Boston Globe article on "clear and hold"
From: Matt Steinglass <mattsteinglass@yahoo.com>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Date: Dec 14, 2005 9:57 PM
Subject: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold"
Dear all,
I’m the Boston Globe’s stringer in Hanoi. I am currently working on an article, with a tight deadline, about the decision to resurrect the “clear and hold” strategy employed by Gen. Creighton Abrams in Vietnam from 1968 on, as part of the US National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.
I would like to get a general sense, from experts familiar with the history of the war, of whether or not they concur with the claim that “clear and hold” was effective in Vietnam. As sub-issues, I’m particularly interested in the maximalist versions of this claim: 1. that the US essentially defeated the Viet Cong by 1971, after which it no longer posed a serious threat to South Vietnam, and 2. that had the US not cut off funding and/or air support for the GVN in 1973, South Vietnam would have beaten back the NVA invasion in 1975 and would still be independent today. (The latter claims have been made most recently in articles by Melvin Laird in “Foreign Affairs” and by former Navy Secretary James Webb.)
I’m also interested in whether or not people feel that the Viet Cong, while at a low ebb in 1971, made a comeback in 1972 and beyond.
Thanks in advance for your responses.
Sincerely,
Matt Steinglass
From: Gilbert <mgilbert@ngcsu.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Date: Dec 15, 2005 6:18 AM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold"
Sadly, your questions display the same lack of perspective of most discourse on the war. Each one of them is refuted, and answers provided in many scholarly works on the war. Looking to participants like Laird, who deliberately engaged in Vietnamization knowing Abrams told him it would fail, is akin to putting foxes in henhouses.
All I can say is that I addressed every one of your questions in the chapter Losing the Other War in M. J. Gilbert ed. Why the North Won the Vietnam War, Palgrave 2002. This is widely avaliable in paperback. I will email you that chapter seperately if you send an email request to mgilbert@ngcsu.edu. Know that my insitution is designated as a Defense College and we put our students in the line of fire regularly. We and they, cannot afford to indulge in wishful thinking. The Reserve Officers Association of the US Army agrees. That is why I allow them to hold the copyright for this book.
In the meantime, please realize that there is such as thing as history--people actually make decisions because circumstances force them to. To argue if something happened in another way could some other result occur is sterile and above all, unprofitable as it presumes there
is no answer from the other side! So we could have used nukes. There was a reason we didn't. If we had, would the outcome be different? Perhaps, but the war would have been different. LBJ had to lecture his own JCS on this. So why do we keep hoping some contrafacutal arguement is the key to history? It is called looking for loopholes and is discreditable to
all who try to use it to advance an agenda or make a buck.
The VC/PAVN difference you are stressing is tangetial to the war--the guerialla war or the conduct of a protracted war was to ground down foreign troops until their war leaders gave up--then regular forces would finish up the RVN. It worked in 1427. And the US needed twice as many men in Vietnam to work clear and hold up to 1970 and none after it--since after 1969 the US followed a policy of Vietnamization that was disfunctional, it no longer mattered how many acres oi the country was under GVN control. Once the US pulled out, Hanoi was convinced victroy in the war was merely a matter of time. Remember that after 1972, with what Laid claimed was the the victory in the Easter Offensive, Hanoi actually controlled all the strategic terrain needed for a final conventional push and most Vietnamese were conditioned to expect the failure of the GVN. The best scenario a dozen US analysis hired in 1972
to study the probelm was that with an all out effort, the US could keep what they called a dictatorship under Thieu alive for some years.
James Willbanks new book Abandoning Vietnam raises some of these issues, but still pulls punches and indulges in a little wishiful thinking himself. But as to Laird, Willbanks--an observer at An Loc-- strings him up and guts him. See my review in Journal of American Hist and also Fred Logel's review of a similar work printed just above my in the most
recent issue.
Others will have to pick up this arguemnt many vested interests try to make sure is without end rathe rthan live with more well grounded truths they find politically unpalatable. I am leaving now to work in some archives in Europe.
Professor Marc Jason Gilbert
From: David Hunt <David.Hunt@umb.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Dec 15, 2005 6:39 AM
Subject: RE: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold"
Matt:
Among surveys of the war, William Turley's is the most authoritative on the military aspect. Turley says that the NLF "had been weakened" after 1968, but in 1971 "down in the villages and hamlets" it was still "ewxacting a fearful toll." He suggests that the 1972 Offensive restored "village and guerrilla movements to their former strength" (Second Indochina War (pages 132, 199). That's an exaggeration, in my view, but closer to the truth than the maximilist view you cite. In his recent book in the war in My Tho Province, by far the best of the now available local studies, David Elliott says that "a significant revival of the local guerrilla movement took place in the last years of the war" and that "before the start of the final offensive in Central Vietnam the GVN was in serious, if not terminal, decline" in My Tho and that "if the war had not been ended by a North Veitnamese offensive and the collapse of the Saigon army, it might have been won by a reprise of the poitical mobilization" in the delta and elsewhere in South Vietnam (Vietnamese War, pages 1356, 1371).
From: Jeanie Glaspell <bglaspell@earthlink.net>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Dec 15, 2005 8:55 AM
Subject: RE: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold"
Matt- I am working on a book that deals with the influence of French and American companies operating in Vietnam during the period 1945-75 on French and American foreign policy. I was in Vietnam from 1966-67 and have been studying the history of Vietnam for several years. I strongly believe that one must ask the following questions in order to clearly evaluate the success or failure of "Vietnamization" of the war: 1. What progress had the South Vietnamese government made in land reform?, 2. Who controlled the major means of production in the economy (rubber plantations, rice production, tea, coffee, et.al.)?, 3. Who controlled government institutions?, 4. Did major religious groups other than the Catholics feel enfranchised?. I am sure there are other questions that should be answered but the war could never have been won without the support of the average Vietnamese. Most Vietnamese, in my opinion, considered the government as ! a puppet for French and American business interests. They considered the Vietnamese district chiefs and the national government to be the same people who cooperated with the French colonial administration and represented the interests of Michelin and other large French companies operating in Vietnam even up until 1975. Just some thoughts. Brian Glaspell
From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Dec 15, 2005 9:30 AM
Subject: Re: RE: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold"
Matt,
The reasons for the poor state of the NLF in particular from 1968 can't be reduced to one tactic (clear and hold). there are multiple reasons, and some may be better able to flesh them out than I.
First, 1968 was devastating to the NLF. As my colleague Ron Spector has shown in his Tet book, the entire year of 1968 -- not just the Tet offensive of that year -- inflicted heavy losses on the NLF, losses from which it was hard to rebuild. This view is also conveyed in David Elliott's book.
Second, the Phoneix program targetted NLF "infrastructure." Former CIA Director Bill Colby was a strong defender of this program, saying it was not an assassination program. There are strong debates over this program, whether or not it devolved into an assassination program, etc. Whatever you think about the program, targetting leaders of the NLF did hurt the NLF.
Third, the extravagant American use of firepower in the counntryside made the countryside a dangerous place for civilians, leading to migration from the countryside to the cities. This increasingly extravagant use of firepower occurred at the same time as US forces were
being withdrawn. David Elliott has argued that while some of the base of the revolution thus fled the countryside, those who remained were more committed to the revolutionary cause.
But taking this all together, the claim that the US had essentially defeated its opponents by 1971 is poppycock. Wishful thinking based on American claims but not Vietnamese realities. The NLF had been beaten down -- but it was incredibly resilient. US and South Vietnamese military victories did not lead to substantial gains in the government's
political legitimacy. Was the NLF as strong as before? I assume not. Eventually PAVN took up the main burden of warfighting.
The claim that with US funding, ARVN could have beaten back PAVN in 1975 is also wishful thinking. ARVN was far less disciplined than PAVN. It has chronic desertion problems. It was far more factionalized in political terms, and political rivalries sapped its abilities. I think most analysts would agree that until late in the war, ARVN had a hard time mounting large integrated operations. The ultimate failure in 1975 came when the ARVN leadership disintegrated under pressure, and battles turn into routs. One might also note that ARVN was far better equipped than PAVN at the end of the war -- yet it still lost. The issue was not
funding. It was training, discipline, and leadership.
Melvin Laird wants to justify his legacy to history. He is entitled to his opinion. But I don't think he gets it. And the insatiable desire to draw parallels between Iraq and Vietnam has its limits. There are some parallels -- intelligence failure jumps to mind. But Iraqification (or whatever it is called) and Vietnamization aren't equivalent. Vietnamization was a policy that aimed to let the US save face by shifting the burden of war to the South Vietnamese. But the South Vietnamese government is not in same position as the Iraqi one. I would assume that most of the Iraqi population wants the Iraqi goverment to
succeed. Most Vietnamese wanted the South Vietnamese government to fail after 1965, and that never changed.
Shawn McHale
From: Joe Hannah <jhannah@u.washington.edu> Mailed-By:
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Date: Dec 15, 2005 10:31 AM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold" (fwd)
Mr. Steinglass,
I am not a scholar of the Vietnam war, but I have been a student of
Vietnam for many years and have formed opinions about our (American)
involvement there.
I have spoken to a number of old NLF (I do not like the term Viet Cong
because of its connotations -- like "Jap" from WWII). They all agree that
1969 and 1970 were "terrible years" for them -- thousands of their cadre
(and thousands of innocent civilians) were killed, lines of communication
and supply were cut, infrastructure (jungle-based) was destroyed,
leadership decimated.
The result, of course, was that Hanoi took the opportunity to replace the
NLF with its own military command and control system, a situation that has
continued ever since the end of the war with northern "carpetbaggers"
flooding into southern VN, taking key positions, stealing land and
resources, etc.
What concerns me about the way you are asking the question, and I see
thatit is response to other writers, is that it looks at the military
solution as the key to the conflict. This is my objection to our handling
of Iraq from day one, and I think you will find that a number of people
familiar with the VN War have this perspective. VN was a "politial" war,
much more than a military one. The communist forces only needed to hang
on, tooutlast us. They had a strong political base, where we did not. We
were cast in teh role of invaders, and the population more and more came
to see us that way. The same thing is now happening in Iraq.
The position I am arguing for is one that looks as the military side of
the war as an extension of the politics, not the other way around. There
is an old story about an American Colonel that travelled to VN in the very
early 1990s and met with a NVA colonel. They glared at each other across
the table for some minutes, until th eAMerican finally spoke up. He jabbed
his finger at his counterpart and said, You know, we never lost a single
battle in that wole war against you!"
The Vietnamese colonel pursed his lips and looked thoughtfully at his
counterpart across the table, meeting his eye, and replied slowly, "Yes,
that may be true. But it is also irrelevent."
Best wishes in your work,
Joe Hannah
From: William Turley <wturley@siu.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Dec 15, 2005 11:40 AM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold" (fwd)
Other listers have responded to this note with well-informed, critical insights that I find easy to support. The responses show that there is something approaching consensus among experts on why the US lost. But to return to Matt's narrower question about "clear and hold" (also AKA oil-spot strategy), it may be worth noting that to a certain extent this worked, or seemed to work, for a time. Communist forces exhausted themselves in Tet 1968, and by replacing Westmoreland's "search and destroy" strategy with aggressive small-unit patrolling, territorial security and integration of combat operations with pacification programs, Abrams seized on this opportunity to maintain pressure in ways that previously had not been possible. However, "clear and hold" was still at bottom a military strategy, and it did nothing to address the structural sources of popular antipathy or indifference toward the RVN. Essentially a tactical response to the disintegration of NLF units, it was imperfectly integrated into broader plans for social change. A strategy of repression, it could not reverse the decades of fear, resentment, and apathy that had spread unevenly, both horizontally and vertically, throughout the population, the ARVN, and the RVN government. And as a strategy only US forces could implement effectively, it deepened the ARVN's strategic, psychological, and material dependency on the US. It was, moreover, a strategy the PAVN had the means to counter by regularizing the conflict, thus forcing the ARVN and US to reconcentrate, abandoning villages it had "cleared" and was "holding" in the process. As for the relevance of "clear and hold" to Iraq, there is no possible parallel to the PAVN's response, and for that reason its prospects of success might be better there. But there is no getting around the strategy's essentially repressive nature, the risk of generating support for the insurgency, and the difficulty of "standing down" when the indigenous forces depend on the US even to make them stand together. For the life of me I cannot see why anyone would think it was a success in Vietnam, and I have grave doubts about its relevance to Iraq.
Bill Turley
From: Hoang t. Dieu-Hien <dieuhien@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Dec 16, 2005 11:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold" (fwd)
Dear list,
I am not a scholar of the Vietnam War nor am I a historian. What I would like to offer here is the perspective of one Vietnamese growing up in the South during the war.
I have family members, my grandmother's descendants, who fought for NVA, NLF, and ARVN. Like most Vietnamese, my family has its roots in farming. Nearly half of my grandmother's ten children were an idealistic bunch. They fought the French. When 1954 came, some went North and later came South with the NVA. Others stayed behind and worked for their cause within the enemy lines. Later, some cousins joined the NLF; some fought for ARVN, half of whom were killed in battles; others did all they could to avoid taking up arms, including self-mutilation. The rest of the family could not care less about politics. They just wanted to live.
As a child growing up and going to a public school in Saigon, never once did we learn anything about Vietnam that was North Vietnam or South Vietnam. For my eight years in grade school pre-1975, all my Geography lessons on Vietnam were about Vietnam, not North nor South, not Social Republic of Vietnam nor Republic of Vietnam. Simply Vietnam. All my history lessons on Vietnam were about Vietnam, from Lac Long Quan and Au Co, to the Hung Kings, and on down to the Nguyen's Dynasty, except Bao-Dai. Modern history of Vietnam was not taught in the first eight years of school in the South. I knew nothing of it other than from what the elders around me talked about.
For the majority of Vietnamese living in the South, including the press -- I did read the newspapers everyday, there was one Vietnam and two factions fighting each other for control: the "quo^'c gia" side (nationalist) and the "co^.ng sa?n" side (communist). Generally, when an ordinary Vietnamese from the South talked about "Vie^.t Co^.ng," we meant "Vietnamese communists" which did not draw a distinction between the NLF and the NVA. The same still holds true today.
Your first point, "the US essentially defeated the Viet Cong by 1971, after which it no longer posed a serious threat to South Vietnam," is essentially irrelevant to an ordinary Vietnamese. One of my uncles, who was a fervent NLF fighter, said what a mistake the Te^'t offensive was because it caused an onslaught of attacks by the Americans that decimated the NLF forces. However, those forces would be boosted and supported by their compatriots and many former comrades from the NVA. For the ordinary Vietnamese living in the South, they were not invaded by a foreign army, the NVA. They only saw that the communist side was winning and the nationalist side was loosing.
To say that "had the US not cut off funding and/or air support for the GVN in 1973, South
Vietnam would have beaten back the NVA invasion in 1975 and would still be independent today," is to show lack of understanding of what that war was about for the Vietnamese people. The majority of the Vietnamese people, including those living in the South pre-1975, would shudder at the thought of an "independent South Vietnam" today, in 2005. Twenty-one years of fighting our brothers and sisters were more than enough. In fact, the wounds that those years of fighting and the after-math have so injured some people psychologically and emotionally that they are still fighting it these days, 30 years after the gun fire stopped, mostly with words, hurtful accusations, and economic sanctions.
During the war years, when my schoomates and I shared wishes and dreams, invariably, there would be one thing that we all had in common: one independent and peaceful Vietnam. As children, we did not come up with this dream on our own. We got it through the teaching of our teachers and the curriculum designed by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Vietnam, through what was expressed in the newspapers and on the radio (television was available to very few people), and through the elders who raised us.
In short, yes, the US forces devastated the NLF forces by 1970, but have not defeated the Viet Cong; but no, I am sure glad there is no "independent South Vietnam" today and no, I am glad the US did not continue to pour precious resources into further destroying the land of my birth and its people, using military means to achieve a political end, a lost cause, and further deepening the rifts within the US.
Would I rather the war ended differently? I no longer entertain such question. It serves no purpose for me anymore.
Respectfully,
Hien
From: Nguyen Qui Duc <DNguyen@kqed.org>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Dec 16, 2005 11:19 AM
Subject: RE: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold" (fwd)
Dear List,
A side aside question: has anyone come across any essay on the use of the term "Viet Cong?"
The conventional use for it in the West seems to be that the "Viet Cong" were southern, anti-Saigon forces (as opposed to NVA--an d separate from Third Forces). The term was used, in South Viet Nam, to denote Communist forces, north and south. Other than Douglas Pike, is there something else one can read?
Thank you.
N Qui Duc
From: Judith Henchy <judithh@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Dec 16, 2005 2:55 PM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold" (fwd)
Duc,
You may be interested to review the discussion we had about the use of this
term on this list in 1999:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/southeastasia/vsg/elist_1999/vc1.html
Best
From: Judith Stowe <judy@stowe43.fsnet.co.uk> Mailed-By: mailman1.u.washington.edu
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Date: Dec 17, 2005 11:53 AM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold" (fwd)
Hi Duc , It may interest you in particular to know that throughout the war the BBC Vietnamese Service did not use the term Viet Cong. It was considered pejorative. Instead they were referred to as NLF forces or communist backed forces especially if the PAVN was thought to be involved as well. But if the context was clear, we would sometimes say 'the other side'. This was not just a matter of BBC policy. Nowhere in British official archives will you find the PRC referred to as chicoms as is apparent in American documents.
Proper names had to be observed.
Regards Judy Stowe.
Date: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 06:59:14 -0500
From: "Dan Duffy" <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Boston Globe article on "clear and hold" (fwd)
What a wonderful exchange with a journalist. I've talked to reporters for hours without getting any actual scholarship on the war into their story. What a welcome change.
Still, what got across was Vietnamese Studies, and the view from Ha Noi, although the list also offered civilian memory and RVN perspectives. Maybe Matt could get posted to Orange County next?
Thanks to him for sparking a wide-ranging presentation of the topic, and using so much of it in the Globe -
Dan