Douglas Niles - A Noble Cause: American Battlefield Victories In Vietnam

Corps Tactical Zones in South Vietnam

CENTER OF MILITARY HISTORY, UNITED STATES ARMY

The United States is a country that is always looking to the future, moving forward with greater intensity, seeming to increase its national velocity with every passing decade, each succeeding generation. It is not surprising, then, that as we begin to pass the 50-year anniversary mark of Americas involvement in Vietnam, the image of the Vietnam War grows ever more blurry and unfocused in our collective rearview mirror.

The veterans who fought in that war, and who survived to come home, are in their sixties nowat least, the youngest of them are. And this, like all wars, was a conflict fought primarily by young men, each of whom was affected, some profoundly, by his tour of duty. Many Vietnam veterans have spent their adulthood living with the uncomfortable perception that the war that asked so much of them was not a successful war, that it is the first war that America lost.

And of course, that outcome is not in doubt, in the sense that the Communist forces achieved their objective of a single nation, controlled by Hanoi, and the United States did not prevent that from happening. It is one of the universal truths of war, even if a little counterintuitive, that it is not the winner that decides when the conflict is over. It is the losing side that must make that bitter decision. In the early 1970s, the United States of America, as a true representative democracy, collectively decided that fighting the war was no longer worth paying the toll it was costingmost notably, the toll in American lives. The toll in American unity had also been high, and both costs would have continued to soar so long as young men were being drafted and sent to Vietnam to face the very real threat of dying there.

Almost all wars are asymmetrical, in the sense that the opposing sides are not usually fighting for the same goals. For example, one nation might be fighting for its survival, while its foe may be fighting to gain territory and treasure. In this regard, the Vietnam War was more asymmetrical than most. The North Vietnamese and the insurgent Viet Cong in the south were fighting to attain national unityand doing so under the banner of the Communist cause. They had the backing, and the doctrinal and material support, of the USSR and Communist China, very much a pair of uneasy bedfellows but united in their opposition to America and its allies. The South Vietnamese, conversely, were fighting for the very survival of their unsteady democracy. They had the backing of the United States, not just in material support, but also through the direct aid of American combat units and eventually the shedding of much American blood.

The U.S.A., in a national sense, had a lot less at stake in the war than either North or South Vietnam, as it was not remotely threatened by the Vietnamese. America was threatened, however, by the specter of communisma much graver threat to the entire free world in the 1960s than many younger Americans currently understand. The domino theory was held up as gospel, in that if South Vietnam fell to communism, then the rest of Southeast Asia would inevitably follow. History disproved the theory: although Laos and Cambodia, inextricably tied to the fate and future of Vietnam, were caught up and tossed chaotically in the wake of the Vietnam War, other more populous Southeast Asian nations including Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia remained stout pillars in the anti-Communist world.