Table of Contents
Praise forThe Politically Incorrect Guide to
THE VIETNAM WAR
Phil Jennings has something to say, namely that the historical record, as selectively compiled and presented by the political Left, has done a terrible disservice to the hundreds of thousands of men who fought in The Vietnam War. With great passion, an unapologetic love of his country, anddrum roll, pleasethe truth to support his case, Captain Jennings walks us through this tragic struggle, the war America never lost, but wasnt allowed to win, either.
-L. Brent Bozell III, nationally syndicated columnist and president of the Media Research Center
In the past several decades, no historical subject has been so grievously distorted by the politically correct as the Vietnam War. Whereas most of the wars chroniclers objected to American involvement at the time, Phillip Jennings was in Vietnam fighting the war, and like most veterans he disputes the antiwar narrative that has dominated the publishing world. His account skillfully weaves together a wealth of historical facts that blow apart the myths handed down by professors and journalists.
-Mark Moyar, Ph.D., author of Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965
When I first met Jennings at Camp Lejeune in the 1960s, he told me his ambition was to become the worlds first successful right-wing folk singer. He failed miserably at that, but yet, over the last 40 years, he has managed to channel his energies toward successfully defeating political correctness wherever he finds it. This book debunks so many of what our generations warriors know to be The Myths of Vietnam that it needs to be required reading. Lance Corporal Diogenes, you may extinguish your lamp. Our generation has found an honest man.
-Major General Larry S. Taylor, USMCR (retired), former Commanding General, 4th Marine Aircraft Wing
For my wife, Deborah. Like a good MarineAlways Faithful.
Introduction
THE DEFEAT THAT WASNT
No war in American history is as shrouded in obfuscation and myth as the Vietnam Wardespite the fact that it was televised at the time, and has been written about at such enormous length that my bookshelves creak under the strain of my Vietnam library. Vietnam has entered into our national memory as a byword for disaster, usually accompanied by the word quagmire, and the specter of the war has haunted our foreign policy discussions ever since.
Guess what?
America didnt lose the Vietnam War
Communism did not triumph in Southeast Asia
The Vietnamese people are today one of the most pro-American on the planet
The biggest myth perpetuated about the Vietnam War is that America lost. However misguided Americas leaders might have been in some of their political, strategic, and tactical decisions, we still won the war. We forced North Vietnam to submit to the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. Those accords ended the war and pledged the North Vietnamese to peaceful coexistence with the South. I fought in Vietnam, and I never saw us lose a battle. Ask a North Vietnamese veteran of the war, and if hes honest, hell say the samethe Communists could never defeat us on the battlefield. If you look at the casualty figures, you can see brutal confirmation of that. The United States military lost more than 58,000 men in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese military lost more than 1.1 million. Who would you guess was the victor?
Look at the geopolitical outcome of the war. Communist Vietnam is dependent on Western aid and trying to adopt aspects of a capitalist economyindeed, Vietnam is now regarded as one of the most pro-American countries in Asia in that its young people look to emulate Bill Gates rather than Ho Chi Minh. If you look at Vietnams southern neighbors, youll see that theyre mostly free and no longer in fear of Communist expansion. Though Laos and Cambodia fell, no other nations succumbed to Communist control; and Vietnams and Laoss postwar poverty and Cambodias killing fieldsa Communist-imposed genocide based on class and politicshave so discredited Communism in Asia that even the great remaining Communist power, China, is itself rapidly liberalizing its economy. It is no longer leading any sort of Communist vanguard of worker or peasant revolution. In fact, Chinas chief Asian allies are two pariah states of particular stench: Burma and North Korea.
Its true, however, that the people of South Vietnam lost the war, and lost it in a way that is painful to contemplate. It is true that they were shamefully abandoned by a United States Congress that had ousted the president, Richard Nixon, who was the architect of our military victory. That Congress, perhaps drunk with irresponsible power after having defenestrated President Nixon, was insistent on washing its hands of South Vietnam, even if it meant disgrace and dishonor for America and a catastrophe we had fought to prevent for our South Vietnamese allies who were handed over to Communist tyranny. If the Vietnamese people have hope for a better future, it is only because they are looking towards America. Behind them, and still over them, is a Communist regime of reeducation camps and a dictatorship that drove hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to risk death in fleeing the country on the high seas.
Ive written this book in order to set the record straightand to settle scores with the pernicious mythmakers of the war. Ive written it for my fellow Vietnam veterans who have been so badly mistreated by the media and cultural trendsetters of this country. And Ive written it for those too young to remember the war, but who have that built-in B.S. detector that tells them that the story they get from the media, and probably in school, is a crock. I trust them to recognize the truth when they hear it.
Here is the true story of the Vietnam War, as it actually was, by someone who fought there as a Marine pilot and later as a pilot for the CIAs Air America, and who has made a lifetimes study of the war (and even written a satirical novel about its absurdities). No war in American history is in greater need of a politically incorrectanother word for honesttreatment than the Vietnam War, because the people who misreported the war, hammered vile lies about it into our national consciousness, and now tout its supposed lessons are the very same people who created political correctness in the first place. Shame on them.
Chapter One
WHY WE WERE IN VIETNAM
It was World War II, the good war, that got the United States involved in what liberals would eventually want to paint as the bad war (though liberals were the ones mostly responsible for our fighting it). Before World War II, Vietnam was a colony of France. During the war it was occupied, with the reluctant permission of Vichy France, by the Japanesethe common enemy of the United States and the Communist Viet Minh.
