How was our pulling out of Viet Nam described? I don't remember anyone

saying that we were cutting and running at the end. Did anyone say that Reagan cut and ran from Beirut?

honor. don't remember exactly what they called it, but it certainly was not cut and run. of course, it did fall apart after we left and after we lost 58,000 troups. pat buchannan recently said that if nixon did not leave office we would have won in viet nam. i thought we had. i'm sure there are others whose memories are more in tact than mine.

And it was so disorganized.Someone forgot to tel the North Vietnamese that it was suppose to be peaceful.........
There are some facts about our position to win (or at least force the North Vietnamese back behind the DMZ) but that debate could go on and on....

Particularly awsome were the Vietnamese pilots crashing their aircraft into the sea attempting to get aboard the ships leaving with American troops. It was chaos. Everyone watched speechless. We couldn't believe what we were seeing.

I don't remember Beirut being televised spectacularly like that. I guess the cloth over the press cameras must have started with Reagan. Nothing to see here. Move on.

helicopters as they were taking off, and falling to the ground.

I remember one of George Carlin's "dirty words" routines, saying "yes, those are the words that will burn your ears, grow hair on your palms, or even bring - God help us - 'Peace without Honor'."

We left because the administration said the South Vietnamese were ready to fight the war on their own. This was the so-called "Peace With Honor". Didn't last long. It was a bail-out.

It ended for good about a year later when the reduced number of remaining troops had to be rescued from the roof of the American Embassy.

Kissinger and North Vietnamese foreign minister Le Duc Tho received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their roles in negotiating a ceasefire.

North Vietnam continued to fight and even though Nixon had promised South Vietnam that he would provide military support to counter a military offensive from North Vietnam, he refused to honor his commitment.

North Vietnam defeated South Vietnam by 1976.

North Vietnam never recognized South Vietnam as a legitimate country, and they had a very good case that it wasn't.

"All parties pledged to "respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam." "

- you have to understand just what a diplomatic masterpiece that phrase was. All sides could walk away proclaiming that peace was at hand.

The '54 Geneva Accord allowed the French to bail out and did not really establish south vietnam as a separate nation - it was a temporary arrangement pending elections to establish a vietnamese government. Those elections were never allowed to occur, as Eisenhower observed that they would have been won by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party and we certainly were not going to let that happen. So instead we stuck around for 21 more years and killed 2-3 million vietnamese until we had our saigon moment and the results of the election that never happened were finally realized.

The treaty allowed the north to keep its forces in place in the south and did not prohibit them from resupply or reinforcement of those forces. Vietnamization was as much a farce as the current iraqification is. The forces we organized were just as likely to be funnels for supplies and intelligence to the north as they were to actually stand and fight. Warlords glommed as much cash and power as they could from us and cut deals with the north on the side.

Congress refused to provide additional emergency aid to the south in '75 as the north's final offensive, almost two years in preparation, got going and that was the end of it. In the simplistic right wing analysis the Democratic Congress sold out the brave vietnamese people who, it seems, despite any ability to fend for themselves in the prior 21 years, were now ready and willing to stand and fight if only they had some additional aid from our treasury.

Was Broken. We LIED and left them to their own devices when push came to shove. A Republican Administration did that.........

Despite the ambiguity of the situation between the forces of the north and the forces of the south after the paris accords, the agreement was quite clear about our status: we were out. Nixon indeed did cut them off in 73 - and then got himself cut off as well and left the mess to Ford. Given the domestic political situation in '75 'going back in' what have meant blood in the streets at home. Everybody knew the score after '73, everybody knew it including the already scheming rightwing fucks who have been using this and the bullshit POW issue ever since in their hideous rightwing renaissance.

That logic was also used by the Right to prolong the war when the country started to turn in the late 60's. "Dishonoring those who died" was the convulated logic that was used to argue for more troopts to stay and die.

If we had carpet bombed VietNam with $20.00 bills in the early 60's, we could have seeded capitalism and really taken out the communist domino without shedding the blood of 58,000 Americans in the process. Saved a lot of money in the process, too. Of course, that would have started the whole out-sourcing a few decades earlier...

we left VietNam. Was it the 58,000 Americans who died over there? Or was it the cost of the war that finally convinced them to finally leave? It's important to note that before VietNam, the U.S. was a net creditor nation. After this madcap adventure, we became a net debtor nation, and we've stayed that way ever since. Now, we're broke, flat-out busted.

I've been harping away about the cost of the war in Iraq, ever since the war started. None of the funds are from current money. It's all been borrowed from the future. About $230 billion I think.

There's no way we can continue at this spending level. It's impossible. Our creditors have been VERY kind to us, extending us an unbelievable amount of credit. But the day will come.....

restless and the politicians realized things were getting close to civil war against the federal government. Back then there wasn't the kool-aid dispersed to the freepers, like there is today. It's like the neo-cons learned their lesson but we didn't.

'the establishment' that something drastic had to be done to defuse the growing leftwing protest movement. That thing was the end of the draft and our withdrawal from vietnam. It worked.

it was described as

HOLY SHIT, LOOK AT ALL THOSE ZIPS! RUN LIKE HELL!

From 1969 - 1971 the accent was on training the South Vietnamese army and air force so that they would be able to take over more of the fight.

In 1972, the ARVN carried the burden of the fighting for the first time and even flew more air missions than the US did for the first time. Things looked hopeful and there was every reason to see progress as the fighting was very heavy and generally successful. ARVN lost 50,000 men in 1972 alone which was as many as we lost in the whole war.

The last US ground forces left in 1973 and at that point the war was up to ARVN. The US promised to intervene with massive airpower if the North Vietnamese launched any major offensives.

Once the US was out of the war, the congress began to cut aid to the ARVN, and that accelarated once Nixon got stuck in Watergate. The situation was made worse because there was an energy crisis at the time due to the Yom Kippur War and oil prices jumped up which was a disaster to the South Vietnamese government which was running out of money.

In 1974 the fighting again gave hopeful signs. The ARVN had many units which fought very well on their own, and in fact they lost 31,000 that year, their second highest losses. However, much of the year was spent ferrying their best units from one hot spot to another which created positive battlefield results, but was very expensive, especially in fuel and ammunition.

In 1975, the South Vietnamese government was aware there would be a major North Vietnamese spring offensive. At that point President Thieu made a disastrous decision. He decided before the offensive started in earnest that he would evacuate the less populated central highlands of his country which could only be defended by expensive helicopter airlifts from point to point. The withdrawel turned into a rout, and when the North Vietnamese main offensive started in the north, the ARVN fell apart.

Nixon was now out of office and Ford refused to intervene with airpower. He did submit an emergency $ 700 million proposal to the congress to airlift massive military supplies to South Vietnam to attempt to stem the North Vietnamese attack, but that was voted down in congress. That was the end.

The end result looked like the end of the world. People running for their lives, helicopters coming in to pick up our embassy staff but we left the Vietnamese who had worked with us behind. A large plane loaded with children from an orphanage crashed killing all aboard. Vietnamese got on anything that could fly and crashed them into the sea near our ships to try to get aboard. People got on any boats that could float and headed out to sea.

A friend of mine ran a camp in the Delta, before we left the war. He said he found out years later that his three Vietnamese secretaries who worked there were killed when the Viet Cong took over.

That was an exception in Vietnam, but it was pretty much up to each local VC leader until the new government was established in power.

In neighboring Cambodia, the US supported government also fell to the communist opposition a few months before Saigon fell, and the aftermath of that was much worse, a Killing Fields where maybe one quarter of the entire population of the country was wiped out, including anyone who had worked for the US supported government.

Ironically, it was the communist Vietnamese who eventually pushed the Communist Cambodians out of power.

I hope if we leave Iraq that we bring the Iraqis with us who have worked with us. I fear the aftermath will be more like Cambodia than Vietnam and these people deserve better than that.

this is one of the few things I can credit the Nixon Administration with doing right. They did clean up the mess in Vietnam. Of course along the way Nixon ordered more bombs dropped on Hanoi than what was used in WW2 and Korea combined. So we did "go out in style" so to speak. He was sending a clear message to Hanoi that "we want out but if you fuck with us we will bomb the living fuck out of you."

Basically, handing the South on a silver platter in exchange for the N. Vietnamese not re-starting shit with us.

The problem is not the act of pulling out. The problem is that these morons will likely do it the wrong fucking way. Rummy and Cheney had a hand in the first one under Ford. I don't see any evidence that they EVER learn from their mistakes.

In Vietnam, we tried to pretend that the South Vietamese were ready so as to save face. They weren't.

The last year we took heavy casualties in Vietnam was 1971, when we lost about 2500. In late 1972, the last infantry units were pulled from the field, and casualties fell dramatically. As a practical matter, it was over. From the end of 1972 until the fall of Saigon in 1975, we lost about 600-700 more troops. Not a small number, but small compared to the carnage of 1966-1971.

The fact is, the war was virtually ended by the start of 1973, because the US public wanted it over. The usual suspects wailed about the cutting and running, but the public was not hearing it.

I was there, and I do not consider it small. Yes, we had no battalion sized assaults during those times, but if you look at the numbers we were losing compared to the number in country...

In 1972, the ARVN for the first time carried the majority of the fight, and they had their worst year of losses to prove it. They lost 50,000 men that year alone.

In 1974 we had removed our very last ground troops, and ARVN had its second worst year losing 31,000.

So it may have calmed down for us, but the war certainly went on at a high level until Saigon was overrun in 1975.

When I say, "nobody," I mean anyone who isn't of the far right fringe. The vast majority of Americans were tired of the war. Burying 58,000 coffins over a ten year span has a corrosive effect on the national psyche.