Vietnam

(1) RESTREPO Monday, 11/29/10 at 9PM ET/PT; (2) Maj.Gen. Scales on Small Unit Dominance

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This is the television premier of this extraordinarily film. I wrote about seeing this filmhere.

Restrepo chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The movie focuses on a remote 15-man outpost, Restrepo, named after a platoon medic who was killed in action. It was considered one of the most dangerous postings in the U.S. military. This is an entirely experiential film: The cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats. The only goal is to make viewers feel as if they have just been through a 94-minute deployment. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you.

I highly recommend this film to all of our readers.

An information page for Restrepo is here, including video.

On a related note, I also highly recommend this article entitled Small Unit Dominance: The Strategic Importance of Tactical Reform, by Maj.Gen. Robert H. Scales.

Slightly more than 40 years ago my unit was butchered by elements from the North Vietnamese 29th Regiment at a mountaintop firebase overlooking the A Shau Valley. Nineteen of my 55 soldiers were killed or wounded severely enough to warrant evacuation. The loss was mainly my fault. I wasn’t new at the job. This was my fourth command so I thought I knew what I was doing. A much smarter and better trained and equipped enemy taught me that I did not.
 
The event made me promise that I would never go to war again No. 2 in a two-sided contest. It also burned into the depths of my soul several questions that have lingered and festered ever since. I asked why the most technologically advanced country on the planet was unable to make better weapons and equipment than the enemy. I asked why my soldiers were so poorly prepared physically, intellectually and emotionally for this fight. I asked why my experience as a combat leader could be gained only by spilling their blood.

Maj.Gen. Scales goes on to say:

In July, I watched the Afghanistan war documentary “Restrepo” play out on the screen and compared it to my experience decades ago: same type of unit (airborne light infantry), same lousy rifle (M16/M4), same helicopter (CH-47), same machine gun (M2), same young men trying to deal with the fear of violent death. Seared in my brain is the image of a young soldier at Fire Base Restrepo hacking away at hard clay and granite trying frantically to dig a fighting position. The U.S. is spending more than $300 billion on a new fighter plane. We haven’t lost a fighter pilot to enemy action since 1972. Why after nine years of war can’t we give a close-combat soldier a better way to dig a hole? For that matter, why do soldiers exiting fire bases not have some means of looking over the next hill? Why doesn’t every soldier have his own means to talk to his comrades by radio? Why can’t soldiers on a remote fire base detect an approaching enemy using sensors? Why can’t soldiers rely on robots to carry heavy loads and accomplish particularly dangerous tasks? I could go on, but you get the point.

Why indeed. I was struck by the same questions. Much of the American arsenal verges on science fiction. But what you see in Restrepo would be familiar to soldiers from 50 or more years ago. In fact, an infantry platoon from 1918 would be very roughly like one of platoon depicted in Restrepo, while an airplane from that era is from an entirely different universe from the aircraft of today.

Air and sea dominance have served us well, though the cost of maintaining them seems to be snowballing out of control. Nonetheless, with the USA fighting land wars against committed opponents we need to spend effort on gaining an edge in that domain as well. Our enemies drag us down to their level, where their numbers and home-field advantage are most telling, when we engage in this type of labor-intensive combat. We cannot match their numbers, and skill and training alone will not prevail over those numbers. Additional tools beyond what they can match may make the difference. Having a Buck Rogers aircraft overhead, while hacking out a hole with a shovel in the hard earth below, shows a misdirection of resources.

(h/t to Adam Elkus for this article.)

Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives

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The Western left’s criticism of Israel’s role in Middle East conflict has long since become so bizarrely lopsided and vicious that many non-leftists have concluded that only antisemitism can explain it.

The left makes sure that every real and imagined military misstep on Israel’s part becomes international news, while ignoring the intentionally brutal attacks of Israel’s enemies against both Israel and their own people. The left contends that democratic, relatively multicultural Israel ultimately makes the evil decisions that drive the conflict and not the autocratic regimes attacking Israel. The left claims that the conflict can end only when Israel reforms, gives up or even disappears. The left requires almost no concrete action towards peace on the part of Israel’s enemies while demanding that Israel take concrete actions merely to get the enemies to even begin to think about negotiating.

Such extreme and thoughtless imbalance in the face of objective facts is one of the hallmarks of bigotry but I don’t think antisemitism drives the left’s stance on Israel. Instead, I think the mindless criticism a kind of intellectual mass hysteria that creates a delusional narrative so encompassing and so immersive that leftists begin to see it as unquestionable truth.

In short, the left is trapped in an immersive story in which Israel is the villain. Any fact that disrupts the “plot” gets edited out of the narrative.

That might sound overwrought but we have seen a mass delusional narrative before…

… the Vietnam era “peace” movement.

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Vietnam Delusion: The “Peace” Movement Brought Peace

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[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives. Feel free to comment but the post might not make much sense without the parent post’s context.]

Delusion:The “peace” movement brought about peace in Indochina.

Reality: This is the most tragic delusion of all. It is the reason I have been putting “peace” in quotation marks. Despite its delusions, the “peace” movement might have been justifiable had it actually produced peace for the people of either Indochina or America. Sadly, it did neither.

The people of Indochina suffered horribly during the final communist invasions and their horrific aftermath. We know at least 165,000 Vietnamese were executed outright in the two years following the fall of Saigon. Another estimated 250,000 died from neglect in the “reeducation” camps. Another two million were made refugees with an unknown loss of life as they fled across seas in tiny boats.

Worse, 1.5 million out of a population of 7 million, 1 in every 5 living Cambodians, would die under Pol Pot’s insanity. The Khmer Rouge murdered 300,000 people outright, and we know this because they took before and after photographs of each and every one of them. You can see them in a museum in Phnom Penh today. The rest they starved to death in an insane attempt to empty the cities and create an agrarian utopia.

It wasn’t just the democides. Soon after we abandoned the people of Indochina and let the communist superpowers take over, the victors fell out among themselves. Border skirmishes broke out immediately, culminating in an invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam followed by an invasion of Vietnam by China. The area would remain mired in unceasing, brutal warfare until the early ’90s.

The aftereffects for America reverberate to this day. The mythology of plucky 3rd worlders armed with nothing but AK-47s and RPGs defeating America’s power has been used by every enemy since to convince their followers that small groups or nations like theirs could take on America and win. Most grimly, it appeared repeatedly in Al Qaeda’s indoctrination materials prior to and after 9/11.

A “peace” that brings totalitarian oppression, impoverishment, mass murder and incessant, bloody military conflict is not a “peace” any humane person would seek. If that is “peace”, most would choose “war”.

Vietnam Delusion: The Words Not Spoken

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[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives. Feel free to comment but the post might not make much sense without the parent post’s context.]

Delusion: The deafening silence about the nature of the communist regimes that were on the other side of the conflict.

Reality: This delusion is not something the “peace” movement said but something it didn’t say. Throughout the conflict and even in the leftists’ histories today, one thing is glaringly absent: There was never any serious examination, nor even serious mention, of the brutal nature of the superpower communist regimes, of North Vietnam or of the ideology and intentions of the Khmer Rouge.

You can read entire leftwing books about the conflict, such as Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright and Shining Lie“, without ever reading more than a couple of paragraphs about the nature of the regimes we were fighting. Instead, the left’s histories focus conclusively on the corruption of our non-communist allies and America’s failings. This creates a distorted and unbalanced appreciation of the actions of the non-communists. Of course their actions look irrational and unreasonable when removed from the context of being counteractions to communist aggression.

As I said before:

The Left’s description of the War in Vietnam is like watching a Kung Fu movie where the bad guys have all been digitally edited out. The hero thrashes about punching air, breaking things and hurling through walls for no apparent reason.

Imagine if every book you ever read on WWII made no mention of the internal nature or actions of the Third Reich. Imagine that you only knew of morally questionable actions by the allies but not those carried out by the Axis. Imagine that the histories spent dozens of pages each detailing the crimes of Stalin and damning America and Britain for allying with him. Suppose mostly what you knew about WWII combat was the results of the city bombing campaigns. Imagine that, while WWII was actually being fought, academics, the media and activists had hammered that lopsided view of the conflict into the public awareness.

Needless to say, your attitudes about the morality and necessity of WWII would be much different than the one you hold now. That is exactly the kind of lopsided, delusional view of the Vietnam conflict, and of the Cold War in general, held by the “peace” movement both then and now.

Vietnam Delusion: US War Crimes

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[Note: This is a subpost linked to by Vietnam, Israel and the Left’s Delusional Narratives. Feel free to comment but the post might not make much sense without the parent post’s context.]

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.