Category Archives: Viet Nam

J.D. over at Mouth of the Brazos has a semi-book review that reminded me of a war story, a true one, as we say, to distinguish it from the stretchers some of us have been known to tell a time or two.

J.D., a onetime Marine who shared my year (1969) and approximate terrain in fun-loving Southeast Asia, was so irritated at the 2010 book An America Amnesia: How the US Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia that he stopped reading: “It was making me sick to my stomach. The entire viewpoint is asinine beyond description.”

His point is that we were losing the war practically the whole way along, even if the (highly suspect) official statistics seem to support the notion that we were winning. Thus when Congress cut off military aid to SVN (which did, indeed, force their surrender) they were only ratifying what practically everyone, except the Pentagon and the military careerists with their vested interests, seemed to finally understand. It is all debatable of course. Isn’t everything?

My true war story contains a clue to why we were losing the war long before the Congress acted: A Popular Forces squad my light-infantry Army advisory team set up in the summer of 1969 (about the time Neil Armstrong was taking his giant leap for mankind) in a sand and bamboo outpost on the edge of what we laughingly called our Controlled Fire Zone—it was such only for the American units which had to clear indirect fires with us. The enemy did what they pleased, mainly at night. They owned the night. “Charlie’s Dark,” I called it.

The PF’s were the lowest of the low in the SVN military, ill-equipped, ill-led, ill-clad and ill-fed. Ill everything. Mostly because the SVN command structure and their supply system were just totally corrupt. Everything got stolen or sold long before it filtered down to our lowly PFs. Which is a big reason the war was a loser.

These poor guys, some very young, a few old enough to be the grandfathers of the very young ones, had M-16s, of which they were very proud, but little else. They needed a 60mm mortar for their defense but we couldn’t get one through their crooked supply. So we stole one. We stole it from the 7th Marine Regiment which was the nearest and largest American unit in our AO (area of operations). We stole everything essential from the Marines: our food, our ammunition, the gasoline for our jeeps and our generators. If I remember correctly we stole a generator. But that might be a stretcher.

The true part is the poor PFs were overrun the first night they heroically agreed to stay in their pathetic little outpost. About half were killed, the other half sensibly ran away. The enemy (mainly Main Force VC and NVA in our neck of the woods) did leave the mortar behind. We passed it on to another PF squad. But we could never get them to stay in the outpost. They weren’t cowards. They just weren’t stupid. Unlike some of the guys still pushing the “congress lost the war” line. Any line doggie with any sense knows better whether he’s willing to admit it to himself or not. It can be a hard admission, even after all these years.