The evidence mounts that America won on the battlefield in Vietnam and that the long fight was a victory in the often-hot Cold War.
I read Mark Moyar's second book in his Vietnam War series, Triumph Regained, covering 1965-1968.
Funny that North Vietnam grossly inflated its body counts of American troops. While our inflated body counts likely just made up for who we didn't count.
Moyar also made a defense against the criticism of fighting NVA units in remote areas when we allegedly should have been fighting counter-insurgency in the densely populated coastal regions. I always rejected that criticism (in an aside):
In Vietnam, we always had two wars: the classic counter-insurgency against the Viet Cong (including--and increasingly after Tet--North Vietnamese infiltrators) to secure the population centers and root out insurgent networks; and the big war fights out in the bush where we fought large and organized conventional enemy forces.
The big war
fights shielded the COIN. Without that campaign in the boonies, small units spread out for COIN would have been annihilated by larger enemy units. And then the COIN forces would have to concentrate to fight the big units looming over the populated areas.
Also, the AstroTurfing of the VC took place long before I thought.
And Moyar makes a defense of what the war achieved, as I've also recounted, in regard to stemming the communist tide in Southeast Asia. Teetering dominoes did not fall--Indonesia in particular.
But the war is widely viewed as a mistake and defeat. Despite these wider successes and despite the fact that America and its South Vietnamese and other allies actually smashed the North Vietnamese army in 1967 and 1968. We had a solid foundation to win the war. And we blew it.
And to make that needless defeat worse, America's horrible foundation for withdrawing our troops from Vietnam needlessly wrecked the Army. In my opinion, the images of an Army coming home in shambles made it falsely look like an Army leaving in defeat. Would our assessment of the war be different already without that massive error? If we had instead seen cohesive units returned to America?
We at least learned that lesson when withdrawing troops from our peak strength in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maybe we'll conclude we really did win the Vietnam War one day. The case is strong that our military won but that our government lost. And our intelligence agencies undermined the former while bolstering the urge for the latter.
I mentioned his first book, which I later read.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 continues here.
