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Thomas Leo Briggs is a former United Staes Army Officer and Central Inteligence Agency Veteran who served during the Communist War of Aggression in South East Asia and Secret War in Laos. He is the Author of "Cash on Delivery | CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos", He serves as our Coalition President.
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Visit our page on Tom Briggs and his comments and commentary on all of the episodes of the controversial Ken Burns / PBS Documentary Series " The Vietnam War ". Also visit the CAVWV's effort in producing and funding the first Vietnam War documentary as told by our Asian Allies titled "Completeing the Record".
Reomended reading on a more ballanced narative on the Vietnam War by Tom Briggs
Forget Burns & Novick – You read these, as I have, if you want to hear more than polemics and propaganda.
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam Paperback – April 2, 2019
by Max Boot (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Road-Not-Taken-Lansdale-American/dp/1631495623
Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam Paperback – Illustrated, December 10, 2007
by Mark Moyar (Author), Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. (Foreword)
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Birds-Prey-Counterinsurgency-Counterterrorism/dp/0803216025/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18AOBLRC96IAJ&keywords=mark+moyar+phoenix&qid=1687307040&s=books&sprefix=mark+moyar+phoenix%2Cstripbooks%2C57&sr=1-1https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Birds-Prey-Counterinsurgency-Counterterrorism/dp/0803216025/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18AOBLRC96IAJ&keywords=mark+moyar+phoenix&qid=1687307040&s=books&sprefix=mark+moyar+phoenix,stripbooks,57&sr=1-1
A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam Hardcover – June 3, 1999
by Lewis Sorley (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Better-War-Unexamined-Victories-Americas/dp/0151002665/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=sorley+better+WAR&qid=1687306190&sr=8-1
Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect Hardcover – January 1, 1978
by Ulysses S. Grant Sharp (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Defeat-Ulysses-Grant-Sharp/dp/0891410538/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2ERTM3NT07QDW&keywords=strategy+for+defeat+sharp&qid=1687306335&s=books&sprefix=strategy+for+defeat+sharp,stripbooks,77&sr=1-1
At War in the Shadow of Vietnam – April 15, 1993
by Timothy Castle (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/War-Shadow-Vietnam-Timothy-Castle/dp/023107977X
Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos Paperback – June 1, 1998
by Roger Warner (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Moon-Story-Americas-Clandestine/dp/1883642361
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War (The Politically Incorrect Guides) Paperback – February 23, 2010
by Phillip Jennings (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Vietnam-Guides/dp/1596985674
“Orthodox” vs. “Revisionist” Views of the “Vietnam War”
If you want to read both sides of “orthodox” vs. “revisionist” arguments, this article and the books recommended, will give you working lists.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/vietnam-war-history-orthodox-versus-revisionist
Vietnam War History: Orthodox Versus Revisionist
James McLeroy - Sat, 03/09/2019
The orthodox academic historiography of the Second Indochina War is less an empirical search for objective truth than a dogmatic defense of politically correct "truthiness." In contrast to objective truth, "truthiness" is the subjective perception of reality that its believers want to be true, regardless of any contrary evidence or logic. Their wish is thus father to their thought.
In orthodox academic dogma, the "Vietnam" War is a mere sub-set of 20th Century diplomatic history, rather than a main subject of 20th Century military history. According to the 1960s orthodoxy, revisionist historians are defending a shameful history of U.S. political ignorance, military incompetence, and imperialist immorality. Orthodox historians reject the revisionist distinction between a U.S. political defeat in America and a U.S. military defeat in Vietnam. They also reject the revisionist military focus on the vulnerability of North Vietnam's economic infrastructure to U.S. conventional, non-nuclear weapons and tactics.
For true believers in academic orthodoxy, the term "anti-war" does not mean opposition to the Communist war of conquest against the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN). It means righteous left-liberal opposition to the U.S. role in an "unwinnable" war to defend the corrupt, repressive RVN regime from the "mostly nationalist" VC forces and their "mostly nationalist" NVA allies. They claim the war began as a small-scale, patriotic, indigenous, revolutionary insurgency and evolved into a large-scale, conventional, international war due only to U.S. intervention.
The primary literary, journalistic, and entertainment sources of the orthodox academic dogma are:
The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955);
Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall (1961);
The Making of a Quagmire by David Halberstam (1965);
Fire In the Lake by Francis Fitzgerald (1973);
Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow (1983);
Anatomy of a War by Gabriel Kolko (1985), and
The Army and Vietnam by Andrew Krepinevich (1986).
After 1967, the orthodox academic dogma was constantly propagated by the left-liberal "anti-war" journalism led by the New York Times newspaper, Time magazine, and CBS television news. The most influential "anti-war" films were:
Taxi Driver (1976),
Apocalypse Now (1978), and
The Deer Hunter (1978).
Revisionist historians think the war was the calculated implementation of a North Vietnamese strategy based on Mao's three-stage model of Communist revolutionary warfare in China. The first stage was a VC guerrilla and terrorist insurgency. The second stage was semi-conventional, mobile VC/NVA warfare. The third stage was conventional, modern, positional NVA warfare.
Revisionists think the war was not primarily an indigenous insurgency or a civil war. It was the incremental invasion of the RVN by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and its subordinate Viet Cong (VC) indigenous forces controlled by the Politburo of the "Democratic Republic" of Viet
Nam (DRV) in Hanoi. Revisionists think the low-level VC violence and terrorism in the first phase of the war were a contest of insurgent versus counterinsurgency forces, but the major combat of the war was primarily a contest of NVA and VC against U.S. and RVN effective firepower.
From 1965 to 1972, the NVA and VC forces lost all the major battles against the firepower of the combined U.S. and RVN forces. In 1968, the main VC forces were annihilated as a strategic threat to RVN sovereignty, and in 1972, the RVN forces with U.S. logistics and air support alone defeated the invasion of 14 conventional NVA divisions. By 1973, the U.S. and RVN forces had effectively won the internal war against the VC and NVA forces in South Vietnam.
The NVA was not capable of invading the RVN again until 1975, two years after all U.S. forces were withdrawn. They then conquered it conventionally with no concern for RVN governance or rural "hearts and minds." They could do so only because: 1) in 1974, the Congress radically reduced or prohibited essential combat support for the RVN forces, and 2) in 1974, the Soviet bloc nations gave the NVA more, and more effective, firepower than the RVN forces. If Congress had not abandoned South Vietnam in 1974, there is no military reason why the RVN forces with the same U.S. logistics and air support they had in 1972 could not have defeated the NVA invasion in 1975 the same way they did in 1972.
The first revisionist challenge to the orthodox academic portrayal of the totalitarian Leninist ideology of Ho Chi Minh's DRV (North Vietnam) was Robert Turner's Vietnamese Communism (1975).
The first book labeled "revisionist" by orthodox academic historians was “America In Vietnam” by Gunter Lewy (1978).
The first military challenge to the academic orthodoxy on the war was “Strategy for Defeat” by U.S.G. Sharp. It detailed how a genuinely strategic air campaign against the DRV could have ended the DRV's physical capacity, regardless of Politburo’s fanatical will, to continue its aggression against the RVN at any time, as it briefly did in 1972.
Since 1978, nine books and a key magazine article have advanced the revisionist arguments:
"How to Lose a War" by Robert Elegant (1981),
“On Strategy” by Harry Summers (1982),
“The Key to Failure” by Norman Hannah (1987),
“Vietnam at War” by Phillip Davidson (1988),
“Lost Victory” by William Colby (1989),
“A Better War” by Lewis Sorley (1999),
“Vietnam: The Necessary War” by Michael Lind (1999),
“The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat In Vietnam” by Dale Walton (2002),
“Triumph Forsaken” by Mark Moyar (2006), and
“The Vietnam War Reexamined” by Michael Kort (2018).
Lind is only revisionist in his geopolitical justification of the U.S. defense of the RVN.
Many revisionists believe that most of the objections of orthodox academic historians to the revisionist options for defeating the Communist forces are based on military ignorance or anti-U.S. military prejudice. Their objections are "strawman" arguments against artificially simplistic
reductions or distorted exaggerations of one or more of the revisionist arguments. Orthodox academic historians reject all the revisionist arguments as "conservative counterfactual speculation."
Is it "conservative counterfactual speculation" to factually state that the DRV's ability to effectively conduct its war in the RVN was directly dependent on the supplies it constantly received mainly from the Soviet bloc nations?
Is it counterfactual speculation to factually state that: all the Soviet bloc supplies came to the DRV in ships; that if the DVR ports were closed, the Soviet bloc supplies could not reach the DRV; that without those supplies, the DRV could not long maintain its war against the RVN; and that the U.S. Navy always had the ability to close the DRV ports with air-dropped mines, as it did in just one day in December 1972?
Is it counterfactual speculation to factually state that after the NVA's disastrous Tet battles of 1968, the U.S. Army had the ability to conduct a multi-divisional airmobile invasion of the eastern Laotian Panhandle to destroy the essential NVA base areas there and in Cambodia; that with their air mobility, artillery firepower, and airborne firepower those U.S. divisions had the ability to capture or kill thousands of NVA troops in their Laotian and Cambodian base areas?
Is it counterfactual speculation to factually state that the bases and choke points on the NVA's Laotian road network could have been destroyed by U.S. Army and Navy engineer units with the protection of several U.S. divisions; that with the DRV ports mined, the DRV bases in Laos and Cambodia destroyed, and the railroad from China into the DRV constantly bombed, the NVA would not have been able to quickly reconstruct their Laotian and Cambodian road networks and base areas after the withdrawal of the U.S. airmobile divisions.
Is it counterfactual speculation to factually state that it was critical for the DRV to protect its basic industrial infrastructure from total destruction by a genuinely strategic U.S. air campaign; that the U.S. Air Force and Navy were always capable of conducting such a campaign, briefly did so in 1972, and could have done so at any time before then; and if they had, the DRV could not have continued to provide essential materiel and personnel support for its forces in the RVN, Laos, and Cambodia; that with no major supplies, reinforcements, or exterior bases for the DRV forces, the superior U.S. ground forces would have soon killed or captured the remaining NVA and VC forces in the RVN?
Ultimately, the dispute between orthodox and revisionist historians of the Second Indochina War is not about debating points, but about permanent differences in basic value systems and perceptions of historical reality. The epistemological dispute between their opposing concepts of historical truth -- objective truth versus subjective "truthiness" -- may be endlessly analyzed, but probably never fully resolved.
James McLeroy
James McLeroy was an Army Special Forces Officer in I Corps, Vietnam, in 1968. He recently co-authored a history of a battle in that war in which he participated titled BAIT: The Battle Of Kham Duc. It will be published later this year by Casemate Publications and will be included in the Vietnam War Series of the Association of the United States Army.
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam Paperback – April 2, 2019
by Max Boot (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Road-Not-Taken-Lansdale-American/dp/1631495623
Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam Paperback – Illustrated, December 10, 2007
by Mark Moyar (Author), Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. (Foreword)
https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Birds-Prey-Counterinsurgency-Counterterrorism/dp/0803216025/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18AOBLRC96IAJ&keywords=mark+moyar+phoenix&qid=1687307040&s=books&sprefix=mark+moyar+phoenix%2Cstripbooks%2C57&sr=1-1https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Birds-Prey-Counterinsurgency-Counterterrorism/dp/0803216025/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18AOBLRC96IAJ&keywords=mark+moyar+phoenix&qid=1687307040&s=books&sprefix=mark+moyar+phoenix,stripbooks,57&sr=1-1
A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam Hardcover – June 3, 1999
by Lewis Sorley (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Better-War-Unexamined-Victories-Americas/dp/0151002665/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=sorley+better+WAR&qid=1687306190&sr=8-1
Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect Hardcover – January 1, 1978
by Ulysses S. Grant Sharp (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Defeat-Ulysses-Grant-Sharp/dp/0891410538/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2ERTM3NT07QDW&keywords=strategy+for+defeat+sharp&qid=1687306335&s=books&sprefix=strategy+for+defeat+sharp,stripbooks,77&sr=1-1
At War in the Shadow of Vietnam – April 15, 1993
by Timothy Castle (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/War-Shadow-Vietnam-Timothy-Castle/dp/023107977X
Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos Paperback – June 1, 1998
by Roger Warner (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Moon-Story-Americas-Clandestine/dp/1883642361
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War (The Politically Incorrect Guides) Paperback – February 23, 2010
by Phillip Jennings (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Vietnam-Guides/dp/1596985674
“Orthodox” vs. “Revisionist” Views of the “Vietnam War”
If you want to read both sides of “orthodox” vs. “revisionist” arguments, this article and the books recommended, will give you working lists.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/vietnam-war-history-orthodox-versus-revisionist
Vietnam War History: Orthodox Versus Revisionist
James McLeroy - Sat, 03/09/2019
The orthodox academic historiography of the Second Indochina War is less an empirical search for objective truth than a dogmatic defense of politically correct "truthiness." In contrast to objective truth, "truthiness" is the subjective perception of reality that its believers want to be true, regardless of any contrary evidence or logic. Their wish is thus father to their thought.
In orthodox academic dogma, the "Vietnam" War is a mere sub-set of 20th Century diplomatic history, rather than a main subject of 20th Century military history. According to the 1960s orthodoxy, revisionist historians are defending a shameful history of U.S. political ignorance, military incompetence, and imperialist immorality. Orthodox historians reject the revisionist distinction between a U.S. political defeat in America and a U.S. military defeat in Vietnam. They also reject the revisionist military focus on the vulnerability of North Vietnam's economic infrastructure to U.S. conventional, non-nuclear weapons and tactics.
For true believers in academic orthodoxy, the term "anti-war" does not mean opposition to the Communist war of conquest against the Republic of Viet Nam (RVN). It means righteous left-liberal opposition to the U.S. role in an "unwinnable" war to defend the corrupt, repressive RVN regime from the "mostly nationalist" VC forces and their "mostly nationalist" NVA allies. They claim the war began as a small-scale, patriotic, indigenous, revolutionary insurgency and evolved into a large-scale, conventional, international war due only to U.S. intervention.
The primary literary, journalistic, and entertainment sources of the orthodox academic dogma are:
The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955);
Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall (1961);
The Making of a Quagmire by David Halberstam (1965);
Fire In the Lake by Francis Fitzgerald (1973);
Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow (1983);
Anatomy of a War by Gabriel Kolko (1985), and
The Army and Vietnam by Andrew Krepinevich (1986).
After 1967, the orthodox academic dogma was constantly propagated by the left-liberal "anti-war" journalism led by the New York Times newspaper, Time magazine, and CBS television news. The most influential "anti-war" films were:
Taxi Driver (1976),
Apocalypse Now (1978), and
The Deer Hunter (1978).
Revisionist historians think the war was the calculated implementation of a North Vietnamese strategy based on Mao's three-stage model of Communist revolutionary warfare in China. The first stage was a VC guerrilla and terrorist insurgency. The second stage was semi-conventional, mobile VC/NVA warfare. The third stage was conventional, modern, positional NVA warfare.
Revisionists think the war was not primarily an indigenous insurgency or a civil war. It was the incremental invasion of the RVN by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and its subordinate Viet Cong (VC) indigenous forces controlled by the Politburo of the "Democratic Republic" of Viet
Nam (DRV) in Hanoi. Revisionists think the low-level VC violence and terrorism in the first phase of the war were a contest of insurgent versus counterinsurgency forces, but the major combat of the war was primarily a contest of NVA and VC against U.S. and RVN effective firepower.
From 1965 to 1972, the NVA and VC forces lost all the major battles against the firepower of the combined U.S. and RVN forces. In 1968, the main VC forces were annihilated as a strategic threat to RVN sovereignty, and in 1972, the RVN forces with U.S. logistics and air support alone defeated the invasion of 14 conventional NVA divisions. By 1973, the U.S. and RVN forces had effectively won the internal war against the VC and NVA forces in South Vietnam.
The NVA was not capable of invading the RVN again until 1975, two years after all U.S. forces were withdrawn. They then conquered it conventionally with no concern for RVN governance or rural "hearts and minds." They could do so only because: 1) in 1974, the Congress radically reduced or prohibited essential combat support for the RVN forces, and 2) in 1974, the Soviet bloc nations gave the NVA more, and more effective, firepower than the RVN forces. If Congress had not abandoned South Vietnam in 1974, there is no military reason why the RVN forces with the same U.S. logistics and air support they had in 1972 could not have defeated the NVA invasion in 1975 the same way they did in 1972.
The first revisionist challenge to the orthodox academic portrayal of the totalitarian Leninist ideology of Ho Chi Minh's DRV (North Vietnam) was Robert Turner's Vietnamese Communism (1975).
The first book labeled "revisionist" by orthodox academic historians was “America In Vietnam” by Gunter Lewy (1978).
The first military challenge to the academic orthodoxy on the war was “Strategy for Defeat” by U.S.G. Sharp. It detailed how a genuinely strategic air campaign against the DRV could have ended the DRV's physical capacity, regardless of Politburo’s fanatical will, to continue its aggression against the RVN at any time, as it briefly did in 1972.
Since 1978, nine books and a key magazine article have advanced the revisionist arguments:
"How to Lose a War" by Robert Elegant (1981),
“On Strategy” by Harry Summers (1982),
“The Key to Failure” by Norman Hannah (1987),
“Vietnam at War” by Phillip Davidson (1988),
“Lost Victory” by William Colby (1989),
“A Better War” by Lewis Sorley (1999),
“Vietnam: The Necessary War” by Michael Lind (1999),
“The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat In Vietnam” by Dale Walton (2002),
“Triumph Forsaken” by Mark Moyar (2006), and
“The Vietnam War Reexamined” by Michael Kort (2018).
Lind is only revisionist in his geopolitical justification of the U.S. defense of the RVN.
Many revisionists believe that most of the objections of orthodox academic historians to the revisionist options for defeating the Communist forces are based on military ignorance or anti-U.S. military prejudice. Their objections are "strawman" arguments against artificially simplistic
reductions or distorted exaggerations of one or more of the revisionist arguments. Orthodox academic historians reject all the revisionist arguments as "conservative counterfactual speculation."
Is it "conservative counterfactual speculation" to factually state that the DRV's ability to effectively conduct its war in the RVN was directly dependent on the supplies it constantly received mainly from the Soviet bloc nations?
Is it counterfactual speculation to factually state that: all the Soviet bloc supplies came to the DRV in ships; that if the DVR ports were closed, the Soviet bloc supplies could not reach the DRV; that without those supplies, the DRV could not long maintain its war against the RVN; and that the U.S. Navy always had the ability to close the DRV ports with air-dropped mines, as it did in just one day in December 1972?
Is it counterfactual speculation to factually state that after the NVA's disastrous Tet battles of 1968, the U.S. Army had the ability to conduct a multi-divisional airmobile invasion of the eastern Laotian Panhandle to destroy the essential NVA base areas there and in Cambodia; that with their air mobility, artillery firepower, and airborne firepower those U.S. divisions had the ability to capture or kill thousands of NVA troops in their Laotian and Cambodian base areas?
Is it counterfactual speculation to factually state that the bases and choke points on the NVA's Laotian road network could have been destroyed by U.S. Army and Navy engineer units with the protection of several U.S. divisions; that with the DRV ports mined, the DRV bases in Laos and Cambodia destroyed, and the railroad from China into the DRV constantly bombed, the NVA would not have been able to quickly reconstruct their Laotian and Cambodian road networks and base areas after the withdrawal of the U.S. airmobile divisions.
Is it counterfactual speculation to factually state that it was critical for the DRV to protect its basic industrial infrastructure from total destruction by a genuinely strategic U.S. air campaign; that the U.S. Air Force and Navy were always capable of conducting such a campaign, briefly did so in 1972, and could have done so at any time before then; and if they had, the DRV could not have continued to provide essential materiel and personnel support for its forces in the RVN, Laos, and Cambodia; that with no major supplies, reinforcements, or exterior bases for the DRV forces, the superior U.S. ground forces would have soon killed or captured the remaining NVA and VC forces in the RVN?
Ultimately, the dispute between orthodox and revisionist historians of the Second Indochina War is not about debating points, but about permanent differences in basic value systems and perceptions of historical reality. The epistemological dispute between their opposing concepts of historical truth -- objective truth versus subjective "truthiness" -- may be endlessly analyzed, but probably never fully resolved.
James McLeroy
James McLeroy was an Army Special Forces Officer in I Corps, Vietnam, in 1968. He recently co-authored a history of a battle in that war in which he participated titled BAIT: The Battle Of Kham Duc. It will be published later this year by Casemate Publications and will be included in the Vietnam War Series of the Association of the United States Army.
Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos
by Roger Warner | Jun 1, 1998
|