By Guest Commentator TED RHODES
Since the dawn of warfare, the most prized battlefield trophy that soldiers present to their commander is the enemy’s battle flag.
In the early Sixties, the objective of the Vietnam conflict, as established by Eisenhower and Kennedy, was to contain China’s Communist expansion in South East Asia. At the outset, our American leaders assessed the campaign with auspicious optimism. The Americans had the North Vietnamese out-gunned, and we enjoyed unassailed air superiority. How could we lose?
Indeed, up until 1975, when the South Vietnamese government lost in the Fall of Saigon, the American forces had decisively won every major kinetic battle in the war. Those victories would eventually grow hollow. Ho Chi Minh plotted to drag the American Forces into an endless hornets nest of guerrilla warfare.
A journalist once asked General Vo Nguyen Giap, Commander of the North Vietnamese Army, how long he would have continued to fight against the American forces had they not withdrawn in 1975. “Twenty years,” he replied. “One hundred years. Even more, if necessary. We would have fought indefinitely until we prevailed.”
In the Spring of 1968 the North Vietnamese Army suffered a bitter loss in their attempt to seize the Marine airfield at Khe Sanh. With B-52 bombers and F-4 fighter-bombers, the Americans dropped more bombs on the North Vietnamese defending that siege than all the bombs the US forces dropped in World War II. American commanders estimated that the NVA suffered as many as 15,000 KIAs at Khe Sanh.
Despite the horrific losses heaped on Giap’s army, Khe Sanh became a turning in the Vietnam War. The nightly news bombarded the American people with horrific images of the Tet Offensive and the siege of Khe Sanh. After the siege, Walter Cronkite broke his career-long tradition never to divulge his personal viewpoints on a news story. Cronkite declared on his nightly broadcast that the Vietnam War was a lost cause. President Johnson’s favorability rating plummeted so low that he closed his reelection campaign. Fed up, the American people were ready to bring the troops home.
And from the ashes of Khe Sanh, the North Vietnamese had discovered a surprising windfall – a political victory won on the American home front.
Finally, on April 30, 1975, at the Fall of Saigon, the North Vietnamese handed the mighty United States a humiliating defeat on the world stage.
Today Vietnam enjoys a thriving economy and a growing middle class. They have western shopping malls that sell the bourgeois brand names of Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Lacoste, and Rolex. As of this writing, each year the country hosts 12 – 15 million tourists adding $27 billion to their annual GDP. Their thriving aviation industry has a superb safety record. Vietnam is on pace to be the world’s 10th largest economy by 2050.
Their economy can be labeled as anything but “Communist.” A more accurate description would be “Free Market Authoritarianism.” But wasn’t the defeat of Communism America’s prime war objective in 1965? Of course. And so in 1986, the Vietnamese politburo passed economic reforms that have led to the prosperity they enjoy today.
To this end, the United States actually won the Vietnam War against the Communists.
We should never have fired a single bullet. The 57,939 service members need not have given their lives. Nor did the countless service members need to have sacrificed the healthy bodies of their youth, nor the soundness of their souls. The cauldron of death we waged upon our own boys and against the Vietnamese people lay in abject waste.
Without firing a shot, we ultimately defeated the Vietnamese Communists. And we did so by General Giap’s own measure: not over a matter of years, but over the course of decades; over generations.
And who were the grand prizewinners of the war? The Vietnamese people. The war reunited the North and South Vietnamese people under a unified flag, and they now enjoy a cornucopia of wealth bestowed by the Free Market.
Today Vietnam is Communist in name only. The Vietnamese people offer the party only a grudging appearance of respect, hollow of any sense of personal loyalty or pride. They regarded me as a fool when I purchased these flags. “Party members are the only ones who buy those flags,” they snickered.
In the same way the North Vietnamese failed to recognize their political power on the American home front, so too did the American leaders, at the dawn of the Vietnam conflict, fail to recognize the might of the Free Market.
The last shot of the Vietnam War was fired on December 18, 1986, when the Vietnamese Communist Politburo surrendered to the Free Market.
This hammer and sickle flag is their tattered, defeated battle flag; our prized trophy of their surrender.