Shannon Love

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Delusion: American soldiers were routinely committing wide-scale atrocities in the conduct of the war.

Reality: This delusion’s greatest champion was John Kerry (the 2004 Democrat Presidential nominee), who while testifying under oath before Congress in 1971 claimed:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….
 
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Twenty years prior in WWII, the majors, colonels and generals of Kerry’s “officers at all levels of command” had, as lieutenants and captains, liberated death camps in Europe and Asia. Those men knew better than any in the “peace” movement what atrocities looked like, and they defined themselves as being soldiers the polar opposite of the Nazis and Imperial Japanese who had actually committed such acts.

Yet the “peace” movement whipped themselves up into a delusional frenzy, to the point where they did not even question why or how such men had turned into monsters. Neither did they bother to present any real evidence of their allegations. Certainly, when they acquired overwhelming political power following Watergate, they did nothing to investigate or punish anyone for what they claimed must have been tens of thousands of war crimes.

Tellingly, John Kerry never pushed the point after the war “ended” and he accepted a pardon from Carter to protect himself from prosecution. At the time, Kerry had served naval officers and was a naval reserve officer when he testified. In his claims of atrocity he committed a crime one way or the other.

He either had no knowledge of war crimes, and therefore intentionally lied about the military for the benefit of the enemy, or he did have proof of war crimes but failed to bring such evidence forward as all American service personnel are legally required to do.

If it was the latter, he is guilty of even greater malice and cowardice than if it was the former. The only thing worse than making spurious accusations of war crimes would be letting actual war criminals go free and remain within the US military.

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Delusion: The war was fought on the Vietnamese side by militarily outmatched but plucky and determined peasant soldiers who fought with no significant support or direction from the communist superpowers.

Realty: The fighting in the last 7 years of the war post-Tet was carried out by large-scale, highly trained, regular North Vietnamese army units. The involvement of communist superpowers was massive in terms of money, materiel and personnel. In 1969 the Soviet Union had an estimated 65,000 troops in North Vietnam and Mao had 160,000-180,000. The Chinese troops served as Ho Chi Min’s internal security force to prevent internal revolt. It would turn out that Soviet personnel had manned almost all the anti-aircraft missile defenses that shot down American planes.

The North Vietnamese army was well equipped with state-of-the-art communist tanks, artillery, planes and anti-aircraft defenses but North Vietnam had zero industrial base to build anything. It is doubtful they could even feed themselves. North Vietnam supplied nothing but cannon fodder.

Without the massive and continuous support of the communist super powers the communist Vietnamese would never have come into power, stayed in power or been able to launch the invasions of the South.

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Delusion: The US “expanded” the war into Cambodia in 1970 and did so “illegally”.

Reality: In this delusion, the US overtly launched operations into eastern Cambodia in 1970 merely to expand its imperialistic designs on Indochina in general. The “intellectuals” of the “peace” movement claimed that there were no significant North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia.

The legal reality of this delusion is best summed up in this article about the Kent State shootings [h/t Instapundit].

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the angry students – as so often was the case throughout the war – had their facts wrong. Going into Cambodia was not “illegal.” Like South Vietnam, Cambodia was one of the “protocol states” the United States had solemnly pledged to defend against communist aggression when the Senate in 1955 consented to the ratification of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization agreement with but a single dissenting vote. Cambodia, like South Vietnam, was similarly incorporated by reference in the 1964 statute, by which 99.6 percent of Congress authorized the use of military force to carry out our SEATO obligations.

This “expansion” delusion could be refuted at the time by anyone who could read a map and see where the battles were being fought. When you see large-scale battles occurring in the Southmost corner of Vietnam, right up against the Cambodian border, you don’t have to be Napoleon to see that the North Vietnamese army had to be supplying and basing itself in eastern Cambodia. Clearly, the North Vietnamese had violated Cambodian neutrality on a massive scale. This justified the incursion into Cambodian on both strategic and legal grounds.

Again, post-Cold War evidence would show the “Peace” movement was dead wrong.

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Delusion: There were no North Vietnamese army units operating in either South Vietnam or Cambodia.

Reality:In order to maintain the delusion that the war was a popular uprising against imperialists, the “peace” movement could not admit that the war post-1968 was one of invasion from the outside. They labeled as lies any US assertions of invasion. Post-Cold War evidence proved the “peace” movement conclusively wrong. Post-Tet, all major combat was carried out by regular units of the North Vietnamese army.

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Delusion:The Tet Offensive proved the US military had lied about the strength and scale of support in South Vietnam for the Viet Cong.

Reality: The Tet Offensive achieved surprise for the same reason Hitler’s offensive in the Battle of the Bulge achieved surprise: The plan was based on a delusional narrative and had no chance of success. In both cases, the US military found it impossible to predict that the enemy would do something so incredibly stupid and self-destructive.

The Tet Offensive was a staggering tactical defeat for the communists that led to the destruction of the Viet Cong as a fighting force. From that point on, all of the major fighting for the communists would be carried out by successive waves of invasion of North Vietnamese regular army units from North Vietnam. Post-1968 the war ceased to be an insurgency and became one of outright external invasion.