Anti American Extremist Seeds

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
--Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night,
Dylan Thomas
________________

Reading Mangold's and Penycate's "The Tunnels of Cu Chi" (1985) is like deju vu all over again.

The parallels to today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unmistakable and illustrative of a military organization lacking institutional memory and operational adaptability.

The following quotes on actions 40+ years old could just as readily be applied to the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) today:

"The Americans' concern for their dead and wounded remained a source of bewilderment and relief to the Communist soldiers. Anything that delayed the battle inevitably favored the weaker side and allowed reloading, regrouping and rethinking."

"The Americans came, as they always seemed to, shortly after eight in the morning."

"In fact, the explosions destroyed only some seventy feet of the tunnel complex, and the system was usable again within a few weeks."

"Everything he had learned about fighting seemed to have no relevance to what he had been doing today. . . . [W]hat did any of this have to do with an enemy you never saw alive, who existed in holes in the ground, and against whom only a man's brute strength and luck seemed to prevail?"

"Aircraft, bombs, artillery, and chemicals obliged the Viet Cong to live and fight underground."

"The tunnels evolved as the natural response of a poorly equipped and mainly local guerrilla army to mid-twentieth-century technological warfare.

"Professional soldiers, including the legendary Foreign Legion, had been defeated by an Asian guerrilla army -- a lesson for the future that few Americans heeded."

"However, the peasants did not in the main have to be terrorized into acquiescence by such tactics. The Viet Cong were themselves villagers, or their sons an daughters, and operated most of the time with the consent and assistance of the people among whom they lived."

"Guerrillas hold the military initiative; the Viet Cong could choose the time and place of battle." "For a guerrilla army, stalemate -- pinning down a larger force in its huge bases -- is equivalent to winning."

"But for the guerrillas there were often blood-debts to settle -- home villages bombed, relative killed, or arrested and tortured, by a government funded and armed by the U.S."

"Not only were they [the U.S.] easy targets for our snipers, but I realized the best way to kill them was with more booby traps."

"Throughout the war,booby traps were responsible for 11 % of all American deaths, and 17% of all wounds."

"The war occurred wherever opposing forces made contact."

"Large parts of South Vietnam could not be, and never were, secured."

"The Hamlet Evaluation System [HES] relied on suspect intelligence supplied by often corrupt ARVN local officials, who tended to portray the running of their areas of responsibility in the most flattering light."

"Twenty years earlier. Ho Chi Minh himself had warned the French, 'You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.'"

"Most of the Cu Chi district was under ARVN or American control by day, but the Viet Cong dominated it by night."

"Westmoreland remembered the advice given him in 1964 by [MacArthur]" To defeat the guerrilla, "you may have to resort to a scorched-earth policy."

"As usual in Vietnam, the brightest possible picture was painted in the after-action reports." "[T]he army's sweeping through an area for a short time, only to allow the Viet Cong to move back in and resume their activities [was futile]."

"Even before the ground war in Vietnam had begun to settle down into one of grinding attrition -- a strategy that is proof of a lack of strategy -- the Americans had already begun to rely heavily on their overwhelming superiority in weapons technology."