Talk:Vietnam War

There is just so much information that ought to go in this article. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, the antiwar movement in the U.S., the Cambodian bombing, the Paris Peace talks....the list is endless. Maybe as I have time I will add more--this is just a rough outline and a first stab at expanding this article. This is a potentially contentious subject, so it is important to try to be objective.

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Hey dude, great job starting it.

I couldn't just stand to see this page left blank,

even something small mentioning it is better than

nothing. I hope it will get people going and

they will add righteous material to it.

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Vietnamization proved effective

Huh ? It proved exactly opposite. Army of South Vietnam lost. Taw

The article indicates that Congress reneged on Nixon's pledge of military assistance for "Vietnamization". The only thing proved here is that "Vietnamization" did not occur. Whether it would or would not have worked is a moot point in 2001.

The point of Vietnamization was that Vietnam would fight its own wars, so if it was necessary for the US to intervene militarily, then I would say that the policy was a failure.

There are three issues here:

1. What exactly, is the definition of "Vietnamization" as proposed by the Nixon administration?

2. Was this policy implemented as defined?

3. If the policy was implemented as defined, was it successful or not?

Further discussion is pointless until these three questions are addressed.

Okay, I'll give it a shot:

Vietnamization was the process of increasing training of South Vietnamese troops to the point that they would be able to take over the roles being played by American troops previously.

This policy was implemented as defined here.

The policy was successful enough that American troops were able to withdraw from Vietnam in stages as the policy was carried out.

It was not intended by the Nixon Administration that this would be the end of US attention to the war, or the end of US support for the South Vietnamese government when Veitnamization was implemented. It just kinda worked out that way.

On a related note, information was added to this article incorporating the perspectives found in Richard Nixon's memoirs, with the intention of supporting the stated aim that Wikipedia ought not be biased. Those additions have either been edited away, or qualified, while other statements of opinion are not similarly qualified. This is an extremely emotional topic area, obviously. Trying to create a balanced article is going to be very difficult no matter what we do, and reacting emotionally to the changes that are going to come as we hammer this thing out isn't going to help all that much. There are many viewpoints on Vietnam, and this article needs to be open to them so long as they meet the standards of the project. Identifying disputed points is a very good idea, but keep in mind that many of the points stated are going to be disputed -- it'll be better to identify the varying positions than to simply edit them away.

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Note from F. Lee Horn, CPT, INF, USA (Retired/Disabled): This can be a really great article, particularly given the excellent start some of you gave it. I am trying to be as objective about this subject as is possible, given the fact that I was there from SEP '67 to SEP '69. Some of the statements I have added (particularly ones about media coverage and some of the activities of the anti-war activists) may be a bit controversial, but I can promise you that they are all historically accurate since I lived through them and my memory hasn't failed me...yet.

I think someone tried to undo your changes. I restored your version because whoever it was made a horrible mess of it (destroying all the links and other formatting). But I haven't attempted to judge the contents - someone who knows about the subject needs to check that. --Zundark, 2001 Dec 30

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I think that as it stands this article lacks NPOV. I believe some rewriting may be necessary. On the whole, I would prefer to see certain points developed, rather than cut some of the more controversial elements of the article as it stands. There are four points, specifically, that I think need to be addressed

1) Discussion of the internal political dynamics in the United States that led to involvement, including the loss of State Department experts on Asia following the McCarthy witch-hunts, and Democratic fear of Republican accusations of being "soft on communism"

2) The opening of the article describes it as a war between RVN and the VC (the former backed by the US, the latter backed by N. Vietnam and the USSR). I do not argue that this claim should be cut, but attention must be given to the alternative claim, that the RVN was a creation and puppet of Western colonial powers (first France, then the US), and that the VC was fighting a war against the United States, not just the RVN

3) The article specifies two sources of opposition to the war: that it was unwinable, and that it lacked clear objectives. These certainly were two problems with the war, and are primary among the lessons that the US military have learned from the war. But they are not the only, or even necessarily the most important, reasons for opposition to the war: many Americans dreaded seeing their country take the place of the French as a colonial power; many were revolted by US support for a corrupt dictatorship (and were later horrified to hear that the US supported the assassination of their own puppet, only to instal a new one). Many simply felt the war was wrong, immoral. I am not insisting that the article declare that the war was immoral, only that it report accurately that this was one of the claims made by those who opposed the war

4) finally, the article should explore some of the reasons why so many Vietnamese did not support the South. The article ends by reporting some pretty nasty things that the victors did after the war. Without trying to defend that government or those actions, the South Vietnamese Government were pretty corrupt, and had little popular support within their own country. A reader of the article cannot fully understand the war without knowing something about problems within the RVN -- SR

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You have some very valid points. Unfortunately, my view of the war was pretty much from the bottom up. I don't feel qualified to address most of the issues you raise. I think the article did state that a number of people who opposed it did so out of a sense that it was immoral. I can relate examples of how the people of the RVN, and beyond them the ARVN failed to give their full support (such as not having a deep idetification with SOUTH Vietnam, which was largely a creation of outside forces; or that the people were so war-weary that ANY peace, even under the North Vietnamese, was preferable to continued warfare), but beyond that I really can't go in all good conscience.

BTW...Zundark: thank you for the assist. I'm new to Wikipedia and most of the lost links and etc. wre probably my fault.

F. Lee Horn, CPT, INF, USA (Retired/Disabled)

Well, most of what I know comes from some youthful memories, but mostly Fitzgerals's Fire on the Lake and Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, so I don't feel very qualified to write much in-depth. Given how big a topic it is, the article so far is a good start. I am sure there are many more people who have much to contribute, I look forward to seeing the process continue... SR

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I agree. F. Lee Horn

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It is a fact that Diem and the United States blocked elections in 1956 because they knew Ho Chi Minh would win those elections, and it is inappropriate to continually remove this fact from the article.

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Some proof of this would be nice. F. Lee Horn

A simple search in Google turned up scores of citations. It all probably depends on what you consider "proof", of course, but frankly, I have never seen any history of the war that ever said otherwise. I would think that the "proof" would be on anyone who wanted to claim that this wasn't the case.

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For what it is worth, the Encyclopedia Britannica claims the same. They say that the North did political work in the South, that the Southern government was unpopular, and that the Communists were confident to win the elections. So the South refused to call the elections, with the support of the US. I don't know how to independently verify that. --AxelBoldt

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Britannica works for me. I stand corrected. Can we devise some language from NPOV? Perhaps you, Axel, can word it?  :) F. Lee Horn

Well, I have really no knowledge of the matter. All I could write would be a rephrasing of the Britannica material. If that's what you want, I'm your man :-) --AxelBoldt

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By the way, for what it's worth, burden of proof is almost always on the party making an assertion. F. Lee Horn

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Go for it, Axel! Better that than constant wrangling over "who shot John." :) F. Lee Horn

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Editing out facts that you don't like is not an example of NPOV. Just because it is uncomfortable to some that the South Vietnamese government held a one-man election in 1971, or that it tortured political prisoners in "tiger cages", that is not a reason to remove that information from this article. Similarly, the fact that Diem and Eisenhower rejected unifying elections because they knew Ho Chi Minh would win should not be sugarcoated just because it makes one unfortable.

I added a statement to that effect, which you promptly changed. I have no problem with stating the facts, what I have a problem with is stating them in such a way that it becomes obvious they are being utilized to support a particular viewpoint. If you can't be objective, perhaps you should let others who can be add to the article.

Furthermore, ad hominem attacks on one side of this dispute do not believe in this article, and are not NPOV. Accusing opponents of the war of having their position simply because they are "ill equipped" to cope with something is not only nosensical, it shows a complete lack of comittment to NPOV.

Show me where I indulged in any "ad hominem attacks" and I will humbly apologize to whomever it was I attacked. I don't think that stating people who had never experienced their country being in a war were "ill equipped to cope" with it. I went through the whole thing: two years in Vietnam, coming home to raving, spitting, cursing protestors, etc ad nauseum. Perhaps I can be forgiven for seeing this topic in just a *slightly* different light than others.

Furthermore, the phrase "it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it" is one of the most infamous phrases to come out the war, and to censor it out of this article as one might wish to do is not only a case of whitewashing the history of the war, but it is also leaving out an important explanation of why the "Hearts and Minds" policy was such a miserable failure.

This is the one statement you have made with which I disagree most strongly. The article already mentioned in several places that large numbers of people in South Vietnam were disencanted with the war. Your choice of where to place a rather heavy-handed statement (to say the least) about why everything we did was such a miserable failure only serves to distract the reader from the purpose of that paragraph: to describe the role of a (to that point) seldom-used type of military unit.

Futhermore, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War did exist and it is appropriate to mention its existence. This is also being censored out of the article.

Where and when did I ever allege that the VVAW didn't exist? If you feel that strongly about inserting comments about this organization, why not do so in an appropriate place within the article? Much of your phraseology and your choice of where to place your comments leads me to believe that, rather than at least *trying* to present a NPOV, you are simply attempting to refute an argument you despise...an argument which, I might add, was never intended to be an "argument" in the first place.

If you will simply try to group your anti-Vietnam War comments in the appropriate places within the article and preface them with statements like "some authorities contend that" or "many people believed that" or "some people felt that" I will be happy to leave them there.