Dan Snow's History Hit - Pacification in the Vietnam War

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. It was one of the most costly conflicts that the U.S. has ever fought, causing immense loss of life on all sides. US intervention was defined by the strategy of 'pacification', but what exactly did this entail, and did it really work? Dan is joined by the expert on this subject, historian Robert Thompson, author of Clear, Hold, and Destroy, to learn about pacification in Vietnam's Phú Yên province. John Harrison, an American veteran who served with the 101st Airborne, will also be sharing his experiences about what pacification looked like on the ground.Produced by James Hickmann and mixed by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, which allowed the Nixon administration to withdraw American troops from Vietnam. They were signed on the 27th of January 1973, and by the end of March, the vast majority of the US military personnel had been sent home. much the vast majority of the US military personnel had been sent home. America's direct military involvement begins in 1965. This was the end of eight years of Vietnam War, or known as the American War in Vietnam. In reality though, neither North nor South Vietnam stuck to the provisions of these accords and the war between them would rage on for another two years. And in early 1975, a massive offensive by the North Vietnamese army that spring saw the conquest of the South and the unification of Vietnam, the creation of the Socialist

Republic of Vietnam. Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, has been renamed Ho Chi Minh City to honour the North Vietnamese leader who died in 1969. The surrender of Saigon put an end to the war that has ravaged Vietnam for nearly 35 years. The war had cost the lives of something like 200,000 to 250,000 South Vietnamese troops. Over a million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters were killed, as well as 60,000 US combat personnel. Other countries fought in Vietnam as well. South Korea were there. They lost 4,000 dead. Australia lost 500 dead. But probably the most disturbing figure is that something like over two million civilians in North and South Vietnam were killed in the conflict. They were caught up in the chaos of the urban warfare that affected the towns and cities of South Vietnam.

They were killed by the giant bombing campaigns that ravaged much of the countryside. Or they were just victims of the struggle for control in the provinces of South Vietnam. Victims of the struggle for control in the provinces of South Vietnam. Full-scale American military involvement might have started really in 1965, but actually American interest involvement in the conflict went all the way back to the 1950s. After the French had left, the CIA propped up the premier of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, paying off, intimidating his opponents and preventing coups and sending military advisors to train and re-equip his army. By 1957, the communist South Vietnamese opponents of this Diem government launched a campaign of terror and assassination.

We now call them the Viet Cong. They launched an insurgency. Government ministers were killed and officials. And over the next few years, the Viet Cong would They launched an insurgency. Government ministers were killed and officials. And over the next few years, the Viet Cong would grow into a fully fledged insurgency that the South Vietnamese army was unable to contain. Thousands of people were assassinated as the Viet Cong sought to gain control of the country. Sensing the vulnerability of the South Vietnamese regime, the US decided to intervene. In a way, they saw an opportunity. They saw an opportunity to showcase America's ability to conduct counterinsurgencies, to stop the spread of guerrilla movements that were supported by their strategic adversaries, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. This was a chance to halt the spread of communism in Vietnam and not just

Vietnam but through Southeast Asia as well. In August 1964 there was a controversial disputed incident in the Gulf of Tonkin where North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an attack on American destroyers and this helped convince the US administration that it needed to directly intervene in Vietnam. And by the end of 1965, there were 175,000 American combat personnel in Vietnam. We're all so familiar through film and television and books with some of the images, we get a sense of the Vietnam War. But in this podcast, I want to talk about the shape that American intervention actually took on the ground. We want to focus on something called the pacification strategy. And that idea was simple enough. And you may have seen this reflected in

some of the movies that you can remember about the Vietnam War. The idea was to gain support for the government of South Vietnam, to prop up that government from the largely rural population and to cut those communist rural guerrillas off from key sources of recruitment and resupply and safe harbour. The Americans would combine military and civilian efforts. You might call it state building nowadays. They'd first of all deploy overwhelming military force. They'd send in air and ground force to secure a town, an area, so that civilian personnel can kind of take over and build the architecture of a state. Win hearts and minds. They can build the schools and hospitals and infrastructure. And pacification came to define the American and Vietnamese experience of this war. Its efficacy is still debated to this day,

and the importance of talking and learning about pacification can be seen through, frankly, quite similar efforts and their failure in Afghanistan more recently. The expert on this subject is a historian called Robert Thompson. He's the author of Clear, Hold and Destroy. And he's joining me on this podcast now to talk about what pacification was and what it looked like on the ground. I'm going to ask him whether it worked and can ever have worked. We're going to focus on the province of Fuyen. It's located right on the ground. I'm going to ask him whether it works and can ever have worked. And we're going to focus on the province of Phu Yen. It's located right on the east coast. So a long way from,

frankly, North Vietnam or some of the routes of infiltration through Laos and Cambodia. And we're also joined on this episode by John Harrison. He's a veteran, an American veteran of the Vietnam War. And he served in a rapid reaction force, part of 101st Airborne. He'll be sharing his experiences with us as well. So without further ado, let's jump in. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Rob, thanks for coming on the podcast, buddy. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. If you look at a war like the Second World War or the First World War, when you know where the Germans are, you've got to land on the beaches of Normandy and drive them back,

or you've got to puncture the Western Front in Northern France and Belgium in the First World War. The Vietnam War wasn't like that, right? Can you describe to me, summarize the strategic challenge that faced US troops when you look at the whole of South Vietnam? So when the US ground forces arrived in Vietnam in 1965, they're faced with basically like a dual threat. They arrive initially to protect U.S. installations, airfields, mostly from the National Liberation Front, its paramilitary arm, the PLAF. its paramilitary arm, the PLAF. And so they're there to provide security from what really amounts to like a guerrilla force that's internal. That's part of this ongoing civil war.

But then there's also that fear of that conventional aspect. And that's having the People's Army of Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Army. And so they're seeing a conventional and an unconventional threat. And so when the U.S. military's mission changes from being defensive to go on the offensive by 66, it's facing a war that it's not like the ones it had seen in the world wars. It's fighting a conventional army and an unconventional army and a foe that can easily shift between the two. There isn't a continuous front line, right? You might be fighting way down south in the Mekong Delta where these irregular forces are carrying out small unit attacks on villages and towns. You might be right near the North Vietnamese border,

you could be anywhere in the whole of South vietnam correct there's really no lines of well that side is the enemy this is not only a place that's really like that it's going to be the dmz where north and south meet but even then further in you're going to have the NLF's paramilitary arm operating. So lines get blurred really easy, even just around the environs of the capital of Saigon. The safe areas quickly go away. So it's really a war without fronts. John Harrison served with a rapid reaction force in the 101st Airborne. So he was responsible for the kind of kinetic phase of pacification, the aggressive phase,

which is that you're deployed to crush communist incursions in real time. They were deployed by helicopter, they were fast moving, they had big range, and so they were the spearhead of the American strategy of pacification. He's joining me now to tell us more about his role. John, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Would you mind telling everyone about your experience in 101st in Vietnam? I guess start by kind of saying when you were there, and then I'll ask you a little bit about what you were

doing. We arrived in Vietnam in October of 67 and went to the field in the middle of November of 67. It takes quite a while to accustom yourself to the heat of the place, at least when we got there in the place where we were, which is about in the middle of Vietnam. We originally were deployed up in the Cambodian islands. We came down to make a parachute jump, but some dumb lieutenant had left the plans in his Jeep, and the parachute jump got canceled. And we were sent to Phan Thiết to be the final reaction force for II Corps, and there was a task force there. We were really what in the old days would be called a legion.

It was a self-contained unit. We had our own helicopters. We had our own dust off. We had our own gunships. We had our own artillery. We had both an eight inch battery and a 105 battery, all in direct support. At one point, I actually had a destroyer offshore that was mine, which was kind of cool too. That's very cool. When you say you're in this sort of legion, you would have been highly

mobile, right? So you could be fighting in several different places, not necessarily on a linear front line. Exactly. All of that, if we were moved from where we were, we were going into a battle somewhere. Somebody was in contact with the enemy and either A, needed help, or B, we would be put in to be a blocking force. So they're pushing them in a certain direction and we'd be put in. We would block them by helicopter. And it could be 100 miles away. If there was nothing going on in Phan Thiat, Binh Dinh province, they'd put us on helicopters. We'd go to Dalat, we'd go to Nha Trang, we'd go to Song Mao, we'd go wherever. We actually went to Phu Yen. have the image in their head of apocalypse now, you know, these mobile helicopter-borne forces kind of going into areas and clearing out Viet Cong, guerrillas, etc. When you were landing, what was your job as a young subaltern? Were you doing those jungle patrols that we're familiar

with from Hollywood? Or was it waiting? Was it trying to garrison a village or a town and providing some sort of security there? It depended on the mission. If we were going in in support of somebody, the LZ would either be hot or cold. If it was hot, it means we would be drawing fire when we went in. Hueys, helicopters, they have a thin aluminum skin. The bullets just go straight through. They don't even slow down much. And of course, the doors would be open, so the bullets would go across when you went in. We would get out of the helicopter as rapidly as possible and first form a defensive perimeter around the LZ. My platoon was almost always the first platoon in and the last platoon out. And the first platoon in, we had the mission

of setting up the LZ. If there was somebody on the LZ, we would immediately assault those people to try and shut them down. So the other lifts could come in. A lift could be as many as eight, ten helicopters, usually was around seven or eight, and could carry six to nine men per chopper, next lift might be an hour away. So you might be in a very hot area and you'd be alone for a while. This is the type of combat that we have to imagine playing out right across South Vietnam, from the Mekong Delta in the south all the way up to the mountains of the north of the country. And importantly, it had to be followed by constructive rebuilding. The US and South Vietnamese governments came to believe that stability, lasting government control could only be achieved if they're able to follow up this violent phase with gaining the support

and the consent of the South Vietnamese people. What is the strategy then? So if it's a war without fronts, it's going on everywhere, what does the US try? The Americans realise that the key to winning this war is to create a stable South Vietnam. And to do that, pacification appears to be the answer. And that means providing security so that the Saigon government becomes legitimate in the eyes of the people and also is able to control enough of the country where it can become economically viable. It doesn't have to worry about fighting battles everywhere, especially to try to create a functional state by putting more territory under control of a government that the United States wants in Saigon.

And the way to do that is with all these conventional forces the U.S. pumps in. forces the U.S. pumps in. Initially, the idea was, well, we'll help build a South Vietnamese military that can do it. But then there's fears after 1963 that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam isn't ready. It can't do this by itself. So the quick answer is, well, the U.S. Army and the Marines and other free world forces can come in and they can do it faster, more effectively. So we get conventional warfare as this answer to help spread pacification, help create a South Vietnam that will be free of communist influence. And that's great on paper. It's great when they're talking about these ideas. In practice, it's a whole lot harder because the North Vietnamese and their communist allies in

South Vietnam are thinking similarly, and that they're trying to pacify areas in South Vietnam, but for the communist cause. They're trying to wipe out what they suspect are pro-democratic or at least pro-Saigon elements. And so everyone's caught in between. So in some provinces, you might have two competing state building exercises going on at the same time. You've got people trying to build a communist state with local South Vietnamese communists, people might call them the Viet Cong, supported by North Vietnamese allies. And then alongside that, in the same town or village, you may have guys trying to build a South Vietnamese US-friendly government. This may sound a little bit perhaps familiar to the kind of warfare in Afghanistan from more recently.

a little bit perhaps familiar to the kind of warfare in Afghanistan from more recently? Yeah, good examples for modern times would be like Afghanistan, because it's really like a village war, a hamlet war, a province war, because it's going to vary. But a lot of these Vietnamese will know people on the other side, they'll get caught between having to choose. Sometimes they don't even get a choice because the Viet Cong might come in and abduct family members and tell them, OK, don't show up to work for the Saigon government tomorrow. Or they come in and it's time to pay your taxes to the NLF. And that means rice. But then a couple of weeks later later the Saigon government comes in it's like time to pay your taxes and so they're caught between two and they're going to have to choose but usually the choice is who do you sometimes fear the most or who is most prevalent

in a lot of cases it's going to be the communists are the most prevalent. They're able to, in a lot of parts of South Vietnam, infiltrate more effectively. And so at least in 65, 66, the South Vietnamese military is facing a serious threat to its existence just because they don't control a lot of the countryside. The communist influence is just pretty much everywhere they look beyond the cities. Yeah, so this is what's so interesting about your work. You've really dug deep into one particular area. Let's talk about pacification, maybe through the lens of the region that you've chosen. We can imagine a kind of rural part of South Vietnam,

the American high command, the South Vietnamese government, this whole area is actually crawling with communists, both infiltrating from the north and local homegrown Viet Cong, local communists. Let's get in there and do something about it, right? That's what pacification is. Correct. So I chose Phu Yen. It was a province no one really had studied. It was a province no one really had studied. It was interesting because out of the 44 provinces, it just appeared average. And I just wanted to know how a province that was supposedly really, really well run and how this great stuff said about it by higher ups.

But all this inspection reports were like, this place is terrible in 1971. It was like, how did a war go so poorly in this nondescript province? The more I studied, the more I realized the province wasn't really that mundane. It was really important for rice production. It produced enough rice to feed battalions of troops. to feed battalions of troops. The money that generated out of it would have been really useful for purchasing weapons, paying soldiers, not to mention just controlling the population

for legitimacy of any government. So when the U.S. decides to go on the offensive in early 66, their focus is to push the communists as far back as they can and secure the rice harvest. And so the war for Phu Yen is really just about controlling the rice. And that amounts to this one river valley of the province where the rest of it, which is mountainous, people go into it, but it's left to the communists for most of the war. And so the South Vietnamese and the Americans decide that they want to get a handle on this.

What is the first thing that happens? So what do they do? The first thing they do is the United States sends in the U.S. Army and ROK Marines, Republic of Korea Marines. And the U.S. Army and ROK Marines, Republic of Korea Marines, they go in and they secure the rice harvest so that when the South Vietnamese farmers go out, they're protected. So that the guerrillas don't come down and try to tax them or interfere with the production at all. Because they know just how important that is. So it's a strange mixture of trying to seize territory and color the map in blue or red or whichever color. And actually alongside that, even maybe more importantly,

that just finding enemy forces, fixing them and killing. Yes. So a big part of the Vietnam War, and everyone's probably heard of it, is like search and destroy. Find the enemy and destroy it. And an argument I made was that search and destroy essentially becomes pacification. Because the logic is if you can find the enemy that's causing all these security issues and you destroy it, it's no longer standing in the way of pacification. in the way of pacification. Now you can pacify the population without that threat posed by that enemy force that's been trying to undo all your efforts. John remembers how search and destroy missions

played out on the ground. When we would go into an area, we would flood the area with patrols. And when you do that, you limit the enemy's ability to move around as well. And you could drive them out. They've got to get water. They've got to get food. They've got to dispose of their waste products. They can't have them where they are because there are people sniffers flying overhead. And if there's human urine or fecal material on the ground, the people sniffers in

a helicopter are going to find that and they're going to send us to go get them. So they would literally carry their stuff out. One time we took back, I told my company commander, we took back six towns today. We were getting lifted out to go back to Phan Theat. He said, no, John, we took back five towns and visited the six because we couldn't go in because we didn't have any maps. And if you don't have maps, you don't have air support, you don't have artillery, you don't have anything. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The North Vietnamese army, although it is a conventional army and it would have uniform troops and it would have armor, I guess, and slightly more heavy weaponry. They knew they were fighting the world's most powerful army in the USA, right?

They very rarely would stand and fight and have kind of conventional battles against them. Correct. They rarely did. They knew not to get into a full blown battle with the Americans, at least not on the Americans' terms. And they witnessed what the Americans could do if that happened. There was US battleships that were brought in to bring in artillery support. There were B-52 strikes. So they saw what the US could do if they got caught. And the peculiar geography of Vietnam was just so perfect for the communist side because it's just incredibly long and thin and all the way down. It's like a, there's like

an out of bounds running track down the whole side of it, which is Laos and Cambodia, which the communists could operate in and the Americans couldn't, you know, the Americans couldn't be seen to invade a supposedly sovereign country. Correct. Yeah. So throughout the war, the Ho Chi Minh Trail coming down from the north to supply the communist forces operating in South Vietnam, is operating in South Vietnam. Much of it is going through the Laos and it's supposedly off limits. We know now that the CIA is running a shadow war up there to try to stop that.

The U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy are running interdiction campaigns to try to bomb the trail out of submission. But as quickly as the trail is bombed, it's rebuilt. We also know now that the Chinese had sent engineers down to help with reconstruction efforts. So there's this whole like shadow war happening over this logistics resupply route, just to keep the war going for the communists in the South. But I guess, Rob, what's amazing is like, virtually no part of South Vietnam is more than 100 miles away

from one of these neighboring countries. And, you know, if you're the 101st Airborne or the, you know, you can't chase over the border. So you mentioned the Viet Cong and North Vietnam being chased out of a region. Well, they can lick their wounds across the border, right? And wait for the Americans to move on and to go and pacify somewhere else. And then they just infiltrate straight back in.

Absolutely. The 95th Pavan Regiment gets pretty beat up after a while. And so it makes a decision. It needs to leave Phu Yen to convalesce. It heads right to Cambodia. And so it gets to Cambodia and the US military chases it all the way to the border. Can never bring it to battle. And the 95th lives on. It gets to Cambodia, convalesces, and then it returns. If you know the terrain, you can cover 50 miles or so pretty

quick if you want to avoid getting hit by gigantic US airstrikes. You know, I bet that was motivation enough to make that journey. Oh, absolutely. Even with US defoliation campaigns that try to make everything easier to spot from the air, that part of the Central Highlands is very rugged, a lot of river valleys. If you don't want to be seen, you're not going to be seen.

The jungle would prove to be just as dangerous an adversary as the Viet Cong, as John explains. That's one thing people don't really realize about Vietnam, is you could be in one area, you could literally be in a desert, sand dunes and so forth, a little to the north of Phan Thiet, there was an area like that. You could be in triple canopy jungle where during the height of the day you could barely see because it's dark. There's very little light that penetrates through triple canopy jungle. That was the kind of area you would be going into and one time we spent almost all day cutting through bamboo. You could run into a line of bamboo that could be any

distance deep and you're not going through there without cutting so I would have like three guys up cutting with machetes four guys sharpening machetes and when the guys up got tired then they would switch and we'd get more people in what a constant progression and you cut cut top, you cut bottom, you push it out of the way. Top, bottom, push it out of the way. You're not making much progress, but you're making a lot of noise.

And if there's somebody on the other side of that bamboo, you could be coming out, you could be three feet away from the end of it. And you can't see them, but they can hear you. And they know exactly where you are. So sometimes, other than the people that are standing up doing the cutting, everybody else is down pretty low, because now and then there'd be a whole bunch of bullets that would come through. So for Yen, let's come back to this area here. So the Americans are successful. They drive these

communist troops out and they collect the harvest and they're trying to facilitate governmental structures and help the South Vietnamese government kind of extend their writ. And then I guess the main combat units would then head off and do something else, right? Head off to another region because you can't just have them these very expensive huge resources of a u.s brigade or division just locked down in one area just kind of on guard duty right so by 1967 first field force which is like the the entity that controlled u.s units in that region was of the opinion that oh yeah we got this one in the bag contact with the enemy is getting lower we've secured a lot of the objectives then we haven't brought that main enemy force to battle but and we've probably beaten it up enough it's not really

going to pose a threat so they start moving a lot of the U.S. combat power to other parts where it's needed. Eventually, we get the Battle of Dokto that happens in the central highlands that's raging. So that takes a lot of their focus away from Fuyen. So in Fuyen, you're left with a handful of U.S. units that are on screening operations. So they're thinking that pacification is going well,

and that the war itself is not won, but that light in the end of the tunnel should be coming up soon. And is that true? Were they right about that? They could not have been more mistaken. There's a commander who's like, oh, we don't think that the communists can do anything in this region anymore. Like there's a commander who's like oh we don't think that the communists can do anything in this region anymore like there's no large conventional communist force capable of mounting offensive operations like we've done a great job at beating them up and then we get 1968 ted offensive and all of a sudden they're proven disastrously wrong and that the war enters its most cataclysmic phase because these units they thought they had rendered combat ineffective in fact have been convalescing

and are now out seeking battle so like that 95th regiment is back from cambodia and it launches an attack on the province capital of tuiwa city and is right there giving the Americans and the South Vietnamese and the South Koreans hell. And everyone's like, where'd they come from? And they went right to an area of operations. They just, in the middle of the night, no one even noticed them until early in the morning. They're attacking a U.S. artillery radar station. It must have been tough for U.S. morale because here's Fuyen. It's right on the coast.

It's as far from Cambodia as you can get. It's been pacified. And here it is back as an absolute cauldron of war once again. It must have just sapped at the morale, really, of American planners thinking, do we just do this whole process again now? The communists get unlucky in that there's a rapid reaction force of the Americans and Fuyan had just come off the line from Dokdo. So they kind of help save the day.

And eventually, after like three attempts, the Americans and the South Vietnamese, the South Koreans defeat the communist head offensive. But the communists had achieved the goal of setting back pacification. All that work had been undone. It was all that destruction, the building of new hamlets, all that infrastructure, everything had to be redone again. And so there was that aspect of it. And I guess, Rob, if you're one of these local officials and you're maybe thinking which way to go and you've been thinking, well, the South Vietnamese government and the US seem here to stay. And then the next year, just the North Vietnamese and the Vietnamese guerrillas are back. You're thinking,

this is not worth my family, my livelihood. I'm not going to head off to work every day for the new South Vietnamese government, nice new shiny officers, when these guys could come back at any time. Yeah, so everyone's been talking about, oh, security's great. And you're like, well, in an instant, it was proven not so great. In fact, terribly the opposite. And then the U.S. senior province advisor remarked that none of the people in the province seemed to care. They didn't come out and cheer that the communists had been defeated. They just went about their own business.

And he was like, oh, no, this isn't good. The attitude of the people is just indifference. And that meant that they're just waiting out to see who wins. Just trying to survive, right? Yeah. So neither side really had the people on board. And for the communists, that's fine. The people then aren't standing in the way.

But the Saigon government explicitly needed them on their side. They needed their help to fight against the communist infiltration, to let them know when there's going to be terrorist attacks, movements. And so that indifference played against US-backed efforts at pacification. It was like almost the worst outcome. The only thing worse would have been if the people had been upset that the communists had lost. And I guess the curious thing about the Tet Offensive, so early 1968, on one level, it is a military victory for the American South Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese, the communists, they turn up, they fight, they try and take them on at their own game, and they get obliterated. But politically, it's now seen as a turning point, seen as a setback

for the US. So what's going on there? I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions by the U.S. as its great victory. Like, okay, now we did destroy the enemy. Look at all these losses they've suffered. Now we have this great opportunity to maybe finally bring an end to the war that we want. So the enemy's losses mean they can't stand in the way of spreading pacification really quickly.

The Tet Offensive was a gigantic, all-out surprise assault launched in January 1968 by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. The fighting was fierce across towns, provinces, villages, right across South Vietnam. And that resulted in a crisis for the US administration, who were unable to present it as a victory to the American public because of the scale of fighting in areas that they'd previously said were under control. John can bring us a little closer to the action. There was one particular day, January 31st, 1968, first day of Tet. We called it the turkey shoot. We just took them. It was an immediate assault and we kept rolling. And as a result, it was unusual in that regard for them to stand and fight. Normally the VC,

Unusual in that regard for them to stand and fight. Normally the VC, particularly, would hit us and then they would run like crazy because they didn't want to be there when the jets came in. They could not stand up to our firepower and the VC knew it. It was kind of like if you take your family poodle out to Yellowstone and it smells a bear, the poodle's going to try and attack it. Now, a bear dog knows not to attack a bear. They circle it. They tire the bear out. Poodle's just going to go straight for the throat and that's going to be the last thing it does. And that was sort of the difference. They all became poodles during Tet and they would attack us and they almost never did that. And when you do that, you take a lot of casualties, and they took a lot of casualties. Essentially, the Viet Cong

throughout Vietnam was wiped out. I mean, not just their military units, but their infrastructure. When I got back to the States, everybody, as far as they were concerned, Tet was a loss. That was because of the reporting. And we sent reporters to Vietnam. And I'm not saying that all of them were biased, because I don't think all of them were. But what they were was ignorant. They had no idea of military maneuvers and what meant what. Now, Walter Cronkite was an exception. Anybody looking at Tet, who had been through World War II, as Cronkite had, should have known that it was a last gasp of a defeated but still very dangerous enemy.

of a defeated but still very dangerous enemy. So as a result, Tet was misunderstood and misreported. 1968 is perhaps the most chaotic year for the United States in terms of civil rights, coinciding with the war in Vietnam. Politically, we have people who before the Tet Offensive are thinking they could become U.S. president of a good chance, and then they just wither. And so now Nixon is president because he had promised, you know, peace with honor. And so accelerated pacification is supposed to be a part of that. It's going to get the United States out of the war soon, and it's going to get the United States out of the war soon and it's going to do it in a way that leaves a stable South Vietnam but in practice all it does is kind of like paint the map more with the South Vietnamese flag and not really do much and in Phu Yen all it does is give the South Vietnamese more problems. After we've looked at this kind of process,

it seems like it's like the tide sweeping in and out. What would it have taken for the Americans to kind of win in Vietnam? And is there any other way the Americans could have won other than put like 2 million men in there and just lock the whole country down? That's always like a great question because I'm of the opinion that I think

the United States lost the Vietnam War as soon as we put troops there. Sometimes I wonder if we lost the war as soon as we sided with the French in the 1950s, just because it was a civil war and the people were already there. There's no way to outlast them, similar to what happened in Afghanistan. How long can we stay in a place? And we were in Afghanistan for 20 years and that didn't change much. But then I'm also of the opinion that South Vietnam had a right to exist. So maybe the way for the U.S. to have won was maybe not to have such a harsh reaction to the events of 1963 with losing faith in Ngo Dinh Diem's government, perhaps leaving the war to the South Vietnamese and backing them, letting them fight the war as they saw it would have been best, and not fighting for them. saw it would have been best and not fighting for them. Because once the US comes in and sidelines them, kind of ignore them. And then all of a sudden with Vietnamization, we're like, oh yeah,

you're going to fight the war again. And we do it in such an abrupt way. Rob, we should explain what Vietnamization is. So you've described how the US decides to take on kind of major combat operations itself. They kind of slightly push the South Vietnamese army to the side. And then when the US is looking for an escape route, it's like, you're in the hot seat again, and we will provide air support, obviously equip your forces, but we're not going to send our young men into the jungle, into those frontline firefights anymore. Right. So when the US takes over fighting the war, we can call that Americanization. over fighting the war, we can call that Americanization. So then Vietnamization is when the United States starts handing war fighting functions back to the Vietnamese. And that starts

roughly, you could say 1967, but it really takes off with the Nixon administration. When we start withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Vietnam, we start giving ARBAN a lot more responsibilities. And we still promise air support, logistics, funding. The U.S. 7th Fleet is still parked off the coast. But yeah, we don't see a need to have Americans die in the remote jungles of South Vietnam anymore. This is a Vietnamese war. We're happy to help you, but we don't want to fight it for you anymore. And also, the war is practically won.

You can finish it. You can take it across the finish line, that kind of stuff. But I mean, knowing full well that it's nowhere near complete because not until like the Paris Peace Accords do we even know what the end is going to be. There's no agreement. The North Vietnamese are dead set on unifying South Vietnam under the communist banner. So Vietnamization is really just a tool for the United States to get out of Vietnam. And sure enough, in a strange preview of kind of Kabul in 2021, that process doesn't work. That compromise doesn't work. And you get the famous scenes where the, in fact, it's the North Vietnamese.

It's not the indigenous, the Viet Cong, the South Vietnamese as much. It's the North Vietnamese kind of invade and topple the South Vietnamese government. And that's when you end up with the images of the people climbing into helicopters on the rooftop of the U.S. embassy. Right. 1973, like at the Paris Peace Accords and the South Vietnamese aren't even present there. They don't get a say in the peace. And so that is, I don't know, like the icing on the cake of how the U.S. had treated their supposed ally during the war that we just forced the South Vietnamese into a lot of decisions.

And then at the end, we're like, OK, here's your piece, because they didn't agree with a lot of what was going on. So for the Nixon administration and Kissinger specifically, it was just easier to keep them out of the talks. Kissinger specifically, it was just easier to keep them out of the talks. Once the U.S. leaves, you have like a couple of years where things look okay. But by 1975, a new U.S. government, Congress unwilling to do anything to help South Vietnam, and then some disastrous decisions on part of the South Vietnamese government. And yeah, you have North Vietnamese tanks rolling into the presidential palace in Saigon and them collapsing faster than anyone could have anticipated. And people trying to get out of there as fast as they can, whether it's on helicopters, boats. To John, it's very important to distinguish between the war he fought against the Viet Cong in the late 1960s and the defeats, the battles that saw the North Vietnamese army take Saigon in 1975.

It was the guys in green that came down in a full combined arms military assault in 1975 that won the war. It had nothing to do with the war that we fought. The people that we fought basically didn't come out of the jungle again and assist in that process. It was all the North Vietnamese army that won that war. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, John, talking us through that, both the politics and what it was like on the front line. Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure.

When you talk to US veterans who took part in these pacification sweeps and took part in the Tet Offensive and saw battlefield successes, tactical victories, they saw their unit overcome the enemy of, they inflicted a big body count on the Vietnamese communists.

You get to respect the veterans because the Vietnam War wasn't like the ones maybe their fathers fought. They didn't come home to that parade thanking them for defeating Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. They didn't get like a VE day or a VJ day. And in a lot of cases, when their tour ended in Vietnam, they thought they were winning. Like, we were winning the war when I was there is a common phrase you'll hear. But I've also talked to veterans when I was asking, like, how did you understand your mission's connection to pacification?

Like, oh, I had no idea of anything that high. I just know it was go out and kill the enemy or do this or that so when i talked to veterans let's try to get like appreciate their experiences and treat it as one little piece of a much larger puzzle and then connect that with other experiences just to see what else that can tell us when it's put together is there a much larger story to tell that if they were there in 1967, how does that correspond with what someone in 1972 had to say? And in some cases, there are similarities that in the case of Fu Yen, someone who was there in 66 and in 71, they both say, oh, the province was terrible. And it's like, well, wait,

two ends of the spectrum. They both say it was terrible. Thank you very much indeed, Rob. We covered a lot of ground there. Oh, thank you so much, Dan. So this podcast has dealt with the experiences of the US and South Vietnamese army and government in Vietnam. And it's obviously therefore one-sided. The perspective of the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies in the South is something we're going to be bringing you on this feed very soon. The Vietnam War is one of the most costly that the US ever fought. Their withdrawal from the war and the subsequent victory of North Vietnam caused great damage to America's global reputation. Today many of us remember it as an unwinnable intervention in a

foreign civil war. Some say that it was an exercise in 20th century imperialism as America tried to extend its power to every continent. America's involvement in that war and the violence and destruction unleashed created a deep rift in American society that many experts think underpins the polarisation still so striking today in American society. Having heard everything Rob and John had to say, having visited Vietnam, interviewed people, written about it, I'm so struck by the similarities between what happened in Vietnam and more recent conflicts like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the intractable problems of intervention in distant civil wars

in societies about which too little is known, that you wonder if any lessons were learned at all. Thanks for listening. you