I bought a DVD set called "Vietnam, America's Conflict." It is a 4 DVD set of Vietnam era documentaries. On the 2nd DVD there is a documentary called "No Substitute for Victory" with John Wayne giving his take on the war. About an hour into the program John Wayne introduces Ezra Taft Benson who shares his brilliant idea for winning the war. ETB suggests that America enlist Chang Kai-Chek and 600,000 soldiers from Taiwan and bring them to Vietnam to fight. I wonder how that would have played out!!! Along with being an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, ETB could have been General Ezra Taft Benson!

China was already on the NV side, but only in the background.
Bringing the Chinese that had fled to Taiwan into the conflict could very well have led to another world war, since the mainland Chinese might have joined the fight outright.

All because Benson had a hard-on for "godless communists."

Actually, China could have done little for North Vietnam because of the limited mountain passes. After the war ended NV had a dispute with China and the Chinese effectively lost because entry on land was too difficult. I do remember the proposal of using Nationalist troops but it made little sense as the people of Vietnam - though many were Chinese in ancestry - would not want Chinese control. The way to victory was to capture Hanoi, etc. with our forces, having trained them in the Vietnamese language. Remember that Red China could not have successfully helped NV.

Perhaps.
But a "full commitment" would include air transport, yes? :)

Air transport is an expensive -- and quite limited -- method for military logistics. You really need ships, railroads and trucks to move equipment and supplies. This is especially true for tanks, artillery, ammunition and other heavy stuff.

Actually, Nixon wrote about the situation before (a while before becoming president) and noted that even the Chinese nuclear capacity at that time would be of no use to them, but rather an easy target to destroy if China were to foolishly enter.

Could you refer me to where Nixon wrote that? Serious question.

Nixon's famous article was his 1967 piece in Foreign Affairs. In it, though, his focus was on bringing China back into the international community--the notion that the US should cooperate with China. He didn't discuss China's entering the war, its nuclear arsenal, or the possibility of destroying that article. He was laying the basis for detente with China as a way of forcing the Soviet Union into detente.

Are you referring to a different article, presumably from many years before?

“Generalissimo” Benson?



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/24/2018 10:12AM by Whiskeytango.

It was completely idiotic. The Vietnamese people had a long and storied history of resisting, and eventually expelling, the imperialist Japanese, the imperialist French and the imperialist Americans. They were tenacious, unforgiving and committed fighters for their homeland who were not only deeply inhospitable to foreign powers invading their country, but were willing to pay any price and bear any burden in terms of sacrificing their own blood and treasure for as long as it took to stave off and defeat outside efforts to occupy, exploit and conquer their native territory.

My grandfather supported the over-heated hawk Barry Goldwater, who touted the insane notion that he could win the Vietnam War over a weekend if he was just given a handful of nuclear bombs to do it.

It was all part of the racist doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” the historically ignorant notion of supposedly divine entitlement rabidly rooted in the ideological/theological construct that the United States was facing a so-called “Domino Effect” where, if Vietnam fell to the Sino-Soviet Communists, the entire region would go Red and eventually the whole world would be speaking Russian.

My grandfather had no realistic sense of world history when it came to understanding long-term grassroot insurgencies born in traditional time and place. The American-spearheaded Vietnam War was a futile intervention into a localized civil war, where Ho Chi Minh and his followers were determined to prevail, even if they had to turn to the Russians and the Chinese for military assistance. Keep in mind that the North Vietnamese initially pleaded for American help in fighting off Japanese invaders but were rebuffed by the US government.

JFK knew that the United States could not win the Vietnam War for the Vietnamese, telling Walter Cronkite that, in the end, it was their war and they would have to fight it. His brother, RFK, traveled to Vietnam in the 1950s and came away convinced that, as far as American intervention was concerned, it was a lost cause.

America’s military leadership, combined with the politically-poisoned view of civilian command, was ignorant of, and immune to, the basic in-country nature of Vietnamese resistance to outside invasion. There was no rational, conceivable, operable long-term military solution to resolving the Vietnam conflict. Eisenhower, Johnson, Westmoreland, LeMay, Goldwater, John Wayne, Ezra Taft Benson, the John Birch Society, et al, were a bombastic bombs-away breed of God-driven, fanatical fools who were out of their league and out of their minds.

At least SecDef McNamara knew, by the early 1960s, that the Vietnam War was a fool’s errand – – meaning militarily unwinnable – – but was nonetheless a willing part of a concerted, deceitful, propagandistic and deliberate cover-up of reality on the ground when it came to Vietnam. It was only years and 55,000 American combat deaths later that he openly admitted that the Vietnam War was not a military operation that the United States could ever “win.”

My grandfather was not a military strategist by any stretch of the imagination. Like he once told me, when he tried to warn Eisenhower that Fidel Castro was not a local nationalist rebel who was being naively idealized as “the George Washington of Cuba,” but, instead, a committed Communist with diabolical designs to take over the entire Western Hemisphere in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, “no one would listen to me because I was just the Secretary of Agriculture.“

Ya think? He also told me that Eisenhower was either a “dupe” or an agent of the Soviet government. This is what drinking too much John Birch sacramental wine will do to you.

ETB was a wacky religious warrior who had aligned himself with the US military-industrial complex. When it came to the Vietnam War, that ultimately proved to be a deadly and delusional mix.



Edited 18 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2018 04:09AM by steve benson.

My thoughts exactly. Thank you Steve

John Wayne dodged serving in World War II. Wayne was a chicken hawk. I hate these guys who come out all patriotic when they dodged their turn to serve. Sorry. The only people who understand war are the ones who actually fought in one and were in the action.

I notice that religious nuts hate communism not because it is totalitarian but because it is supposedly "godless".

exactly, it's the "godless" part that religious nuts fear. As soon as the God is gone then life is less sacred or important, any lie, any manipulation, any atrocity is acceptable because all truth is relative and no one knows who or what's right. The strongest wins and a Joseph Stalin arises and kills 10,000,000 people. Because nothing matters except power. Yes lets all be athiests (sarcasm)

I strongly recommend everyone to watch the Burns' Vietnam episodes that were on PBS. The American public was lied to and deceived about what was truly going on over there. Just like we are now being lied to and deceived by the government and the media. Forces exist that want our country to go to war with N. Korea, Syria and Iran. It appears with Trump this may very well happen. Too bad we cannot learn from history.