a counterfactual argument of sorts, it's also a counterfactual argument -- arguably a far more shaky one -- to assert that there was no such causal relationship. Especially given the geopolitical maxim that external threats give nations greater popular support for internally repressive policies.

To be clear, I'm discussing predictable realpolitik outcomes here, not justifications.

These events do not occur in vacuums.

Edited September 8, 2022 by James Wilkinson

[Michael Griffith]

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))

 

[James Wilkinson]

You've lost the debate if you refuse to engage with our counterarguments and instead simply continue defaulting to repeating summaries of Vietnam's post-war human rights violations, like a chatbot with a limited script. You're also ignoring direct questions about whether you've read Kill Zone and subscribe to his Rothschild conspiracy theories.

And you can't even pull a Madeleine Albright and state your argument's untenable implication, that causing the deaths of millions of noncombatants is morally justified.

How could any of the atrocities you've cited be considered more heinous than slaughtering and bombing MILLIONS of people? Is it simply easier to dismiss or conflate such a figure with your own stats because it's so large as to be indistinguishable from fractions of it that are orders of magnitude less? Are you equating killing with other forms of repression?

To persist in debating a person over the morality of slaughtering millions of men, women, and children is to lose some of our own humanity, by further legitimizing such a reprehensible question that should be rightly dismissed on prima facie basis. Dropping bombs on children and babies will always be a monstrous act that no trolley problem thought exercise can ever obfuscate. That this even needs to be asserted is an indictment of our society.

With your evidence shown to be selective and your reasoning unsound. it appears that all you have left is the same endless loop of repetitive emotional appeals echoing out into the ether....

Edited September 10, 2022 by James Wilkinson

[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.

 

[James DiEugenio]

Michael;

As Draper so eloquently stated in his decimation of Podhoretz--which the NY Times mentioned in Draper's obituary-- there is no defense or excuse for what America did in Vietnam.  Especially since there were voices in the government urging Foster Dulles and Ike not to intervene, like Wilson the secretary of defense, and Heath the ambassador. Plus the Collins mission strongly disagreed with the selection of DIem, since Collins felt he was 1.) incompetent, 2.) too reliant on his brothers, and 3.) tended to be despotic. Here you have a guy with a suit on, speaks perfect French and is a Catholic.  And he is supposed to lead an artificial country created out of whole cloth against Ho Chi Minh?  Who had just defeated the French Empire after an eight year war.

I mean please.

But Foster Dulles sold him to America, and early on  Mansfield, Kennedy, and Humphrey all thought, well maybe he can make it.  And Diem came here for a four week visit in 1957, visiting major cities from Washington to Hawaii.

Little could they have known that DIem was taking 5,000 prisoners a month, and executing 135 per month.  Many of them by guillotine. (See the book by David Anderson, Trapped by Success.)

The worst part of the Dulles decision is that there were others who would have been much better than DIem.  These men believed you could not inspire loyalty by mass arrests and executions.  Or a police force trained out of Michigan State.

So Dulles compounded a strategic mistake, creating this ersatz country, with a tactical one in picking the wrong guy.  Because of this, the Viet Minh were not going to give up.  So France's war, now became America's war.

I agree with Mr. Wilkinson, these colossal errors made it all worse later on, after America realized--after 7 million tons of bombs, and millions dead in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos--that, as Kissinger said, we should have never been there.

Kissinger can admit that and yet Michael cannot?

 

Edited September 12, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Joseph McBride]

Graham Greene, in his 1955 novel THE QUIET AMERICAN, tried to alert

the world about the US taking

over the failed French war in Indochina (which was half

paid for by the US). 

[Joseph McBride]

William H. Sullivan's eye-opening admission in 1972

about why the US was still fighting the Vietnam War caused a brief

stir when I reported it for The Wisconsin State

Journal and it was sent around the world by the AP.

The news was eclipsed by his revelation in my coverage of that same

speech on the University of Wisconsin, Madison, campus that the Paris peace

talks were about to resume. Sullivan tried

to deny his revelation about the peace talks and his unusually candid admission about the war. I produced my notes showing that he said what I reported.  Then he tried

to claim the event and his speech had been

off the record. I produced the letter from

the university group inviting our newspaper to

cover the speech.

 

From my recent book POLITICAL TRUTH: THE MEDIA

AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY:

 

[In his 1976 book, THE YANKEE AND COWBOY WAR: CONSPIRACIES FROM DALLAS TO WATERGATE AND BEYOND, Carl] Oglesby further interprets an earlier coup, President Johnson’s forced “abdication” in 1968, as the outcome of the internal power struggle between the “Cowboy” faction that LBJ represented and the Eastern “Yankee” elite. Oglesby writes that Johnson’s grudging agreement not to seek another term as president, “as well as his switch to a negotiated settlement line on Vietnam,” was a “bloodless power play.” The North Vietnamese Tet Offensive of January 1968 and the international Gold Crisis that resulted from the weakening of the U.S. economic position by the war caused Johnson to be forced out of power by his “Wise Men,” the group of senior leaders who regularly advised him on policy as a kind of shadow government (the epitome of what’s meant by “deep politics”). Drawn largely from the leadership of the Eastern establishment, they included Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge, Douglas Dillon, and George Ball. On March 25, 1968, they told Johnson the war could not be won the way he was pursuing it and that he could not run for another term as president.

 

Johnson surprised the nation by announcing “his” decision on television six days later. He was bitter about it and, according to the chief American correspondent of the Sunday Times of London, Henry Brandon, Johnson told him later that year, “The only difference between Kennedy’s assassination and mine is that mine was a live one, which makes it all a little more torturing.” Oglesby interprets that forced abdication as a Yankee power play by the Wise Men. He writes that they wanted to “break off [from the Cowboys] a war believed to be unwinnable except through an internal police state, both sides fighting for control of the levers of military and state-police power through control of the presidency. Johnson’s Ides of March was a less bloody Dallas, but it was a Dallas just the same: it came of a concerted effort of conspirators to install a new national policy by clandestine means. Its main difference from Dallas is that it finally did not succeed.”

 

That the ouster from office of Kennedy’s successor resulted in America eventually losing the war in Vietnam was another tragic historical irony. After Nixon’s ascension in place of Johnson, the new president wound down the war diplomatically but with excruciating slowness while expanding the war enormously in terms of American firepower. That devastating escalation was partly made possible by Nixon’s canny decision to end the draft, which helped reduce domestic dissent. His maddening gradualism in bringing the war to the conclusion he had promised in his 1968 campaign but did not deliver during his tenure in office was the subject of a question put to a member of his administration at an event I covered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1972, as a reporter for The Wisconsin State Journal.

 

Henry Kissinger’s deputy William H. Sullivan (who later was serving as the U.S. ambassador to Iran when the hostage crisis erupted in 1979) was asked at that event why the U.S. was still in Vietnam. He answered that it was because the U.S. needed to control the oil in the South China Sea. That kind of candid public revelation about realpolitik and the economic causations of war is most unusual among government officials. What I reported was picked up by the Associated Press and went around the world on its wire, although it was eclipsed by another revelation I reported from the same event, Sullivan’s comment that the Paris peace talks soon would be resuming. Following the stir both statements caused, Sullivan claimed he had not made them. I produced my notes to prove that he had. Then it was claimed that Sullivan’s speech to a university organization had been off-the-record. I produced a letter from that organization inviting our newspaper to cover his appearance on campus. Studies of the Vietnam War rarely discuss the importance of oil in motivating the long U.S. presence there.

 

Revisionist (i.e., truthful) historians such as Oglesby and [Peter Dale] Scott attempt to make sense of these often-hidden aspects of modern American history. They analyze them as part of the workings of the deep state, a line of inquiry that helps clarify the seemingly mad spectacle of American foreign policy from Watergate and Vietnam and continuing through all the internal battles and external crises that have followed. That history takes us through the terms of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and careens catastrophically from 9/11 to the attempted Trump Coup. The parade of nearly constant destructive upheavals and calamities our country has undergone since the end of World War II demonstrates the continuing validity of Scott’s 1993 thesis about the regularity of “perceived threats” in modern American history and how those threats have been resolved through “collusive secrecy and law-breaking” and how they “deserve to be regarded as periodic readjustments of the open political system in which we live.” Even though the Cold War ended in 1991, such upheavals and readjustments, often carried out by violent means, remain the norm in the conduct of American foreign policy and the central role the military-industrial complex plays in our national life. By studying the functioning of the deep state that way, Scott writes, “we should look within, not outside, the political status quo, if we hope to understand the [Kennedy] assassination.”

 

Edited September 11, 2022 by Joseph McBride

[James DiEugenio]

Joe:

Was Alden Pyle in Greene's novel based on Lansdale?  I have heard that more than once.

I have not seen the Michael Caine version of the book, have you?  I heard it is good.

Sullivan was one of the guys who tried to talk Kennedy out of issuing his withdrawal order, and actually taking it out of the report.  

Edited September 11, 2022 by James DiEugenio

[Joseph McBride]

Yes, Pyle was supposed to have been based on Lansdale. Greene

was once asked how his novels could seemingly predict future

crises. He said it was because he would read the New York Times

carefully each day. He would not read every story but would read

all of the first three pages or so and at least the headlines of

every other story in the front section. But the truth was that

his deep connections in British intelligence were keeping

informed about hot spots to watch. He would go there on

journalistic cover assignments to do his research.

The Caine/Noyce version of THE QUIET AMERICAN is pretty good, though not as good

as the novel. I have not seen the earlier Joseph L.

Mankiewicz version, which is supposed to be a travesty

and flagrant distortion of the book.

 

BTW, Greene once said the best training for a young

writer is to work for a conservative newspaper. I assume

he meant you have to learn how to navigate around restrictions

and learn to tell the truth by reporting accurately and in

a foolproof way, while on a "liberal"

newspaper you were given more license, which tends to

make a reporter complacent and encourages

one to slant his/her stories ideologically. I found what

Greene said to be true about the conservative paper

for which I worked, The Wisconsin State Journal, a

morning paper. The liberal Capital Times, an afternoon

paper, had a chance to hire me at the same time

but didn't; the managing editor told me a while later that I would

have been happier on his paper, but I doubt it. His paper was

very lax in many ways.

 

And they shamelessly plagiarized many

of my stories, because we staffed government meetings at night that they

didn't bother to cover. We shared a print shop

and printing press. The Cap Times became so brazen about it that

they would literally just lift the type of my stories and print

them without credit. So one time someone inserted a line

at the bottom of a story, "Stolen from The Wisconsin State

Journal," and sure enough, the story ran with that line intact.

It embarrassed them a bit, but not enough to make them do their

own legwork. (I wrote a few stories for the Cap Times earlier,

and they pusillanimously apologized for a couple of

accurate features I wrote exposing problems at the university.

The State Journal never did that to me. But the Cap Times did run a letter I wrote

in 1966 [published December 7] dissenting from

the Warren Report, my first writing on the Kennedy assassination.)

 

The reason I got the job on the State Journal was

that my grandfather, John G. McBride, an art

teacher at Superior (Wis.) Central High School

for forty years, had persuaded the principal not to flunk out one of

his students, Dan Fitzpatrick, who was not doing well in his other studies. My grandfather

argued that the young man had genuine art talent. So

Dan Fitzpatrick finished school and went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes

for editorial cartooning on The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The editor of the State Journal

when I applied was Dan's brother Larry Fitzpatrick, who

told me that's why he was hiring me. To quote Portia in THE

MERCHANT OF VENICE, "How far that little

candle throws his beams,/So shines a good deed

in a naughty world."

Edited September 11, 2022 by Joseph McBride

[James DiEugenio]

Greene was really a smart guy.  Some good advice for a young journalist.

 

And what a good novel The Quiet American was, published in, get this, 1955. Talk about predicting a disaster.

[Michael Griffith]

On 9/2/2022 at 5:30 PM, Michael Griffith said:

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that Tang was a genuinely moderate member of the National Liberation Front (NFL) and of the PRG. He admired Marx and Lenin, but he was not a hardcore communist. He believed Hanoi’s promises that under communist rule, the southern part of Vietnam would be allowed to form its own regional government that would be part of a national unity government, and that the southern region would have a genuine voice and influence on national policy. It is surprising how many times in his book Tang tacitly and overtly acknowledges that there were significant long-standing differences between northern Vietnam and southern Vietnam. 

This is an important point that I didn't fully develop because the reply was already rather long. One of the North Vietnamese/Communist Bloc talking points was that South Vietnam was an illegitimate artificial state created out of nothing at the insistence of Western powers, that the division of Vietnam into North and South was a baseless action done because of Western pressure. In point of fact, there were numerous well-known and important differences between the northern and southern regions of Vietnam that had existed long before the 1950s. As Tang's memoir reveals repeatedly, Vietnamese who lived in the southern region felt a strong bond with their region and as "southerners." 

When William F. Buckley ran circles around actor Robert Vaughn in their televised Vietnam War debate in 1967, this was one of the numerous communist talking points that Vaughn repeated. That debate is worth watching. Click here to watch it.

Another video worth watching is Dr. Andrew Wiest's 2010 lecture "Vietnam's Forgotten Army," which summarizes his 2009 book Vietnam's Forgotten Army. Anyone who holds the mistaken belief that South Vietnam's army (ARVN) was an unwilling, incompetent force should watch this video. Dr. Wiest destroys this myth, and in the process gives an informative overview of the Vietnam War as a whole. Among other things, he discusses the Tet Offensive, the origins of ARVN, ARVN's actual combat record (not the erroneous one falsified by liberal authors), the Vietcong, Hamburger Hill, and whether or not the war was winnable. Click here to watch it.