We Must Have Won The Vietnam War

On the essential Arts and Letters Daily I noticed a link on the side bar to CIA Studies.I checked a few articles they were well done though with a definite point of view. I found some interesting if unusual comments in a book review of Of Spies and Lies: A CIA Lie Detector Remembers Vietnam by John F. Sullivan, Volume 1 2003. The book is the remebrences of a polygraph eximaner in Viet Nam. The reviewer comments:


Yes, we could have fought it better. Yes, Jack Kennedy’s wish to play Special Forces soldier should have been avoided. Yes, Lyndon Johnson could have spent more time chasing secretaries instead of bomb targets. But the Vietnam War was a war that had to be fought. By the time it was over, the communists’ reach for global supremacy had become tired and bedraggled. Had it not been for the military stand of the United States, all of Southeast Asia might have been overrun by those gritty little North Vietnamese imperialists, and we would have had to stage a second Inchon landing somewhere around Vinh to break the stranglehold. And that, gentle reader, would have cost a lot more than the 58,000 names on the Wall. Maybe we could have saved some of those lives by fighting a better war, but the sacrifices should be considered a major contribution to victory in the Cold War. They were not made in vain.

snip

If it is true that the victors write the histories, we must have won the Vietnam War, because we are writing the histories.


See Also: TET 1968 - A Personal Narrative