shaped the era. saturdays at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. eastern here on american history tv on c-span3. tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv, we'll hear about president warren harding's long term love affair detailed in letters recently released by the library of congress. his nephew explains why his family insisted on keeping the letters sealed and how the family continues to deal with the fallout from the letters and the impact on harding's history. next on american history tv, a panel of vietnam veterans and scholars reflect on the events leading up to the vietnam war and whether it was a necessary conflict for america. the speakers also discuss what it was like being in the war, both from the american and vietnamese points of view. the group vietnam veterans for factual history organized this event. it's about two and a half hours.

good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. and welcome. we're gathered on the 50th anniversary -- sorry, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the august 7th, 1964, passage by both houses of congress of an authorization for the use of military force. we didn't call it that, but that's exactly what it was. it was implementing our obligations under the 1955 cito treaty pursuant to the united states constitution. vietnam veterans for factual history is a diverse group of mostly vietnam veterans including retired four-star generals medal of honor recipient, prisoners of war, special operations personnel, and a variety of others. our common bond is that we believe the americans had been misled about the realities of vietnam and too many of the, quote, facts that they have been led to believe are true are not true. and because of this, when other

conflicts arise, they're drawing the wrong lessons. after the war, polls showed that vietnam veterans supported the war by more than twice the average of the american population. we were proud of our service, and most combat veterans said they would go back again even if they knew what the outcome was going to be, even if they knew it was a losing effort, they still would go back to protect the people of south vietnam. we had an advantage over the american people because we did not get our information filtered by dan rather and other journalists. we saw firsthand what was going on. we talked to other people who were over there who were seeing it first hand, and my own sense is we came back with a much better picture of what the war was all about. i can spend probably the next hour talking about what was wrong with the american journalism profession in vietnam.

just to give you one example, the most cherished vietnamese journalist by most of the american media was a man who worked for "time" for a while, worked for "reuters" but he was the go-to guy for all sorts of journalists in vietnam. it was not until after the war was over that we learned he was a north vietnamese colonel the entire time. the journalists tended to hang around the caravel hotel and the continental hotel and lo and behold, there were always vietnamese nationals there to chat them up in english and provide insights, so many of those people were working for the communist movement. when he passed away in 2006, they published a book called "perfect spy, the incredible double life of hahn." you have been invited to hear a

debate, and i regret to report that none, no one of the more than two dozen prominent anti-vietnam leaders from the 1960s was willing to join us and try to defend the core arguments that turned so many americans against the war in the 1960s. this may be a bigger news story because the american people were misled by the critics and they accepted it as fact and because of that, they pressured congress to, as i like to put it, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. and the fact that now that new information has come out of north vietnam, information came out during the pentagon papers that almost nobody read, looking back, none of their major arguments holds true. not even the argument that stopping the war would end the killing and promote human rights. indeed, experts say that more people died in the first three years following the liberation of south vietnam, laos and

cambodia that were killed in the previous 14 years of war. i'm going to probably save for d questions a discussion of that, but if you want to look at the consequences of that congressional decision, it's one of the darkest pages in american history involving the loss of life of millions of people who entrusted us and the loss of freedom of tens of millions of others. my name is bob turner. robert f. turner. and i have for the last 27 years been a professor at the university of virginia where i've taught both in the law school and for many years in what's now the politics department. i used to teach u.s. foreign policy. i taught an undergraduate seminar on vietnam. and i continue. i will start later this month teaching a post-graduate seminar at the law school that is open as well to politics and history students. this week marks the 50th anniversary of the first thing i published about vietnam, which was in fact the letter to the

editor in the paris edition of "new york times" which ceased to exist many years ago talking about -- in fact, it was published on 7 august the day congress acted talking about the importance of standing up to communism there. when i returned back to america and continued my college education, i quickly became involved in the teachings and debates and so forth indeed between returning to vietnam at the end of 1964 and going in the military four years later i was involved in more than a hundred debates, teaching, panels, other programs. and one of the interesting things is at almost every one of those programs i heard the same litany of arguments. the united states first got involved to reimpose french colonialism, which is not close

to being true. we violated the geneva dr sorry, the geneva agreements of 1954. we blocked elections in vietnam allegedly required by the geneva accord. sorry, my current job involves national security law so i deal with geneva conventions a lot. i also shifted my major from economics to government so that i could spend more time studying vietnam. and i wrote a 450-page honor thesis that i standby today. it really captured a lot of this including ha hanoi had made a decision in 19590 liberate south vietnam by force. when i graduated from college i was commissioned through rotc. my first day of active duty i volunteered for vietnam. in reward for that they sent me to hawaii for a year.

and there when ho chi min died i wrote a letter on the leadership struggle. i'm told dia and cia were predicting chongqing would come out. and when eastern diplomats confirmed my interpretation, all of a sudden the government decided my knowledge of the enemy was more value blg than my value as an expert infantryman. so my jobs in vietnam both tours i was assigned to work in the north vietnam affairs commission of the embassy in what was called special projects office. in that capacity i traveled throughout the country in my five times in vietnam i was in 42 out of 44 provinces plus laos and cambodia. i was in and out of vietnam from 1968 until the final evacuation in 1975 when i was involved in trying to help get orphans out and also trying without success to get into cambodia to bring orphans out of cambodia.

after my second vietnam tour i left the army and became a fellow at the hoover institution on war revolution and peace at stanford where i wrote the first major english language history of vietnamese communism. again, i think -- i went back and re-read it a few years ago and there may be a few paragraphs i would change, but i think i got it right pretty accurately. i returned in 1974. i took a job as part of a fellowship which turned out to be the position of national security advisor to senator robert p. griffin of michigan on the foreign relations committee. and in that position i returned to vietnam at every opportunity finally coming out again during the final evacuation. there's not going to be a debate today other than sparring with people in the audience, which would be fun, but the offer to debate anyone any time anywhere

is still open. because it's important that we do this. now, my assignment this morning is to provide some background on how and why we went to war in vietnam. and why doing so was both a rational decision and fully consistent with international law. academic doctorates from university of virginia law school. i co-founded the center and housed at the war college. i mention that only because law is not a passing interest. it's my full-time occupation now. also chaired at the american bar association standing committee on law and national security for three terms. i'm not going to focus much on legal issues because i don't think anybody argues them anymore who knows anything about what happened. there are a awful lot of people out there who still think that, you know, wonderful thing to pull out of vietnam. so i'm sure there are a lot

of -- i hate to use the word but ignorant people or uninformed people who would think it's illegal. but among the senior scholars i don't know if any in 2000 our senator put out a big vietnam conference in the 25th anniversary in the fall of saigon and we decided wouldn't it be fun to re-do the old vietnam legal debate sns so we picked the six most prominent scholars and invited them one after another after another and none of them were willing to come forward and argue. of course the reason is their case was premised on things like north vietnam wasn't really involved. and after the war vietnam came out and said, oh, yes, we made a decision on ho chi minh birthday in 1959 to start pouring troops and so forth. at that point you sort of lose the claim that this was just a civil war in south vietnam. one of the -- this i already

mentioned is we tried to reimpose french colonial rule after the second world war. in reality the opposite is true. franklin roosevelt during the war said the french should not be allowed to havin doe china. they've exploited it for a hundred years and the people deserve something better than that. after the war ho chi minh met with the french in paris on march 6th, 1946, signed an agreement that welcomed the french back into indo china. and when they got back there the head french officer wrote his superiors saying the americans are a bigger impediment to our return than to viet min. trying everything possible to keep them from coming back. we wouldn't let them land on our airfields. we prohibited u.s. flagships from carrying troops or equipment or supplies to the french in vietnam.

and it was not until we finally realized that, look, it's french for right now. if the french failed, the communists will take over. and we felt that was a greater threat. but until the very end we pressured france to grant real independence to vietnamese nationalists. indeed one of our conditions when we considered using bombing to stop the defeat was if we do this you're going to have to recognize the vietnamese nationalists as an independent country with the right to withdraw from the french union at any time. the best single source probably is this book right here, the pentagon papers. which if anybody had bothered to read it, it shot down almost all of the arguments being used by the left. it's fascinating. it pointed out ho chi minh was an old stalinnist trained in russia. and so forth.

yeah, there were mistakes. there were mistakes in every war. there was corruption. there's corruption in virtually every war. there were war crimes, but no worse than in most wars and better in some wars indeed in 1966 general westmoreland announced the united states was going to give full permission to viet kong soldiers who were captured unless they were captured while engaged in acts of terrorism. in which case we turn them over to the south vietnamese as common criminals. the international committee of the red cross wrote generalmoreland that never has a country gone to such lengths to make sure the rules are complied with. there's a -- this is one of my favorites. i've got a long chapter in my vietnamese communism about his background. and 19 out of every 20 footnotes is to north vietnamese material. they published a wealth of stuff

in english. and i got on their mailing list. and they sent me all four volumes. i did these care packages this thick stacked with publications. and i would read them. and it's amazing how much they publish that is contrary to their interests. they noted that when ho chi minh was in macaw of hong kong on february 3, 1930, where they established the communist party, he was there as a representative of communist national. he left vietnam in 1911 and did not return for 30 years until may of 1941. during that time -- in december of 1920, ho was a member of the french socialist party. and he spoke out and actively supported shifting from the second to the third international, which is to say joining the communist international. and after that decision was made he traveled to the soviet union where he was educated, trained.

when i was a fellow at the hoover institution as a man named bertram wolf, a colleague and good friend, burt had been the mexican representative to the common term. very radical leftist back in the 1920s. and he told of traveling around the soviet union with ho chi minh and addressing various groups at communes and so forth. said this guy was an absolute militant internationalist. now, this is not the time to -- let me get a little bit of why we went and why it was necessary to go to war in vietnam. i'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this. but just a couple things. june 25th, 1950, north korea invaded south korea and the u.n. security council authorized the united states to lead a u.n. force in response. for those who said, oh, no, vietnam was really just one country temporarily partitioned unless it was all right to,

well, if it was legal for north vietnam to use force to reunite, how do you explain the u.n. using force against north korea when they tried the same thing? how many troops did we have in west germany ready to go to war? yes, they were in theory temporarily divided but they were de facto international persons of states. and for either to aggress against the other, it was a violation of the united nations charter. after the korea invaded, harry truman a containment doctrine that basically said, look, we thought after world war ii that soviet union was going to work with us, with the u.n. and would be able to stop threats to the peace working collectively. they're not going to do that. they're trying to promote revolution in various parts of the world. we have to stop them from doing that and the answer is

containment. eisenhower came to power and he had several interests. one, he knew the american people would not tolerate high defense budgets. so he wanted to cut the defense budget. so he cut our manpower considerably in the army. and he decided instead to go with something called the new look strategy. and he said that if there's another korean invasion we're not going to send american troops to fight chinese troops or north korean troops. we're going to respond asymmetrically at a time and place of our own choosing. massive retaliation. if you did not understand that, calculate the half-life of u 235 and look around moscow and see if you want to see it glowing for that time. it was a real bold threat to resort to nuclear weapons if the communists tried to use force conventionally. and it worked. did not want to risk getting moscow bombed or anywhere in the soviet union bombed.

so he came up in response with peaceful coexistence. he told various communist movements around the world, hey, we haven't given up on taking over the world, but we're not going to do it now. right now the correlation is not on our side. a lot of things to undermine your government, but don't start shooting anybody because we don't want to get nuked. and a number of grievances with stalin going back to where he didn't think stalin supported him enough in the revolution. but there were other issues. but he was especially angry at de-stalinazition. but more than important than that he wanted to be the leader of the communist movement. so he challenged the soviet union on several grounds. and one of them was on arms struggle. and he quite cleverly said when

you look at the imperialists they look very fierce indeed, but they're in fact a paper tiger. why? because we will use people's warfare. we will send in guerillas with money and arms and equipment and train people. and guerillas live, work, sleep, eat, among the people for every they kill with a nuclear weapon, they'd kill hundreds of soldiers. they're not going to do that. and vietnam became the test case as to whether that would succeed. did the united states have an answer to wars of national liberation? here's a quote. we were going to use slides, but we cannot afford the charge here at the press club. so we made some cheap prints of some of them. i hope you can read it. this is a quote from the vice chair of the central committee of the chinese party and their leader for fraternal obligation for other countries to help liberate them.

and he wrote a fascinating pamphlet called long live the victory of people's wars. i think that's what it is. yeah. and in it he said -- he talked about vietnam's being a test case. he said the americans are trying to find an answer to people's warfare or unconventional warfare. a communist victory "will lead to a chain reaction. the people of other parts of the world will see that u.s. imperialism can be defeated and what the vietnamese people can do, they can do too." and it was not just the chinese. as far away as cuba, castro's top military guy, wrote in 1963 the vietnam battle front is most important for the future of all america. the victorious end of this battle will spell the end of north american imperialism. it was widely understood that vietnam was going to decide whether we were going to stop

wars of national liberation or wind up facing a dozen or more of them in the next few years in africa, asia and latin america. and reality is we could not have defeated even three vietnams around the world. it's too expensive. when you're fighting against guerillas and you need about ten times the force and spend about ten times the money or if you're the americans you spend a hundred times the money or more. but, so vietnam became the test case. and we decided we were going to show that we were not going to allow aggression to take place. so with the active support of china and the soviet union, north vietnam began in may of 1959, more than five years

before congress acted 50 years ago this week, they passed a resolution saying -- secretly. it was absolute secret. and they said let's open the ho chi minh trail, open it down through laos and cambodia and send down troops, weapons, supplies, for the purpose of overthrowing that country's government. again, i found this out when i was an undergraduate back in 1966. this wasn't that hard if you went to the library and read their own stuff and a little bit of other stuff. but anyway, in may of 1984, on the 25th anniversary of this decision, they wrote an article in vietnam courier admitting that they had made a decision to liberate south vietnam on may 19, 1959, but kept it absolute secret. and the ho chi minh trail was built -- we'll talk about that as we go on. the state department issued a white paper called aggression from the north and the anti-war movement went ballistic. it was a lie. there was no aggression from the

north. the viet kong was entirely indigenous south vietnamese group. now, again hanoi kindly translated a several-volume set of proceedings of the third party congress in 1960, in may of 1960. and this is a quote from that book, from volume one of that book, that series. to ensure the complete success of the revolutionary struggle in south vietnam, our people there -- this is a communist party meeting. so our people there means communist. our people there must strive to bring into being a broad national united hunt. three months later announced the national lib rag front. i apologize for this next slide because it's very misleading when you take it from color to black and white, but it was another $30 to put it in color.

the point is on the left side there is a red flag with a big yellow star in it. on the right side there is a red flag at the top and the bottom half is blue. and the same big yellow star is there. although there's no connection at all between north vietnam and the national liberation fund. it was]z now, another argument. well, maybe ho chi minh was like a communist, but he was a national communist, not a militant international communist. and so if he came to power, he would be a buffer to chinese expansion in southeast asia. well, this is lez, succeeded ho. the third party congress. the point a very senior member. precisely the communist party

headed by comrade mao tse-tung. again, in the same speech he says the modern revisionist represented by the yugoslavia are trumpeting the nature of imperialism has changed. if we want to lay bare the aggressive and bellicose nature of imperialism, the communist parties must necessarily direct their main blow against revisionism. now, do you really think this guy's a titoist? it's absolutely absurd. if you go back to the late 1940s, veet min radio denounced tito as a spy. when asked other countries to recognize the democratic republic of vietnam, tito was the first government to respond. they didn't accept his recognition. they took note of his offer. they never considered yugoslavia

to be a socialist country. and they denounced te to all over the place. well, i used to debate this. and the scholars on the other side, i mean those who knew who tito was. bob, you don't understand, ho was desperate for aid to win his freedom, he could not afford to offend stalin so he had to denounce stalin's enemy. that's fine, stalin died in 1954. kru chef came to power, he went to belgrade and hugged tito and then ho chi minh went to europe and traveled around. continued to denounce the revisionist as the greatest threat. this is a 1960 quote. hungary in 1956, the soviet union intervened when hungary tried to go a more independent route. some countries criticized it. ho chi minh, north vietnam, the

soviet union has assisted their brothers in, you know, stopping this imperialist plot. chex -- afghanistan, vietnam totally endorsed the soviet invasion of afghanistan. we talk about this more during q and a, but one of the biggest myths and most common mentioned was the geneva conventions and the elections. this is very easy. there are records on this. in fact, one of the best again is the pentagon papers. here's what happened. the geneva convention met to consider the solution to korea in february. that went nowhere. and on may 8th they took up indo china. by the way, japs forces were in position to take cambodia -- to take den bin few any time they wanted it and the chinese

advisor said hold off, keep it on the front pages of european newspapers. we will tell you when. the day before the geneva conventions took up indo china, they took din bin fu. din bin fu was a sad tragic blunder of intelligence. nobody thought that jaup could get heavy equipment, the artillery and other weapons he'd been given by china. as soon as he poured equipment in north vietnam. he says we set up a fort at some crossroads surrounded by high mountains. but too far away for rifle fire to be effective. well, he put together tens of thousands of workers to clear a road and took apart artillery and attached it to bicycles and mules and so forth. and they went in and actually built it in on the front side of the mountain. they weren't firing indirect, they were firing direct fire. in the middle of the facility at din bin fu there was an airport.

i don't know how many pilots or fliers there are here, but it's amazing how intimidating it is to have somebody blow a few five-foot holes in your runway. yeah, pilots weren't going to land anymore. so then they started flying over and parachuting supplies. well, the viet min just dug trenches and more often than not the wind would blow the packages and supplies outside the walls. and before they could get near them -- guts to face the fire, they had food for another few days. at that point it was not a matter of who was going to win, but win. and by timing it until the last minute they brought down the french government. and pierre came to power and said i will have peace andin doe china within one month or i will resign my position. and he had no interest at all in the nationalist in south vietnam. they were a pain in the butt to him. so after a few weeks the viet min went to him and said like

your job and perks and everything, but you know what you're going to sign to keep snit and he signed. and the south vietnamese and americans were totally excluded from those negotiations. at geneva, south vietnam and the united states protested against partition. and protested against the icc, the supervisory commission that gave poland a veto. they'd done it before. and we found every time they required unanimous votes and put a communist on the panel, the panel could never do anything that moscow didn't like. what did we propose? actually had dinner with dr. tran van do, the chief of this delegation, and he talked to me about the experience of it. and their position was no partition. the united nations should supervise elections when they conclude conditions for free elections are present. they did not sign or endorse any document.

there was only one signed document, and that was the french and viet min military. by then the french granted complete independence and authority to run their forces south vietnam. so they weren't bound by a treaty france signed. and the united states consistently said we're not going to agree to anything here. we continue to believe that unity should be decided by free elections under u.n. supervision and when the july 1956 deadline approached the british as co-chairman of the geneva conference said they're not bound and shouldn't accept this because north vietnam has a bigger population. ho chi minh did have some elections. i won't say free elections, but he did have elections. the worst he ever did was 98.99% of the vote. there were usually candidates from each four seats. no party leader ever got less than 96%. these were not serious elections. and as "new york times" repeatedly editorialized during

the period it would be monstrous to compel the south vietnamese to accept this kind of an election. it was a great quote from president eisenhower, actually brought his book here somebody wants to raise the famous eisenhower saying 80% of the people would have voted for ho, not what he said. i actually wrote president eisenhower, got a letter back from his publisher, that is saying he's being misquoted. i'll tell you more about that during q and a. i want to get through this quickly. now let's look at how we went to war in vietnam. immediately following the geneva accords, the united states decided if we're going to avoid future koreas, we need to have alliances so that the bad guys will know that if they attack vietnam or cambodia or laos or the philippines or new zealand, we have an agreement, a solemn treaty commitment to defend them. so you will be starting a war with the united states. and not many people wanted to do

that back in those days. a different president then. they met in the philippines and seven countries signed the s.e.a.t.o. aggression by means of arms attack or against any state or territory which the parties by unanimous agreement may thereafter designate what endanger solemn peace and security and will activate and meet in accordance. it was approved by the senate with one descending vote. he was in isolation. not someone that didn't want to protect southeast asia, he just didn't want to be involved outside our borders. you see that statement designated by unanimous agreement. the same day they designated

cambodia, laos and the free territory in vietnam as the protocol states. so congress -- or the senate and the united states by solemn treaty, which is part of the supreme law of the land, declared that if any of these countries were invaded and asked our help we would go to their aid. interesting when you remember the students who shut down almost every campus in this country when president nixon went into cambodia. a brilliant success. i spent a lot of time in the delta and the difference before the incursion and after was incredible. i talked to defectors who said we only have five rounds per ak-47 and we've been instructed by higher authority to put away our ak-47s and dig out the old american car beans and stuff not comparable. let's see now. i've already noted hanoi made a decision or admitted that it

made a decision on may 19th, 1959 to overthrow the government of south vietnam by force. and that was more than four years before -- oh. we're talking about -- i missed a note. we're talking about the independence of the national liberation front. this is a wonderful book. i highly recommend. "victory in vietnam," it's the translation of the official north vietnamese history of the war. it has a forward by professor william diker. and he concludes his forward by saying, one of the most pernicious myths about the vietnam war that the insurgent movement in south vietnam was essentially autonomist one has been definitively dispelled. this is not -- you know, they basically kick the viet kong to the curb as soon as they took over saigon.

this was a myth. this was a classic front. anybody should have understood when they set up the national liberation front. now, again, how did we go to war? okay. we had a treaty commitment. and then on the second of august 1964 there was a minor skirmish between an american warship, the u.s.s. mad dox, and north vietnamese torpedo boats. i've seen photos, there's one hulled in the superstructure of the maddox from machine gunfire. when they told lbj about it he said let's not overreact. this may have been the act of one boat skipper or something like that. we don't want to do anything -- you know? and everybody says he wanted to drag the country to war. if you listen to the tapes that have been declassified and made public, he's talking to richard russell, the armed services chairman saying i don't know what to do. i don't want to go to war but

i'm under pressure from congress and american people to go to war. but he didn't do that until he got a report that a second attack had occurred two days later. now, there are some very intelligence, very informed people who say the second attack involved in this and he swears it happened. i got a nice e-mail -- it wasn't a nice e-mail. a very unhappy e-mail former chief of operations who said

you're wrong about it and said it happened. now i'm at the point of saying i don't know if it happened, nor do i care if it happened. we did not go to war in vietnam because of that silly incident in the gulf. communist vietnam for years had been trying to overthrow its neighbors. this is a southeast asia resolution as it was called by congress. today referred to as the gulf of tonkin resolution. and it notes the purpose is to -- the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast asia. and they talk about the attacks and say they're part of a deliberate and systematic campaign of aggression. the communist regime has been waged against his neighbors, therefore congress decides. and goes down to the bottom and says, let's see, with a constitution and the charter of the u.n. in accordance with our obligations under the seato treaty, the united states is

therefore prepared as the president determines to take all necessary steps including the use of armed force to assist any member or protocol state of the seato treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom. again, cambodia, laos and south vietnam were the protocol states. now, originally the premiere of cambodia said we are neutral, you're infringing upon our rights and so forth. this had no effect. south vietnam did ask for help and it was perfectly lawful for us to go to their help under international law. during the floor debate on this resolution, senator j. william fallbright, the chairman of the foreign relations committee who introduced the bill, was asked by enacting this resolution are we authorizing the president to use such force as might lead into war? and he responded that is the way i would interpret it. very clear language. you can find that in the

congressional record. the joint resolution passed the house, unanimously pased the senate and the two senators lost their next re-election bids. combined vote 104-2. comes out to 99.6% of congress endorsing the use of force to protect south vietnam, laos and cambodia. if you want to round up, it's all right with me. the point is this was not a close vote. was the war legal? you know, this is such a silly thing. i'm not even going to spend time on it. but, yes, it's legal. under the u.n. charter article 51, states have a right to individual and collective self-defense. that's what this was. south vietnam was being attacked, invaded, it was covert, it was clever, but it was lots and lots of soldiers, real serious guns and ammo and other things. and they did ask us for help.

and that was perfectly lawful. i mentioned that we tried to get people to debate. we finally went way down the barrel and we got two people to come and debate. this is the book, the proceedings of a conference we held in april of 19 -- april 29th of 2000. and in here is the debate. the guy who debated me on constitutional issues didn't try to rebut. i ended my confrontation saying it was an authorization to use force. my colleagues debated on more it was not fun. if you want to see more of the debate, you can find it there. there's another book you might be interested in. to oppose any foe, the legacy of u.s. intervention in vietnam. and this is a compilation of papers written by students in our seminars. and it's quite good. in fact, it got some praise from

some pultser prize winning on the back end. all right. so congress authorized this every bit as much if they had to declare war. we can talk about that issue later if you want to. last point, i think. we went to war with the overwhelming support of congress and the american people. i've already pointed out 99.6% of congress voted to authorize the use of armed force. but to be fair they did not give lbj the money he asked for. lbj had requested an appropriations to accomplish the purposes of the resolution, and they tripped on their own notion. congress was not dragged into vietnam. if anything congress dragged lbj into vietnam. in 1966, now, if anybody didn't know what was going on in vietnam in '64, by '66 there were hundreds of thousands of american troops and people were dying every day in vietnam. and congress was asked to

appropriate $13 billion supplemental appropriation for the war. in the house it passed 389-3. the following year 1967, an even bigger war, a $12 billion supplemental, passed 385-11 in the house and 77-3 in the senate. obviously you can spin numbers. there's a great story about the best soviet and best american horse had a horse race to decide which was a better country back in the '60s. and pravda, which means truth, reported that in the great international horse place the soviets came in at second and the americans were next to last. it's true. you can look at this and say, wait a minute, two senators voted against it in '66. three in '67, that's a 50% increase in opposition to the war. but the reality is congress overwhelmingly supported the war. the big change came with the

offensive. and it came because the american media almost unanimously portrayed it as a great communist victory. they were kicking our butts all over south vietnam. and that meant one of two things, either our government had been lying to them as the peace movement had been saying, or it was so out of touch with reality to be not worthy of our confidence. now, public opinion. during the months surrounding lbj's use of force against north vietnam 50 years ago this week, the gallup poll -- his popularity in the gallup poll increased 58% from 42% to 72% approval, a 30-point jump. i've not gone back to look at what george w. bush did after 9/11, but i understand he had a big spike as well. didn't last. but this was a tremendous increase. and the gallup organization said this was because of his firm

stance against communism in vietnam. all right. what else are we going to do here? let's -- oh. cambodia incursion were two tremendous victories for our side. absolutely no question in a military standpoint. the communists lost well over 10-to-1 in comparing their fatalities to the number of south vietnamese and americans killed. it was a devastating loss to them. and he announced himself it was a defeat, except politically. and thank god for the american press that made the american people think, hey, we were losing the war and our government was lying to us. because that broke the back. and all of a sudden the majority of americans favored withdraws from vietnam. if they had known the truth of what had happened, i don't think we would have lost that support. a lot of reasons we also lost support, no end strategy, a lot of incompetence by the white house and others. by 1972 there was a large number

of experts who said the war's been won in the south. bill colby later head of the cia in late '50s had been saigon station chief for the cia. he knew vietnam just as well as just about any american i knew over there. he wrote a book called lost victory. and he said that the eastern offensive, what they call the spring offensive in 1972 when pushed back north vietnam soldiers with only american air support a turning point. "the will and capability to defend itself with the assistance but not participation of its american ally against the north with assistance by the soviet union and china." on the ground in south vietnam the war had been won. one of the most distinguished correspondents of the era, because of that most papers and

organizations would not hire him to cover north vietnam. they begged him to go to china and he felt korea was right. he wrote 1981 looking back coolly i believe it can be said surprising as it may still sound but the south vietnamese and american forces actually won limited military strategy. i can give you quotes from my old friend douglas pike and bob sarly, very distinguished historian written about vietnam, also a vietnam veteran. let me just end on this point with john lewis gattis, a very distinguished professor of history at yale university referred to by "new york times" as the deen of american cold war historians. and in 2004 he said historians now acknowledge that american counterinsurgency operations in vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict. the problem was that support of the war had long since crumbled

at home. we had a few responses to our letters inviting people to debate. and one of them -- whoops, that's not it. i didn't print it. i'm sorry to say. or else i didn't bring it. a professor at clemson wrote us back after -- we spelled out mythology. and he says nobody believes that stuff anymore. well, that was exactly the point we were trying to make. now, what went wrong? the peace movement was angry. it had got a lot of very liberal democrats elected in the elections of 1972, taking office in '73. they decided they didn't like vietnam, and in may of 1973 they passed a statute, a law, that said notwithstanding any other provision of law on or after august 15th this year, 1973, no

funds heretofore or here or after appropriated to finance the involvement of the united states military forces and hostilities in or over or from off the shores of north vietnam, laos or cambodia unless specifically authorized by congress. congress threw in the towel. congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. and i hope somebody will ask me what the consequences of that were. because we can talk about the loss of lives in indochina. i mentioned cambodia. over 20% of the population was slaughtered by paul pot and his crew. in vietnam there were executions, hundreds of thousands died trying to flee the country on unsea worthy boats. thousands of others were killed in re-education camps or in the new economic zones. tens of millions were consigned to communist tyranny. i brought with me an old issue

of freedom in the world, which is put out every year by what i think is the best human rights group out there, freedom house. it's a group set up by eleanor roosevelt in the 1940s. and this is their annual survey for '98 and '99. and here on page six they have a little chart. the 13 worst rated countries. these are the very worst of the worst human rights violators. the last country on the list is vietnam. and they've got a write-up on vietnam that comes back in the back. vietnam remains -- in 1998 vietnam remained one of the world's most closed and tightly controlled societies. at one point they described vietnam as being less free than china, about the same as north korea. all the peace march who are said we want human rights for vietnam, they didn't get it. they didn't stop the killing.

and what they did do was tell the world america has lost its will and is no longer willing to keep the peace and live up to its obligations. so the soviet union flew something like 50,000 cuban soldiers into angola where that civil war lasted for a while and killed several hundred thousand more people. brez nef took off the chains in latin america and said it's all right to use armed struggle now. so we had civil wars in el salvador and several countries in that area that killed lots and lots of additional people. the soviet union invaded afghanistan. i don't know if it was in the millions or high hundreds of thousands who died there, which also created the taliban and some of our current problems. but the big thing that we remember as vietnam veterans is the people that we had repeatedly pledged to protect and to support, the people that

stood by us and worked with us to try to find freedom. and we abandoned them and left them to their fate. i don't know of an incident in american history for which i'm more ashamed of. i love this country. i grew up in a military family. i travel around the world. every time i came home i said, god, i was lucky to be born here. but as time has gone on, sometimes i don't feel quite as much that. i feel like we promise to help people and then when things get bad we abandon thems2a to the islamic state in the current situation where if you don't know the right words to the prayer they're going to cut your head off or machine gun you and so forth. and women and kids aren't spared. any way, i'm going to now turn over -- oh, after they did this -- the rest of the story. the premier of north vietnam said the americans won't come

back now even if we offer them candy. the soviet union in china which had been cautioned constraint because they had their own issues to deal with us, as soon as they saw we were out of the game, they greatly increased their aid to north vietnam. and in april of 1975, almost the entire north vietnamese army left the country behind columns of soviet-made tanks to conquer their neighbors. they kept the 325th division back to guard hanoi. and we sat back and just watched because congress had made it illegal for us to carry out our treaty obligations. and john kennedy's beautiful pledge that we would help people in the world who wanted freedom. some people say, well, nothing really bad happened if you don't mind a few million dead vietnamese and cambodians. but things did happen. some things we said would happen in 1964 and 1965 did not happen.

i think the reason is because we held out for ten years. in 1964 thailand and indonesia, which indonesia is the world's third most populous nation, were basket cases ripe for revolution and very active communists insurgencies in both. by '75 they were strong and we were to protect ourselves. most importantly while we were there the great pro-revolutionary culture turned inward. by the time -- china had been exporting revolution throughout southeast asia as far away as mozambique. they viewed it as their fraternal duty. they stopped that. nobody was exporting revolution. so the outcome that we saw there, which was by itself horrible, would have been far more horrible if we had said, no, we have not -- we have no answer to people's warfare. we would have found ourselves facing a bunch of vietnams

throughout the third world. and our only possibility of winning would have been nuclear weapons. i'm now going to turn the program over to an old friend. until today i had not seen him since saigon in 1971. a very distinguished vietnamese scholar. he's a graduate of princeton and columbia. and, you know, extremely insightful on these issues. without fur adieu let me turn it over. >> judging by nods i think it's a good time to take a break. so let's take five minutes to do what you need to do. stand up and stretch. if you need a little more, that's okay too. >> three minutes. >> we'll wait for you.

>> well, good afternoon. it's great to be among friends. i see so many friendly faces. not just friendly faces, actual friends. like max. like john. like seoul sanders, mike. all of you. about ten of course we know each other since 1971. that's colonel -- but great things. that's how you get to know new people who you trust in the field and who can work with us on some of these issues.

people, you know, if i may reminisce a little bit, i went to school here. graduate school in the 1960s that was the height of the antiwar movement. so even though i was a student in asian studies having nothing mucúo@çó to do with vietnam specifically, but because of my quote/unquote patriotism, i had to go out and argue the case of south vietnam with my -- i still call them my antiwar friends. and i think most have now been able to leave behind. so i'd say there's reconciliation more or less in america. but to say that vietnam war is entirely behind us is not quite true. united states left vietnam an unfinished job. and because it was an unfinished job, that's why we're still here

today. that's why i have the chinese with their -- in the south china sea. it's how president obama now is talking about pivoting back to asia and so on and so forth. so that's why i think in many ways the vietnam war is still a contemporary concern. that's why i'm extremely happy and grateful to steve schurman to give me this chance to talk about whether the vietnam war was immoral or not. as the paper this conference says the antiwar people argue that vietnam was first illegal, second, immoral, and third, unwinnable. so i'm supposed to be doing this second part, whether it's really immoral or not. well, in a famous interview

given of little saigon radio in 1991, the famed author of novel without a name and paradise of the blind had this to say about the morality of the war in vietnam. only after i got to south vietnam -- this is her quote, did i realize that the northern regime was a barbarian regime because it punches blind people's eyes, it plugs up people's ears. in the south people can listen to any international radio they wanted, whether it's french, british or american. such as a civilized society. how bitter it was that a barbaric regime could triumph over civilized society. that was how ironic and erroneous history can be. that was the most expensive

lesson and mistake that the vietnamese people have ever committed. end of quote. she was not alone in her assessment. the colonel who was present at the center of general in independence palace on april 30th, 1975, also defected to france in september of 1990 and the following february went on bbc to present his famous petition of a citizen asking for an entire overhaul of the regime. i think within also that his conversion when it was part of the four party, how do you call it, commission after the paris agreement because he was posted. and there he saw a great deal of south vietnam how among others the south vietnamese press over

there free, how people could demonstrate on the streets against president teo. how people could criticize the corruptions of the government and so on and so forth. so within also asked for total reversal of the policies of north vietnam. strange enough even prime minister before his death in 2008 had this to say about the war. whenever we reminisce about the outcome of the war, if there were millions who were happy, there were also millions who were sad. belated as his judgment was, he was only reflecting a reassessment that millions and millions of vietnamese have made about the validity of the war effort engaged by hanoi in

launching the second indochina war known as the vietnam war in the united states in 1959. reflecting under disastrous decades after the end of the war in 1975 which saw the country plummet to rock bottom poverty and near astronomical inflation. in fact at one point in 1986 the inflation rate in vietnam was 800% that year. as a country had to face two wars against its former allies, one southwest in cambodia and one to the north in china. one of the heroes of the southern revolution since the 1930s advocated in his memoir viewpoints in life that the communist party of vietnam made a clean breast of its mistakes,

rejected socialism and frankly adopt capitalism as a path to the future. another hero of the southern revolution demand up the grey tiger because he fought very well against the french during the anti-french resistance wrote in his memoir entitled letter to mother and national assembly that ho chi minh himself declare in congress in 1951 that he had no thought of his own because from the point of view of theory the vietnam workers party takes len nonism and thought of mao as its compass. this was a final blow to the legitimacy of the regime in vietnam. since the collapse of communism in eastern europe and soviet

union and overthrow in china, the regime has no logical prop left to rely upon except to refer to a mystical ho chi iin both of whom were present at a 1951 congress confirm ho chi mi minh's declaration there about his not having any thought of his own. unable to prove the legitimacy of the regime based on the inexistence of ho chi minh and not able to acknowledge in the committee's revolution, the communist leaders of vietnam went so far as to object any debt and only recently on january 19th, 2014, when a mausoleum was erected to the memory, they had his most important quote displayed on a huge panel in large letter right

at the entrance of his mausoleum saying, the reason we fought the south was on behalf of the soviet union and china. bang. right there. mausoleum, at the entrance. so that's an epitome of reason, of treason as far as the vietnamese p vietnamese patriots, of course, are concerned. the morality of the communist cause in vietnam is that now an open secret that immorality is not only due to the fact that a revolution which is the eyes of the vietnamese population was originally a justifiable cause. that is, the cause of national independence had been hijacked to become a mercenary cause in the name of international communism as order for moscow and beijing. and the enormity of that immorality can be seen in the fact that at least some million vietnamese lives had been

sacrificed to a struggle that was in the end not theirs, that was not their choice. in other words, they are hoodwinked into that cause. the standard interpretation of the war in vietnam, at least the american face of that war, is given as something like this. from 1946 to 1954 the vietnam and ho chi minh fought is war resistance against the french who were intent on reestabli reestablishing their colonial rule in vietnam. in 1954, the country was temporarily divided into two parts at a 17th peril, reunification two years later. however, with the help of the u.s., that promise and ran a rule of terror which forced the

southern population into an insurgency that north vietnam, i.e. hanoi, reluctantly was drawn into supporting. it is the legitimacy of that, from communist point of view, which eventually got the better of the united states and the, quote/unquote, puppet regime in south vietnam leading to the reunification in 1953. this is the standard version of in vietnamese literature inside the country. nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. the communist movement in vietnam as well as many other nationalist parties had to resort to forceful means to resist that repression and win adherence to the cause of independence. but if the nationalist parties only resorted sparingly to acts of terror such as individual

assassinations, the communists systemic massive way. for instance, in the so-called soviet uprising of -- in the summer of 1930, the communists did not two after individuals. they came up with a slogan which means, as far as intellectuals, rich people, individuals are concerned, we must radically dig them up and uproot them completely. with that, they went after this four classes in society in mass, which call, of course, for harsher retaliation by the colonial authorities. more than half a snchs later, one could still find intellectuals in hanoi,:=wz9i o that recall9"o those days and admitted that just thinking back

about that slogan gave us shudders. but a communist party of vietnam merely brushes off this consideration claiming that it was due to what is called leftist infantilism. a passing phrase of the revolution that would disappear with a majority of the movement. in 1954, by their own admission, the chinese communist party only had 5,000 members in the entire country as buck turner's book on vietnamese committees, you know, could tell you, taking it from their own page, their own history. thus, they were clearly in a minority in the face of nationalist pears such as the vietnam national party that

counts tens of thousands throughout the land. yet when ho chi minh left for france to go to the conference in the summer of 1946, those at home carry out a reign of terror that in a few months kill at least 10,000 members of the nationalist parties including most of their leaders including to a french historian in his book about vietnam. "history of vietnam from 1940 to 1953." 1953, in the midst of an intense war, ho chi minh was forced to -- described by ho chi minh, himself as a social revolution of, quote, sky shuttering days and earth shattering nights.

this land reform went through several phases, about six phases all together and did not stop until 1956, three years later even after peace was restored for some two years in july 1954. the systemic nature of the communist policies can be seen again in effect that in those three years, two of which were spent in peace, the amount of casualties is higher than the total amount of soldiers, french soldiers, fallen in nine years of the resistance war. the french force, for instance, lost some 75,000 dead. but the victims of the land reform, an economic historian, the number of casualties of the land reform, in those three years, and only in half of the country, came to 172,000,008

person in which 123,266 person or 72%, in other words, 3 out of 4, were later found to be wrongly classified. can you imagine that? three years of peace. 172,000 deaths. and these are vietnamese people killing vietnamese. nine years of war, the french lost only 75,000. and they were armed. they were plentifully armed. and so it's incredible, the enormity, atrocity of something like that. it's just unbelievable. only such figure could describe why during the course of the entire year, the sieve ville wraps, always in the final years, always ran to the government side and almost never to the communist side.

only such figure could explain something that apparently never could penetrate the thick heads of anti-war movement, anti-war elements, professors and all, including the allies in the liberal media. i'm alluding to two huge mass movement that are indisputably the largest in vietnamese history. the flight of nearly 1 million refugees from north vietnam after 1974 and a movement known as the people running away from the triumphant communists of the 1975. t it was these two exoduses that finally turned world public opinion ward a realistic assessment of what it meant to the vietnamese people, to the common people on the ground who had to live with communism. as early as 1979, john bass and some 74 major intellectuals in the world, took a full-page ad in "the new york times" to complain that the realities of

vietnam, after all, were not what they had thought they fought for that their previous anti-war fervor. in france, the initiator with veteran russell of the so-called stockholm war crimes tribunal, that was anti-u.s., also came to the realization that he was wrong all along. he shook hands with a conservative fellow, and agreed to call an france to come to the rescue of the people. this was the beginning of the doctors without frontiers movement with an anti-war fellow before 1975. so the movement, they rescued people in the south china sea. also some 700 vietnamese

intellectuals, mostly in europe, sign a petition started in belgium asking for fundamental changes in policy in hanoi. after the end of the war, as far as the united states was concerned, there was an intense subterranean debate inside vietnam to who won over whom. that's a quarrel. that even to this day, people are still trying to find out who won over whom. of course, the debate could not be carried out in the open, considering the nature of the regimes in power, but the evidence was such debate can be seen in ridiculous claims like the one made at one point by vice president of the socialist republic of vietnam, that, and vietnam is a million times more

democratic than the so-called democracies of the western world. that debate, however, is mostly carried out in popular places, therefore the most are anonymous. this one, reportedly coined by one of the stars in vietnamese poetry. china insurrection and justice is gone. so did freedom when appeared a general uprising. all these names of streets in saigon, who had streets called freedom, we had a street that was called justice. when the mu nicommunists came i changed the street names to the general uprising, then china insurrection and just as this is

gone, freedom the general uprising. even international relations are described in this. for instance, there's a park. your home is in russia. how come you now stand in one of our parks? you pointed out. freedom and happiness? you're still a long way. look at the examples of russia. even after 70 years, we're still nowhere near them. or with the united states after the resumption of normal relations, so probably ran like this. you used to cuss the u.s. better than anyone. now you sing their praise ten times better than you ever did. used to fight them like no one

else. now your send all your children there for an education. you used to say, u.s. bad, party number one. now the party opens wide its arms begging it for arms. internally, the situation is described as followed. one could find anything then. even by mail, one must now register and stay in line. it's getting to a point whether the widespread feeling in vietnam now that the defeat of south vietnam in a way was a blessing in disguise for the north vietnamese. who without their victory in 1975 would be kept in the dark forever about what it meant to be a civilized society.

again, one would put, and she said in one interview sighing, oh, i've had moments of craziness in my life in different guises, but crying? i've had two occasions to do so. the first time was when the victorious troops entered saigon in 1975. everybody was happy and laughing. i cried. because i realized that my young years, the springtime of my life, had been wasted. i was not impressed by the tall. i was flabbergasted that all the works by south vietnamese authors were freely published. tons of authors that i've never heard of have works displayed in a bookstore and even on street curbs and people had all sort of access to information such as the television, radio, and cassette galores.

the north vietnamese could only be in dream. in the north, all the media and publications are under government control. the people could listen to only one radio, radio hanoi. and only very trustworthy cadres are allowed to listen to the chinese radio. as for the rest of the population, they had only one source of information. the p.a. system that broadcast all day in the streets. in other words, they were allowed to hear only one source. only after i got to the south did i realize that another regime was a barbarian regime because it punches blind people ee 's eye. it plucks up people's ears. no wonder when a journalist publishes two volume works entitled "the winning side" two years ago, it reads more like an account of how the south vietnamese won over the north. in everything except in the military sense, the south won

not only because of its economic wealth, but also because of the superiority of its culture, music, literature, theater, arts and fashion, cuisine, let alone education and even politeness which the northerners were the first to notice when they came into contact with the south vietnamese children. finally, to give you an example of how the south now is compared to the north, even in people's mind, the recent introduction of the chinese giant oil rig, 981, into vietnamese waters, on may 1st 2014, once again demonstrate the superiority of the south over the north even in dealings with china. since at least 2011 because of hanoi's inability to effectively counter the chinese moves in the south china sea, more and more the people are resorting to the

republic of vietnam argument to support vietnam niece claim to sovereignty over the parasells and spratley islands. whereas the chinese could have used the premier's official letter of december 14th, 1958, acknowledging the chinese claim to the parasells and spratle where, s among other. vietnam fought a battle in repel the chinese's aggression in the parasells. therefore, the chinese could never climb that vietnaming a we sesed to the chinese action which is not condoned by international law. the 74 navy personnel who were sacrificed in that battle together with the commanding officer, thus became national

heroes and their portraits and names were paraded through the streets of hanoi in several demonstrations against the chinese incursions. in other words, the legitimacy of the southern government, i.e. the republic of vietnam, is now widely recognized not just by vietnamese, but even by a large majority of vietnamese inside vietnam both in the north and in the south and even by much of the official press inside the country. if you could read the vietnamese press these days. thus one can put to rest the question of whether vietnam, the vietnam war was justified or not. the high moral ground held by the republic of vietnam is now clearly demonstrated. and it has become an irrefutable argument in favor of our side, the side of the republic of vietnam, and its allies, even if that alliance in the end was undone by internal american politics. thank you very much. [ applause ]

>> andy, marine corps. >> yes, i was. >> in the north, that's basically up here. your turf. >> almost three years. >> your podium. >> recon, he's a real war hero. >> let's go -- >> go ahead. >> we're running short of time. i'm going to try to be fast. i had prepared remarks. aisle going to truncate them. in the interest of time, a lot of you have some questions that you'd like to raise. my portion of this presentation is to address the contention that the vietnam war was unwinnable. this was brought to my attention pretty dramatically when i was a student at the naval war college in 1985.

i was having lunch with a professor friend of mine who taught me at the naval academy, and a distinguished historian who was on leave from harvard to the naval college came up to us while we were talking about various strategies that could have applied to the vietnam war and distinguished harvard professor said, i don't know why you're even talking about this. there was nothing that could have been done by the united states to change the outcome of the war. that war was unwinnable. to this day, we still have some academics and observers who contend that the war was unwinnable. i'm not going to go into all the various reasons why they say so. maybe you can address only solve them in q&a. what i'm going to do is come at this from the perspective of a national war planner. i have spent 24 years in the marine corps. i spent three years in vietnam. but subsequent to my tours in vietnam, i was a national-level war planner. i worked on the war plans that the united states developed.

and people who were involved in national-level war plans don't deal with things like ideology, will, and they sort of don't involve themselves in the politics. what they look at is the capabilities of your adversary. and what you can do to thwart those capabilities, and to do so so that you achieve your political aims and thwart their political aims because the whole purpose of military force is always to achieve some kind of political objective or aim. in this case, in vietnam, what were the political aims or what were the war aims of the north vietname vietnamese? the north vietnamese war aim which was clearly articulated as early as 1952 when the first forces in the first indochinese war captured documents from the communist party of vietnam, it stated that the war aim of the communist party, the workers party of vietnam, is to unify

all of vietnam under the party leadership of the communist party and exercise control or influence over the rest of indochina. and i would add probably all of southeast asia. what were the war aims of the united states? the war aims succinctly for the united states was to have south vietnam remain a free, independent, noncommunist state aligned with the west. now, i'm not going to go into the strategy employed by the united states. we don't have that much time. i'm going to very quickly talk about the north vietnamese strategy and then i'm going to talk about a strategy that we might have employed that would have at least given the south vietnamese government a better chance at defeating their adversaries after we left the country. bob and dr. bick i think have

very eloquently explained the impact of the congress, congressional actions in 19s 73 and '74. and live up to our treaty obligations we had in the 1973 accords. i'm not going to go into that, either. if you're looking for proof of that or some of the north's better books on that, "black april" which i think is a recent publication is an excellent book that explains the impact of the removal of aid. you can also look at the testimony of general john murray who was one of the last -- i think he was the last adochet in saigon and dramatically and cogently lays out the impact of not having adequate support from the united states. as bob pointed out, the

communist government, north vietnam, decided to oconquer south vietnam in 1959 using force and to do so to facility that, they established unit 559, which was the organization responsible for resupplying reinforcement of their forces in the south. that organization was responsible for both land and seaborne infiltration. as things developed, they relied more and more heavily on land infiltration and reinforcement. the united states, for several reasons which i won't get into, decided to fight a war of attrition in south vietnam. they viewed the war in the context really of just south vietnam. because of the geneva accords on

the neutrality of laos and cambod cambodia, a fiction was maintained that neither north vietnamese or the americans or south vietnamese would engage in any kind of armed conflict in those two countries. to get around this, the north vietnamese decided that they would develop a strategic plan that would allow them to attack south vietnam anywhere along their border of 1,400 miles. that's a very large border to defend, very difficult and really is at the crux of the difficulties that the south vietnamese military had in 1975. the -- the -- this problem with the border area of laos and cambodia was addressed not only by the americans but more importantly by the vietnamese

very early. president zin brought this up several times. he asked the u.s. embassy what do you intend to do about the road system in laos? it's very dangerous to have that road system. it lends itself to the strategy that the north is going to use against us, especially if they decide to attack us conventionally. president zin was assured the united states would take care of that, that was something that was external to south vietnam. we would take care of that using our state department assets in laos and cambodia and we would resolve that problem for him. general vien, who was the chief of staff of the vietnamese, south vietnamese army, also brought this up several times with the americans and essentially got the same answer. this problem was -- should not have been easily dismissed, and i say that because -- excuse me -- in 1961, secretary mcnamara and secretary rusk sent a joint memo to president

kennedy addressing this very issue. and in that, and this was endorsed by the joint chiefs of staff, it said, and i quote, "it will probably not be possible for the government of south vietnam to win the war as long as theé3 flow of men and suppli remains unchecked and guerillas enjoy a safe sanctuary in neighboring territory." that is a very, very telling analysis by some very professional and intelligent people in 1961. and you sort of wonder why that was not taken into consideration the way it should. when i was in vietnam, i had an opportunity because of the job i had to interview a lot of north vietnamese and vietcong political kaudryes, and some of them, when i asked a question, i had a certain question i had to ask, was, you know, what was the vulnerability? the biggest vulnerability you

had. you're the enemy, what's your biggest vulnerability? and almost without exception, all of them said, logistics. supply. and i would say, well, what do you mean by that? he says, because we never were able to take advantage of any of our successes. we would have a local success, but we wouldn't have enough ammunition. we wouldn't have enough medical supplies. we would got have petroleum. we had a lot of deficiencies in supply. and all we could do was attack and then move away, withdraw, either into our sanctuaries or some place where we could hide. that was a big vulnerability, and what we would call in the planning business their center of gravity. that's where the center of gravity when we define it as a military planner, that's where you attack a key vul nerability of their enemy, and if you do, you will thwart their objectives. i'm going to briefly now, i knoç

we don't have a lot of time, i'm going to briefly go over a sample of one of the war plans that probably would have worked, certainly would have put the south vietnamese in a much better position had we instituted this. i'll just go over here. this is the northern part of south vietnam and the southern part of north vietnam. the ho chi minh trail which comes through generally through two passes but primarily through the lugia pass using route 23 comes down the western spine of the mountains. this is a very, very mountain now terrain, very rugged, very difficult to deal with. during the monsoons, it makes it impossible during those five months to use any vehicle travel in this area. but the north vietnam niece built a system of trails and

roads through this western portion of the range and used it to resupply all of their forces all the way down. >> down to saigon? >> down to saigon. >> below that. >> yeah. one key vulnerability of the ho chi minh trail was the fact that geography can't be changed and geography forced all of these forces, all of these systems to come through and area of about 20 square miles around the laosian town. and because of that, there were certain chokepoints where vehicles could not get through if they were blocked. and remember this, it's important to remember this, from talking to the north vietnamese, not the americans, but talking to the north vietnamese that i spoke to, they needed about

8,000 troops every month to come down the trail to make up for the attrition loss within the country. that's just a steady state. anything less than that and their forces were diminished. in addition to that, they needed about 3,000 tons of ammunition and equipment to come down. that can't be transported on bicycles, can't be transported back. it came by trucks. and the north vietnamese had at one time 8,000 trucks coming down the ho chi minh trail. it was not a small operation. on one day in particular, the u.s. air force found, like, 945 trucks photographed on the ho chi minh trail. so the ability to sustain conventional operations, any kind of sustained attack in the south, was heavily dependent upon truck traffic. truck traffic. those trucks came through five choke points. most of them, there's two here,

there's one here, and two further south at the area called the four corners area. plans were tdeveloped. this was not unknown to the americans and the south vietnamese. general westmoreland wanted to come, wanted to cut the ho chi minh trail. and he knew that this was the key to success. and he tried desperately to convince lyndon baines johnson to allow him to go into laos and cut the ho chi minh trail. because of these-mkómc÷chokepoit could have been done with a relatively modest military force. probably a brigade. each one of those chokepoints. but this is the plan thatç i h looked at this from the perspective as a war planner. i took some plans that were already on the shelf in saigon. we had up plan york, up plan el paso, and 719. unfortunately, all of those were raids, they were short term. they weren't designed to hold

the ground and stay there. mine would be different. what you would do is you would have a division and a third move from kaison, which would be the logistics hubs for this operation, along route 9 to seize chippon. chippone would have the first air calvary attack to link up this force coming from the east. in addition to that, the airborne division of the south vietnamese army would land and seize the other two chokepoints to the south. i would add one other division equivalent to this attack and use it through thailand and i would have and have a u.s. army division at savannakhe.

essentially what this would do is cut vietnam and laos in half. you have two major on tackles here. you have the south china sea. trucks don't go on the south china sea. you have the mekong river which is a huge obstacle. it forces the enemy to use trucks if their going to main feign a level of violence in the south and come down this way. if they move down west, this is a relative area, very flat, very easy for trucks and things to be spotted in that area. there's no triple canopy over here in which too hide your trucks. there's no caves in which to hide your trucks. they have to come this way. with u.s. and military forces occupying those blocking positions and remaining there, you essentially cut off the south from about 80% of their supplies and 100% of their manpower. that's pretty significant. okay. we're cutting short here.

why do i think this is superior to whatever we had done previously? one is, it takes u.s. forces which are conventionally trained not for pacification, conventionally trained, better suited for conventional warfare with experience in korea in barrier defense, to occupy positions that are where you're going to be fighting conventional battle. it forces the north vietnamese to fight conventionally which is to our advantage. in addition to that, to train here, both subsequent parts of the terrain lend themselves to defense. you need to overcome -- you need a factor of three 3-1 to overcome good positions. in addition to that, you cut them off from their weigh station and their supply dumps that they've already established to the south. those sort of die on the vine, and you can use your other forces to put them even more

significantly south of that. it also gets the americans out of the countryside in south vietnam. that was an optics problem. it looks like your occupational army of foreigners in a country. this could take the bulk of the american forces and put them in just one province of north vietnam and southern laos. this is also an area that's largely devoid of any population. it has some, but not many. the dmz is devoid of population. southern laos has very few people in it. tchepone, the major town there, had less than -- there in 1978. u.s. air power and supporting arms which oftentimes inadvertently but unfortunately inflicted casualties on the south vietnam niece sieese civi. essentially take the conventional war and move it here and let pacification and nation building be developed by

the south vietnamese. okay. i'm going to leave it there so we have some time for some q&a. [ applause ] >> unfortunately, that never happened, right? some quick -- yes, sir? >> a very important point about the chinese support at the -- and leading up to it. and what i'm hoping is that our organization, as we've done on discussions, will bring in more information to flush out this pretty much unknown military assistance because you saw the same thing through the mugai pass and hiphuong in the '73, '74 period. they had troops at some point in time working on the ho chi minh trail. that is a logistical issue. the keyword andy talked about is

crucial to understanding how the war was fought and how it could have been fought. and die on the vine was exact words a north vietnamese general i interviewed said to me. he said, if we take out hiphuong, we'll take out the vine because we can't support a division on the land. a number of issues that you raised and i'm hoping we will further flush them out over time because it's really adding something, and with the people in this room, with the knowledge they have such as sal sanders, we're going back to time. we're looking at the flesh that was being put on the bones and a lot of times you don't see this in history books. you sometimes see the flesh, or the bone, you never see the whole body. >> it's something we ought to do, but not something this afternoon in&sa÷ñxiñi few minut. i always like to say the first question for anybody who is oórmíu!ziñiiñ8iy

scholarship on your parts and others. i don't have any argument with facts or facts. what impressed me is that how -- how my own experience being going out there in '64 and believing, of course, we're going to win. and volunteering for two reasons. one, because i was an army career officer, infantry.

two, because i believed, well, one of the papers i read was aggression from the north. from the state department. and a codomino theory and all that. i'm really gung-ho. i was sort of surprised based on what we had been told when i got out there that the young dudes trying to kill me and nearly did on 22, november, '64. you know, carbine fire, both arms, and all that. were from the same village, the southerners, you know, that i was advising. and we're fighting each other and all that. okay. well, i'm not just saying it -- i started to get more pessimistic and i volunteered for another tour to try to help -- >> where's the question, sir? >> i said it was a comment. >> that's all right. go ahead. >> and so, anyway, okay, if you don't have time -- >> go ahead, please. this is important. >> anyway, in 1966, i had a chance to do a study on hamlet security for robert comer, known

as a blow torch from lyndon johnson. and pete dawkins and i co-authored it, and make a long story short, we made recommendations how to change our strategy so we could better compete with the communists at village level. and as army officers, it was politically delegate because we really basically were most impressed with the marine combine action platoons and we want to, you know, do more of that kind of thing with u.s. army. comer loved it. i got to brief in the vietnamese language the vietnamese general staff. and then they staffed it to death and it was never implemented and then to make a long story short, i will see -- by 1973, i was the interpreter for the united states delegation to the military commission. by that, for a lot of reasons, i believe that we were not going to win, that nixon's so-called plan, secret plan to end a war was really just to keep it going. and when they asked me to go

back to the prime minister's office, working for william colby, i declined because i -- my wife is from vietnam, my daughter was a year old and i didn't want them caught in the crossfire when hanoi launched the final campaign. up none of these things is mutually exclusive. that's my point. >> i would agree with at least 90% of what you said, 10% i probably didn't understand or don't know, but this gentleman was a real hero in vietnam and a real patriot because he was being told you cannot keep extending in vietnam. we know you're the best american linguist we have over there, you interpret, but if you want to advance your career, you need to come back and go to the command and general staff school, to the war college, and he decided he was going to serve his country and try to help us with the war rather than get the tickets punched to help him go on to be a flag officer. i have the greatest respect for him. i also am a great fan of the

marines' combined action platoons and we could have a whole other program on mistakes we made because we were there a long time. we had a lot of people. we made some horrible mistakes. we had some cases of just absolute horrendous war crimes. william cal should have been taken out and shot after a fair trial. what they did was worse than you read about. but that was not the exception. even john kerry who at one point talked about genocide and we were behaving like gingus khan, he went on "meet the press" in 2001 and was asked about it, oh, those are the words of an angry word, and, oh, our facts in vietnam behaved as honorably as in any other war. that wasn't quite an apology, but, you know, a lot of us, when he told congress -- one of our brothers who had just come back from the war and said we were 60% to 80% of us were stoned 24 hours a day. he didn't see much of vietnam. he was only there for three or four months and he was fairly

isolated in the delta, but the things he said, you know, i think he bears more responsibility than anyone for the reception we received. when i came back in '71, end of '71, we were told don't wear your uniform into town. you know, the situation was such -- i had one friend who jokingly said, if they ask me where i was the last year, i'm going to say i just got out on parole as a child molester because people will think higher of me for being a child molester than having served in vietnam, and it's sad. next question. guy head, sorry. >> mike, he was a p.o.w. >> yes. >> john kerry, by the way, killed an unarmed vietnamese -- >> yeah. >> -- teenager. >> yeah. >> so he -- >> that's why he got a silver star. >> guilty. >> wounded. he'd already been shot to the ground. that's another story. it's not a war crime. because under the law of conflict, if you don't surrender, even if you're running away, you're a lawful target. but it certainly was not

conspicuous gallatry. >> the target was on a boat. >> he was on the ground. he'd been shot by i think a .50 caliber, knocked to the ground, got up, unarmed trying to limp away when kerry tried to chase him down and heard a shot and he put himself in for a silver star. >> other questions? >> my name is john. retired army. i want to inquire about the up plan el paso, and this is outside the context of your talk. but was one reason that that plan did not get adopted the fact that washington was afraid of chinese intervention as happened in the korean war? >> yeah, that -- a paper had been written on upland el paso, which he said there was a huge logistic constraints on it as well. it was a risky operation, to be

sure. but great results sometimes require great risk. i don't think so. i went back and read the national intelligence estimates na that period, and there's no evidence at all that the chinese were going to intervene if we went into laos. it's a different story if we went up to north vietnam. but in southern laos, no, there was no indication at all that the chinese were going to intervene if we did something like that. >> we have time for one more question. >> yes. comment. may i add something? >> that mike or this mike. >> may i add something to colonel findlayson's presentation? i talk at length to a colonel who defected and he wrote about 12 books already about his experience. and one of them i translated is called "from enemy to friends." published by the naval institute

press. and what he told me, that it's true that americans were afraid of the intervention. the chinese did intervene in 1956, '57. they brought in 320,000 of their troops. and the latest revelation is that, you know, senator john mccain, then a pilot, was not shot down by vietnamese but by a russian and they just interviewed that russian about it. now, what he told me is that the general was in charge of what are called 559 which mean s totally in charge of -- >> what it comes from, they started the whole thing in may

of '59. >> that general told him, this is a secret you better keep until your death. that is, if the americans only not tried to go out way to the north, that will bring in the chinese, but if only they would go and attack the starting point of 559, the north vietnamese have to pull all their -- >> forces. >> -- vpa back to the north and there would be no support for the southern insurrection. as simple as that. they didn't have to go very far. they just basically said, one division and hold on for a number of weeks or months or something like that. and the north pulled all their vpa back. >> just very quickly, i don't want to beat a dead horse here, but he made a great quote that was in an article and re-printed

in "the wall street journal." he was interviewed by a leftist journalist in paris in 1995. he was asked a lot of good questions. i recommend that article if you get it. one was, they asked, how could the americans have won the war? just two sentences, answer -- cut the ho chi minh trail inside laos. if johnson granted westmoreland's request to enter laos and block the ho chi minh trial, they could not have won the war. that's a pretty definitive statement on his part and coming from his background, i think it's pretty cogent. >> okay. one more. one more question? quickie. >> what is my opinion of that war, it was a matter of weak and strong to lose and to win. win or lose, it up to a lot of other factors. economic, political issues all over the world. especially the countries that are participating in the war.

>> that's true. >> chinese, russian, american. or anybody else. >> one thing that people have mentioned or alluded to, and the audience represent, is people. the vietnamese people were occupants of southern china. as we know china today. khan on trying to oconquer peope forced the vietnamese, as we know today, down south into what we know as vietnam today. they occupied basically the coast. who lived on the coast? the malao polynesians. they were forced off the coast up into the highlands. i spent two years with them up in the highlands with my compatri compatriots.

as with the tribes, beautiful people. beautiful people. they had a written language, unlike half of the other tribes to the north. they didn't have a written language. and their mythology, a father had two sons. the father had two gifts. one was a book and one was a sword. one took the sword, one got the book. the book was a spinoff. the sword was all those that were even the people of the other tribe look at them, oh, they're the savages. the -- but i loved them. i loved the vietnamese people. there was friction between the vietnamese and the others going back centuries. but as an american living with

the -- in the midst of that, in special forces, we were ordered out in 1970 basically except for operations going into laos and cambodia. so we were leaving in december '70 and was closing up the "b" team. and converting our border camps to arvin ranger border defense camp, battalions. each one of them. party for the americans, for the americans, americans for the multenyards. the vietnam niece. the multenyards throw a party for us. the multenyards have a lot of country music passed down their history vocally and in song, and they were singing this new song.

and it was "you came here ten years ago." your motto was "liberate the oppressed." "you are now leaving, we're still not free. maybe it would have been better that you never came at all." >> let's get an opportunity for some more questions if we can. >> we're out of time i think. >> oh, one question there, ma'am. >> okay. >> i have a question for colo l colonel. in your opinion, if the u.s. continue to support vietnam financially and politically, will south vietnam win the war or at least not fall into the -- >> 1973, we didn't renege on our promises to the south vietnamese government. is that what you're asking? >> yeah, even if it's 197 5rks

if the u.s. continues to support south vietnam financially or politically, will south vietnam win the war or at least not fall into north vietnam? >> it's still problematic because when the united states left vietnam, they still left the sanctuaries. ió when i talked about that operation there, that would change that 400-mile border to a 200-mile frontage. much more, much more easily ed vietnam forces. the problem we left with them is we left them with not only not enough ammunition and equipment, we also left them with no reserve. they had no reserve to commit when the north vietnamese attacked. all of their reserve or strategic reserve units were up in "i" corps and were already committed and the enemy knew that. they knew this was the time to strike and they struck. whether or not they would have won given the support of the

united states, i'm not sure. certainly if we had retained air power, i think it would have been a different story. supported them with air power. >> that's the key. the 10 days of bombing or 12 days of bombing before and after christmas of 1972 was the first time in the entire war we followed the advice of the joint chiefs of staff and really hit them hard. by hanoi's own count, something like 1,800 people were killed. you know, with this kind of b-52 bombing. it was incredibly precise bombing. a plane would come in, get fired at by a sam-2 missile just as load was released and it would fall where it wasn't intended. otherwise, it was very effective bombing. by the end of that bombing campaign, hanoi was out of sam missiles. they were totally vulnerable. and we had -- we still had b-52s on gaum in the philippines and what killed us is when congress

came along in may and said you cannot spend any money on any more bombing, no matter what they do. my own sense is we didn't -- you know, the paris agreements were not perfect, but they were effective because i knew if they breached them, we could come back and hit them again. they didn't want us to hit them again. we had gone through how many years of war with one arm tied behind us? and finally, i -- tom moore, the chairman of the joint chiefs in that period, came down and spoke to my seminar and uva some years back. he's been gone now for a while. and he talked about nixon calling him in and saying, okay, you guys have been complaining about being handcuffed, bring me a plan. and our p.o.w.s talked about how the music in the street stopped. the guards all of a sudden were very salacious, would bring them coffee in the morning. one look in the eye of any north vietnamese officer's face, you could see they were defeated. they finally realized they were at war with a superpower.

my own sense is, had congress not intervened, at least the north would not have taken over the south, you know, in the next, you know, few years. now, whether they would continue trying, you know, i don't have a crystal ball, but i do know their will was hit really hard because of that bombing. and also the effectiveness of the south vietnam niece troopet the spring offensive in '72. they had courage and did fight with courage. >> question, sir? >> yeah, the question of congressional bugout and betrayal. do you think that the anti-war movement had any impact at all on congress? >> it drove the decision. bill colby was a good friend and bill told me he wanted to go up and brief congress. they wouldn't lisen to him. they thought he was lying. instead they listened to garrett po

porter and others we invited to be here today and decided not to show up. the decisive factor was sad. mostly young people. some of them couldn't have found vietnam on an outlined map of the world but they'd been told we were evil, we were doing the wrong thing and had something to do with nixon who they didn't like. it was a tragedy because we betrayed, you know, millions, tens of millions of people we had repeatedly promised to protect from communists. >> final comment. >> can i add an optimistic thing here? hopefully there will be a new book coming out within maybe the next year or two addressing or  readdressing the role of the hanoi lobby an campaigns in '73 to 75 against, in congress. the earlier one was done by professor lou fanning. who did "betrayal in vietnam" which dealt with congress and the war. that was a good start. more is going to be coming out

on this issue. roger has been slogging away at this for decades. i have two, andoo, and a couple people. this will be addressed spec eed specifically as an issue by itself. i think you can be you are prized by what you see. a lot of people who you think didn't know where vietnam were actually were much more hard core communists than had been publicly known. what you're going to see is this was not a bunch of people on the street. this is a well-planned operation that came right out of hanoi. >> most of them were good, patriotic americans who had been told we were blocking before the elections, we were blocking self determination.

if i believed their version of the facts, i might be marching with them. these were not evil people trying to do something bad. and then they persuaded the government to stash defeat in the drawers of victory: >> pleased at the victory, they had had, in the north, that he was catholic. like many catholics, that was the thing, and buddhists, became silent. so he joined the very accomplished professional out sert.

he joined the army of vietnam. he said to me when we were leaving, the french were there to use them and to take. we were there to teach them to take over. and he appreciated that. in '70, i got my chance to put my boots on the ground in cambodia.

i was getting my reports that the mva, they were moving 40 kilometers back from the border. i went up there, what's going on? i was then briefed by the army general, i need your troops to be advanced in division going across. i said sir, i didn't know anything about this authorization. we're prohibited from going -- >> oh, no, here's the aut riization.

i said they're not there. how come they got the word before i did? the point is the north vietnamese had extremely good intelligence on what was going on in the south. they had their moles working all the way up to the general's staff. his outfit had sneaky troops going over there with him. you probably didn't reelize right now that the deputy commander in danang was picture

ed for all the operations on the ho chi minh trail. the picture of him in hanoi, brigadier general. he was in on all the operations. you can't forget about the politics and the people that. 's what it's all about.

>> i got out of the joint staff. i was the office of the chiefs of staff, unconventional warfare in direct action division when i know i got out of yun foumpl.

one of the project there, an air force guy comes in to me and says the b-52 strikes across the border, we were sent in to do bomb damage assessment. not a good mission because they knew we were coming after the smoke cleared. invariably, we were finding nothing destroyed. it wasn't until i'm working in mufty in sicivilian clothes for this outfit that i found out why. they found out that the b-52 coming out of guam was putting out a notem.

notice to airmen of commercial airliners. their routes, their times, their attitudes were two days before the mission occurred. they knew two days in advance. don't they your enemy is stupid. they're smart as he lirks l. >> i often wonder if i'm alive today because my office is just a very small, special projects office. we traveled all over the country, but we never told anybody we were coming.

i really had wondered if we were sending messages ahead. anyway, we only rented the room untim a half an hour ago and era don't have time for another hour. so thank you for coming.