A friend from the great state of Kentucky sent me the following:
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General Giap was a brilliant, highly respected leader of the North Vietnam military. The following quote is from his memoirs currently found in the Vietnam war memorial in Hanoi:
"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it.
But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!"
General Giap has published his memoirs and confirmed what most Americans knew. The Vietnam war was not lost in Vietnam -- it was lost at home. The exact same slippery slope, sponsored by the US media, is currently well underway. It exposes the enormous power of a biased media to cut out the heart and will of the American public.
A truism worthy of note: Do not fear the enemy, for they can take only your life. Fear the media far more, for they will destroy your honor.
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My thanks to my friend for sending me the above article.
For anyone who believed that the Vietnam war was lost militarily, now you know the truth from the enemy's point of view.
SFC Chuck Grist
www.AmericanRanger.blogspot.com
Confirming what we already knew... such a shame.
ReplyDeleteGod willing this won't happen in Iraq and A-Stan.
Could be true but General Giap never said that - it's a BS fabrication. Check it out at snopes or about.com
ReplyDeleteI watched a video of an interview with Giap and he said that the US media lost the war. Forget about Snopes, it's a left wing false news outlet.
DeleteWith regard to the "anonymous" comment of July 27th, I did check out the comment at snopes, about, etc. There is great controversy about it and it has been quoted by people who are quite educated and experienced. It does appear that Giap did not make this statement in his memoirs.
ReplyDeleteThe reality of Vietnam was that it was only fought as a "half-war" with the American military limited to operations within the borders of South Vietnam (except for the 1970 Cambodian operation). This enabled the North Vietnamese to deal only with periodic bombing campaigns, but never a full-scale land invasion. Furthermore, North Vietnamese soldiers moved freely along the Ho Chi Minh Trail within Cambodia and Laos (kind of like the terrorists do in Pakistan today) with little fear that they would be attacked. We had all the "rules", but our enemy had none.
America was never defeated militarily, but we were defeated politically. As communists, the North Vietnamese had no concern with "public" opinion. By committing U.S. troops to a war for which they had no clear path to victory, American leaders doomed us to defeat from the start. War should only be waged if the objective is complete victory: the surrender, defeat or annihilation of the enemy.
As a soldier, I have said before: "Send us to war to win or don't send us."
Charles M. Grist
www.AmericanRanger.blogspot.com
I agree with your reply and asked myself the same question when President Bush declared the war against terrorism. Where's a goal definition and what dictates an end of hostilities? A war with no end, WOW
DeleteWe went to war for what we though was just. We returned home to fight another war at the VA!
ReplyDeleteDepressing but I think many of us knew we could have prevailed if the politicians
ReplyDeletewould have backed off and let the best armed force in the world do what we were trained to do