Been busy this week, so apologies for the delayed reply.

Kevin Brooks wrote:

"Guy Alcala" wrote in message
. ..


A chart on the same page shows 1.1 million NVA/VC dead versus about
276,000 US/ARVN
and allied itroops in combat. So, we've got 3.1 million North Vietnamese
killed
during the war, vs. 2.24 million south Vietnamese. The majority of SVN
civilian
deaths would have been due to allied firepower, especially US.

Where do you get that from? It would take quite a few collateral damage
events to equal the number of RVN civilians executed by the VC/NVA at Hue
during Tet 68 alone--what kind of reliable data do you have that supports
your assertion that we were responsible for most of the RVN civilian deaths?

In the immediate aftermath of the battle for Hue, U.S./South Vietnamese forces
reported digging up 2,800 bodies that appeared to have been executed, hands tied
behind their backs with bullet holes in the back of their heads, or in some
cases just buried alive. Douglas Pike, at that time an intell officer in SVN,
wrote a report (1970) about the executions because their scope and scale was so
unlike anything the VC had practiced prior to Tet (or since), and arrived at a
figure possibly as high as 5,700. However, those figures have been called into
question, because apparently they were supplied to him by a South Vietnamese
intell unit, the 10th Political Warfare Battalion, whose whole charter was to
discredit the NLF, and Pike apparently had noi way of checking the totals
himself. Then again, its possuible that at least some of the executions were
carried out by the South Vietnamese; a U.S. intell officer told a U.S. reporter
(who had been at Hue during the battles and who returned twice more to do
interviews) that South Vietnamese Intell units had sent in some hit squads
themselves to kill collaborators while the battle was still continuing. In any
case, let's assume a range of 2,800 - 5,700 were executed by the VC in Hue - no
one is ever likely to know the true number.

Saying, "I saw it in an Oliver Stone movie" ain't gonna cut it, either...

Oh please, Kevin - you really don't think that I'd base claims on a movie, do
you, whether "Platoon" or for that matter, "The Green Berets"?

And how many of those deaths actually occured in the infamous "reeducation
camps" after the actual combat was over (it would be kind of convenient to
slip those tallies into the war casualty count, just to make things look
nioce and tidy for folks later)?

Certainly possible that some of them did, although if they just wanted to kill
people wholesale why bother to ship them to a 're-education' camp, when they can
just take them into the jungle, dig a trench and mow them down? Worked for the
Einsatzgruppen and the NKVD.

So assuming
reasonably accurate numbers,

That would be quite an assumption in this case.

Sure, but we don't have any better ones. Ed is the one claiming the U.S. killed
between 1 and 3 million _North_ Vietnamese.

the US and its allies killed somewhere between 2 and 4
million civilians, plus the 1.1 million combatants.

Using that model, you are assuming that the NVA/VC were just really swell
guys who never dared to harm RVN civilians?

Of course not - they were considerably more brutal and ruthless than the GVN
governments, who weren't exactly known having much concern for their own
citizens themselves. After all, it was the GVN who designated Free-Fire zones
for the U.S. military.

Just how do you think we managed
to kill those *millions* of noncombatants?

Simple firepower. See below.

I note that the number you are
touting is on-par (at a minimum--your max figure is about twice the German
total) with the number of civilian casualties the Germans sustained during
WWII--that with the spectres of the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin,
etc., ad nauseum, not to mention the effects of the Red Army onslaught in
the eastern portion of that nation--which leaves me a bit suspicious of your
figures.

I'm glad you brought up Germany. Kevin, I can't give you the source because I
saw it many years ago, but it was a credible one. I don't remember whether it
referred to bombs alone, bombs and artillery shells, all ammunition, and
included the casing weights or just the HE equivalent, but the total (of
whatever metric) used by ALL the combatants in World War 2 was ca. 3 megatons.
By comparison, the U.S., over the 1964 -1973 period dropped/fired 8 Megatons
(same metric) on SE Asia. SVN received either the first or second percentage of
this tonnage, with Laos holding the other place. The DRVN was in either third
or fourth place for tonnage (can't remember if they came in before or after
Cambodia).

The vast majority of this firepower was quite inaccurate; it's the nature of war
that civilians get killed just by being in the way, even when they're not
deliberately being targeted. We employed the vast majority of the firepower in
the south, so clearly we would have killed the vast majority of the civilians.
The VC and NVA certainly killed their share, but they just didn't have the
logistics to kill relatively indiscriminately in large numbers, as the U.S. and
to a lesser extent our allies could, even if they'd wanted to (and for the VC,
that would be counter-productive). Yeah, they fired a few rockets into the
cities on occasion, and civilians certainly died during the invasions in
1968/72/75, but the sheer firepower was lacking to kill large numbers of
civilians indiscriminately. The VC tended to kill civilians deliberately and
discriminately, targeting government representatives, uncooperative village
leaders etc. for assassination/execution. They didn't do it by bombing a
village.

Were you claiming the deaths of
civilians, those of both our allies and our enemies, represented a great
triumph of
american arms, Ed? Killing civilians in a war is easy, as was repeatedly
demonstrated in the 20th Century (and every other one, for that matter).

I believe Ed was pointing to the fact that it would be difficult to lable
the final outcome in 1975 (and the years following) as much of a "victory"
for the North--and events since then point to his observation being more
accurate than not.

Since they achieved their aims, at a cost that was grievously high but one they
were prepared to pay, they definitely won. Unless you believe that Germany
defeated the Soviet Union in WW2, or Japan defeated China ditto? And as I
pointed out to Ed, he has presented no evidence that the subsequent tilt towards
a more material society by Vietnam was a result of the war. China has been
progressing in that direction at an even faster pace than Vietnam, and I haven't
seen anyone claiming that was because of their losses in the Korean (or Vietnam;
the PRC employed a lot of workers on the NE and NW railroads) wars.

Of course, all of this is really moot, and smacks of McNamara's numbers
war. If you
wish to claim that the number of dead on each side defines which side won
and lost,
then you must believe that the Axis powers won World War 2, because they
killed far
more of the citizens of the allied powers than vice versa. The DRVN
achieved their
goals at a cost they were both willing and able to pay, i.e. they won.
The US didn't
achieve its goals because we ultimately decided the cost was too high for
any benefit
we might get, i.e. we lost.

Only if you assume that the US had some sort of irrevocable requirment to
stay in the thick of the fight in perpetuity. When we decamped in 72-73, the
RVN had the tools to perform their own security mission and we had handed
that responsibility off to them,

With the promise that our airpower would bail them out if they got in trouble,
yes, but we _as a country_ weren't prepared to keep that promise.

the VC had been eliminated as a major
factor (and had been since the days following Tet 68, vastly different from
the situation in the mid 60's),

Yup.

and the NVA had been for all intents and
purposes pushed out of RVN territory.

Nope, indeed that's why Thieu dragged his feet so much at signing the accords,
_because_ large NVA forces were allowed to remain on the ground in SVN, which he
knew would just serve as the launching pad for another invasion.

Two years later things went to hell in
a handbasket rather quickly, courtesy of a massive conventional invasion of
the RVN by the DRVN--but you think that constitutes a defeat for the US
military?

Kevin, at no time have I stated or implied that the U.S. military was defeated;
that was the argument of others, which I don't subscribe to. They weren't
defeated, and indeed they couldn't be, which was explictly recognized by that
PAVN Col. who was talking to Col. Harry G. Summers (that is who I've seen the
anecdote that Paul J. Adam quoted, attributed to). OTOH, the U.S. military was
equally unable to win. But, as the DRVN leadership recognized, they didn't have
to defeat the U.S. military, they just had to not lose and make the price higher
than the U.S.A. was willing to pay, which has been the strategy of many weaker
powers -- it worked for us in the Revolutionary war.

And they did. They lost every battle except the last one, and won the war.

I don't think so. It was indeed a blow to the previous US foreign
policy objectives, but it was no defeat of US military power, which had
withstood the best the DRVN could hurl at them and ended up departing an RVN
still controlled by its own sovereign government.

As the North Vietnamese realised, It wasn't a war of military against military,
it was a war of country against country, and their country defeated ours.
Whether we were defeated by default is irrelevant; that the U.S. did not achieve
its aims in SVN, is while the DRVN government did, is obvious. That's a defeat
for the U.S., and a win for the DRVN in my book.

Guy