On June 30, the last American troops left Cambodia. Our troops had captured 22,892 individual weapons, enough to equip seventy-four full-strength North Vietnamese battalions; 2,509 big crew-served weapons, enough to equip twenty-five full-strength North Vietnamese infantry battalions; 15 million rounds of ammunition—about what the enemy had fired in South Vietnam during the past year; 14 million pounds of rice, enough to feed for four months all the Communist combat battalions estimated to be in South Vietnam; 143,000 rockets, mortars, and recoilless-rifle rounds, enough for fourteen months of fighting; 199,552 antiaircraft rounds; 5,482 mines; 62,022 grenades; and 83,000 pounds of explosives. And according to an intercepted radio transmission from the COSVN, our forces were at times close to overrunning it.
Our Cambodian operation dealt a crushing blow to North Vietnam’s military campaign in the Mekong Delta region. We saved Lon Nol’s government and thereby ensured that the port at Sihanoukville would remain closed to Communist arms shipments. We destroyed or captured an estimated 40 percent of North Vietnam’s supplies in Cambodia and thereby eliminated the chance of a major Communist offensive in the region for the next two years. Our casualties dropped from ninety-three per week in the six months before the operation to fifty-two per week in the six months afterward. We sapped Hanoi’s strength so severely that when the North Vietnamese launched their spring offensive in 1972, their attacks in the delta region were easily repulsed.
Most important, we achieved the operation’s two main goals: We prevented the fall of Cambodia and relieved the pressure on Phnom Penh. We undercut North Vietnam’s offensive striking power and thereby bought time to press forward with Vietnamization. Our Cambodian incursion was the most successful military operation of the entire Vietnam War.
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Of all the myths about the Vietnam War, the most vicious one is the idea that the United States was morally responsible for the atrocities committed after the fall of Cambodia in 1975. The critics charged that the actions we took against North Vietnam’s Cambodian sanctuaries, starting with the bombing of Communist bases in 1969, began a series of events that brought the murderous Khmer Rouge to power. This is a total distortion of history and complete perversion of moral judgment.
The myth runs like this: Our secret bombing in 1969 not only slaughtered countless civilians but also pushed the Vietnamese Communist forces deeper into Cambodia and thereby destabilized Sihanouk’s neutral government. Our incursions against the sanctuaries in 1970 swept peaceful Cambodia into the war and led the North Vietnamese to give massive aid to their Communist Khmer Rouge allies. Therefore, because American actions set in motion the events that brought the Khmer Rouge to power, the United States was to blame for the ensuing holocaust, in which over 2 million Cambodians were killed.
These arguments are wrong on every point. Our bombing caused minimal civilian casualties because the Communists had long before cleared all Cambodians out of their base areas. A Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum written in April 1969 pointed out that “Cambodians rarely go into areas under de facto control of the [National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese Army].” It added, “Cambodian villages and populated areas are readily identified and can be essentially avoided in conducting preplanned operations into the base areas.”
Nor did our bombing destabilize Sihanouk’s government. No evidence exists to show that our 1969 air strikes pushed the Vietnamese Communist forces deeper into Cambodia. These forces grew at the time of the bombing, both because a steady stream of new troops was coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and because United States and South Vietnamese military sweeps in South Vietnam were pushing more Communist troops into Cambodia. But none of these forces went deeper into Cambodia as a result of the bombing. Communist forces simply dispersed themselves and their supplies more widely along the border with South Vietnam.
Sihanouk was overthrown because of discontent, both among the people and within the government, over his unwillingness to take vigorous steps to expel the Vietnamese Communist forces from the country. Years later Sihanouk admitted as much, saying, “If I lost my Fauteuil présidentiel and my Chamcar Mon Palace in Phnom Penh to Marshal Lon Nol who occupied them for five years, it was because I tremendously helped the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese.”
Our incursions into Cambodia in 1970 did not widen the war. Since 1965, North Vietnam’s forces had occupied the border areas of Cambodia. In March 1970, Hanoi infiltrated into Cambodia over 20,000 Khmer Rouge guerrillas who had been trained in North Vietnam. In April, after Cambodia’s government tried to reassert its authority over its own territory—hardly an unreasonable demand—North Vietnam launched an invasion of the country. Hanoi’s delegate to the private peace talks in Paris freely admitted to us that North Vietnam intended to bring down the government in Phnom Penh. In May and June, when American and South Vietnamese forces cleared out the Communist sanctuaries, Cambodia was already swept up in the war. If we had not acted, we would have guaranteed the victory of the Communist forces both in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Thus, the charge that our incursion drove the North Vietnamese out of the border areas and toward Phnom Penh is false on its face. The Vietnamese Communists moved deeper into Cambodia two weeks after the fall of Sihanouk and a month before our incursion occurred.
During the war in Vietnam, those who now concoct apologias for Indochina’s totalitarians opposed American policies that sought to prevent a Communist victory and the human tragedy that would follow inevitably in its wake. No doubt these apologists are now at least subconsciously motivated by feelings of guilt. Simple ethics holds those who took an action responsible for its consequences. To assign blame for the genocide in Cambodia to those in the United States who sought to prevent a Communist victory, rather than to the Communists who committed the atrocities, is an immoral act in and of itself.
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Our critics claimed that our operations in Cambodia deepened our involvement in the war. But the opposite was true: Our attacks on the Communist sanctuaries were the single most important move that enabled us to continue our policy of steadily withdrawing American forces from Vietnam. We reduced the pressure on our forces in South Vietnam, allowing them to devote more time and resources to training the South Vietnamese to defend themselves.
In January 1969, the United States had 542,000 troops in Vietnam. By July 1970, as our operations in Cambodia came to an end, our troop level was down to 404,000. With the breathing room we gained through our actions and progress in Vietnamization, we accelerated our withdrawals. We pulled out an additional 179,000 troops in the next twelve months. By July 1972, we would have only 45,600 troops stationed in South Vietnam.
Many of my congressional supporters had urged me to announce a complete withdrawal schedule in 1969 so the American people would know our involvement in Vietnam was coming to an end. I discussed this idea in a conversation with Dean Acheson, who despite our bitter differences in the past had become one of my most astute unofficial foreign-policy advisers. In his usual blunt and incisive manner, he said, “That would be a stupid move, both on the battlefront and on the home front. If you tell the North Vietnamese in advance that you are going to withdraw all our forces on a certain date in the future regardless of what they do, you lose all negotiating leverage. They will just continue the war until we get out and take over when we leave.” He added that, because the American people were tired of the war, we had to buy time until South Vietnam was able to defend itself. If I revealed a complete withdrawal schedule now, he warned, I would have nothing to announce later to show that the war was winding down. “Parcel out the good news,” he advised. “Don’t put it all out now and have nothing left later, when you may need it to sustain public support.”
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A few months after our incursion into Cambodia, one prominent politician who was against our involvement said that our best young men had gone to Canada. In his view, those who evaded the draft represented the best of American youth because they were
acting on their belief that the Vietnam War was immoral.
Draft dodgers acted out of a whole range of motivations. Some were conscious pro-Communists who wanted North Vietnam to win; others were sincere pacifists who believed no war could be just. But most were not acting out of moral convictions. Many, drawn into the moral vacuum of the 1960s, saw no moral issue at stake in the war. Some of them felt that we had nothing worth fighting for because they had lost faith in what the United States stood for in the world. Others felt that we had nothing worth fighting against because they believed that life in North Vietnam was as good as or better than life in South Vietnam. One of the great tragedies of the Vietnam years was that for the first time many draft evaders either wanted the enemy to win or did not care which side won. But most who fled the country or feigned illness to evade the draft acted out of expediency: Like most draft dodgers in our previous wars, including the two world wars, they were understandably afraid of risking their lives.
Antiwar protesters were another matter. Some were pacifists who opposed all wars, or idealists who believed our values were being corrupted by the Vietnam War. Others were pragmatists who did not believe that this war could be won. Still others were isolationists who did not want to see the United States play a world role But many key leaders of the antiwar movement were hard-core militants of the New Left who hated the United States and wanted to see our country humiliated in Vietnam. They did not hide their allegiance. They openly flew the Viet Cong flag at their rallies. Destroying the American system was their goal, and they did not shrink from using violence to try to achieve it.
Today, many Americans remember the demonstrations against the war as flocks of flower children marching in orderly candlelight processions. But what we saw from the White House at the time was quite different. Until 1968, antiwar demonstrators were basically peaceful, seldom doing more than holding “teach-ins” and symbolically burning their draft cards. But that had changed by 1969. Students shot at firemen and policemen, held college administrators hostage at knifepoint, stormed university buildings with shotguns in hand, burned buildings, smashed windows, trashed offices, and bombed classrooms. In the academic year 1969-70, there were 1,800 demonstrations, 7,500 arrests, 247 arsons, 462 injuries—two-thirds of them to police—and 8 deaths. The violence was not limited to college campuses; it was a national epidemic. From January 1969 through February 1970, there were over 40,000 bombings, attempted bombings, or bomb threats, most of which were war related. These caused $21 million of property damage, hundreds of injuries, and 43 deaths.
Violence was becoming the rule, not the exception, in campus protests. Following the announcement of the incursions into Cambodia, a new wave of violent protest swept the country. At the University of Maryland, fifty people were injured when students ransacked the ROTC building and skirmished with police. In Kent, Ohio, a crowd of hundreds of demonstrators watched as two young men threw lighted flares into the army ROTC building on the campus of Kent State University and burned it to the ground. Ohio’s governor called in the National Guard. A few days later, a large crowd of students began throwing rocks and chunks of concrete at the guardsmen, forcing them up a small hill. At the top, the soldiers turned, and someone started shooting. Four people—two protesters and two bystanders—were killed. In August a van packed with explosives was blown up next to a building at the University of Wisconsin, killing one graduate student, injuring four others, and doing $6 million in damage. Underground newspapers across the country reported ecstatically that another blow had been struck against the “pig nation.” No one could justify the decision of the guardsmen at Kent State to fire on the crowd, but neither should anyone have defended the actions of a confrontational mob or of murderous bombers.
I had mixed emotions about the antiwar protesters. I appreciated their concerns for peace. I was angered by their excesses. But most of all I was frustrated at their moral righteousness and total unwillingness to credit me or my predecessors with a genuine desire for peace. Whatever my view of their motives and whatever their estimate of mine—the practical effect of their actions was to give encouragement to the enemy to fight on or refuse to negotiate a peace. That the brightest and the best in our great educational institutions could not recognize that their peace protests prolonged the war is one of the tragic ironies of the Vietnam era. More than once North Vietnamese negotiators taunted our delegates at the Paris peace talks and Henry Kissinger at our secret negotiations by quoting the statements of the antiwar leaders on our campuses and in the Congress.
The demonstrators wanted to end the war in Vietnam. So did I. But they did not see anything wrong with abandoning the South Vietnamese people in order to end the war immediately. I did. I saw no moral purpose served in letting the totalitarians in Hanoi set up shop in Saigon. It was my duty as President to do what I thought was right for the country. Our policy had to be made in the voting booth, not in the streets.
News reporting tended to portray America’s young people as unanimously opposed to the war. That might have been true on a number of college campuses. But it was not the case in the country as a whole. Opinion polls showed that support for the war was always highest among those who were twenty-one to twenty-nine years old. In March 1966, when asked whether our involvement in Vietnam was a mistake, 71 percent answered that it was not. Even after the Tet Offensive, polls indicated that a plurality of young people, averaging about 45 percent, said that we acted rightly in going into the war. And in the presidential election of 1972, I split the youth vote evenly with my antiwar opponent, Senator George McGovern.
Our best young men did not go to Canada. They went to Vietnam. When I visited our servicemen in South Vietnam in July 1969, I found the most idealistic young Americans of an idealistic generation. But they knew better than their contemporaries at home what it took to give life to ideals in a world that was far from ideal. Any war is difficult to fight in. But the war in Vietnam was the most difficult one in which American soldiers had ever fought. Front lines were seldom clearly drawn. Enemy soldiers were often hard to identify. Our men were constantly bombarded by media reports telling them that the war was unwinnable, that our cause was unjust, and that a majority of the American people opposed it. But to their credit, our men did their duty. They honored their country. They served well the cause of freedom and justice.
News media reporting portrayed our troops as divided along racial lines, undisciplined and addicted to drugs, and guilt-ridden over their involvement in the war. None of these problems was unique to the Vietnam War. But all of them were exaggerated in the press.
It was commonly asserted during the war that blacks constituted a disproportionate number of combat casualties and that this injustice, in turn, stirred racial animosities. But in fact casualties among blacks were not out of proportion to their share of the population. By March 1973, when blacks comprised 13.5 percent of all American men of military age, blacks accounted for 12.3 percent of combat deaths.
Our armed forces in Vietnam were not collapsing from a lack of discipline or being overrun by drug addiction. Our troops in Vietnam were more disciplined than those in Korea. During the Korean War, for the years in which statistics were kept, the average AWOL rate was 170 per 1,000. In the Vietnam War, the rate was 115 per 1,000. Drug use was a widespread problem for the generation growing up in the 1960s. It was not appreciably worse among military personnel in Vietnam than among those stationed in other countries or among draft-age civilians in the United States. Among students at Harvard College in 1968, 75 percent had smoked marijuana or used hard drugs. In 1971, a survey showed that 50.9 percent of Army personnel in Vietnam had smoked marijuana and that 28.5 percent had used hard drugs, like heroin or opium. Few were truly addicted, and most had used drugs before being sent to Vietnam.
American soldiers were not haunted by doubts about the morality of the war. Overwhelming majorities still believe our cause was right. An opinion poll conducted in 1980 revealed that 82 percent of those who engaged
in heavy combat believed that the United States lost the war because the armed forces were not allowed to win it. And 66 percent indicated that they would be willing to fight again in Vietnam for the same cause.
Many believe the war in Vietnam was a war without heroes. But that was not the case. All our fighting men were heroes in the sense that they were risking their lives in a selfless cause. Heroic acts were as common in Vietnam as in any other war. But our prisoners of war, who had been courageous in action and even more courageous in captivity, were among the most remarkable heroes of the Vietnam War.
Many Americans did not know that our POWs were brutally tortured by the North Vietnamese until we freed them in 1973. During the war, the news media virtually ignored reports that trickled out about the mistreatment of our prisoners and were bamboozled by antiwar activists engaged in a concerted propaganda campaign to portray North Vietnam’s treatment of our prisoners as humane. Acting out of naïveté or malice, these critics would go to Hanoi, meet a handful of American POWs, and make rosy statements about their condition. What the American people were not told was that the prisoners who were presented to these activists often had been tortured minutes before to guarantee that they said nothing out of line.
These antiwar activists knew or should have known what was going on. In August 1969, after going to North Vietnam and securing the release of two prisoners, a group of these opponents of the war praised Hanoi’s humane treatment of its captives. In a hospital press conference, one of the newly freed POWs refuted their assertions, saying, “I don’t think that solitary confinement, forced statements, living in a cage for three years, being put in straps, not being allowed to sleep or eat, removal of fingernails, being hung from the ceiling, having an infected arm almost lost without medical treatment, being dragged along the ground with a broken leg, and not allowing exchange of mail for prisoners are humane.” But after a trip to Hanoi in August 1972, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark testified that the POWs were well treated and well fed and were “good, strong Americans.” One of the prisoners later said that the Communists “persuaded” him to meet with Clark by hanging him by his broken arm.
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