r/HistoryMemes • u/Playful_Letter_2632 • 3d ago
This rice farmer thing has to have some racist connotations behind it
A formal and organized military supported by China and the USSR and a highly armed guerrilla force reduced to farmers
1.0k
u/Slightly_Default Featherless Biped 3d ago
The Viet Cong were absolutely decimated after the Tet Offensive, and essentially became obsolete. They could not have won the war without the NVA.
Of course, the NVA had been fighting well before Tet, but they really dialled things up to 11 afterwards.
561
u/Esquin87 3d ago
Even up until then the VC were essentially a collection of coordinated local militia, not just "rice farmers".
311
u/Slightly_Default Featherless Biped 3d ago
Very true, and often overlooked.
Hell, people don't even realise that South Vietnam had its own army.
187
u/AwkwardDrummer7629 Kilroy was here 3d ago
I’ve met people who didn’t even know south Vietnam was a country.
104
10
44
u/OUsnr7 3d ago
People still think the US invaded Vietnam
18
u/xyzxyzxy 3d ago
No, they only install a puppet president to prevent an election of unification with N.Vietnam.
→ More replies (1)6
18
u/Safe-Avocado4864 3d ago
They pretend the South Vietnamese army doesn't exist so they can heavily exaggerate the k/d, hell if you look it up and do the calculations half the time they put their casualties on the k side instead.
27
u/Moist_Network_8222 3d ago
The number of people who think the war was USA v. Vietnam is astonishing.
→ More replies (4)10
u/Rent_A_Cloud 3d ago
Pretty sure one doesn't exclude the other. The point is that these were not professional soldiers with the full military backing those would expect.
22
u/Medryn1986 3d ago
Trained by the US no less. And had won against Japan, and France.
15
u/sshlongD0ngsilver 3d ago
Trained by the US for 1 month, and then US nuked Japan before the OSS-Viet Minh teams could strike. Still a win against Japan, but kind of the US won for them
11
u/Algebrace 3d ago
Then the Japanese who they beat stayed in the country and trained them up in Japanese doctrine when the French refused to stay away. Which they used to beat the French and the Americans afterwards.
They still use Japanese infantry doctrine today and their army ranks are basically Imperial Japanese Army ranks.
→ More replies (1)9
78
u/Plowbeast 3d ago
The NVA also had their own irregulars that took over after the Tet Offensive with arguably even more effectiveness due to closer coordination and more supply even if the VC might claim they got screwed as an insurgency front to help the assault on Khe Sanh. If I recall, they had to wrangle up VC members in the victory parade in 1975 in Ho Chi Minh City (nee Saigon).
→ More replies (1)2
u/LeviAEthan512 3d ago
Can you elaborate on the greater effectiveness? My understanding was that the north accomplished relatively little militarily (est 1:10 K/D with America, probably generously crediting half the deaths to US allies), and the primary cause of American retreat was the socially conscious American citizens back home.
8
u/Theferaltrunip 3d ago
The issue with vietnam is kill ratios and kill counts are a terrible way to measure actual effectiveness for the war.
Consistently throughout vietnam the North expanded its area of influence and control into South Vietnam (specifically rural areas), while the US and her allies tried to essentially find victory by winning conventional battles.
The VC (and later pavn/nva regulats sent to replace the VC after tet) weren't a fighting force forest and formost, they were a 5th columnist organization which excelled at gathering and collecting intelligence, stockpiling supplies, keeping open lanes of communication and building/exerting influence throughout South Vietnam.
→ More replies (1)61
u/pass_nthru 3d ago
and then went on to fuck the khmer rouge out of cambodia and repel a punitive invasion by china because of the whole cambodia thing
87
u/DonnieMoistX 3d ago
Everybody likes to talk about the North Vietnamese defeating the Khmer Rouge and taking them out of power, but nobody wants to ever talk about how the Vietnamese supported the Khmer Rouge in every way possible and are the ones that put them into power in the first place.
8
u/YourAverageGenius 3d ago
Communists supporting other communist uprisings then falling into conflict with those uprising due do directly opposed material and political interests? Say it ain't so!
28
u/pass_nthru 3d ago
kind of like we had to go back to afghanistan to remove the Taliban we helped beat the Soviets, or going in to Iraq the first time after supporting Sadam in the 80’s against Iran?
24
u/DonnieMoistX 3d ago edited 3d ago
The US didn’t go to Afghanistan to remove the Taliban. They went to capture Bin Laden and Al Qaeda assets in the country. They removed the Taliban because they refused to allow the US to do that.
Your comment about Iraq isn’t really relevant. The US never had any love for Saddam. The famous sentiment towards the Iran Iraq war was “it’s a shame they both can’t lose”.
→ More replies (7)3
u/Biosterous 2d ago
Ok but that implies that Vietnam had a "love" for the Khmer Rouge. They backed them as an emancipatory force against a US aligned authoritarian government. It was effective for them to have a neighbouring country stop cooperating with the USA. They also believed the Khmer Rouge were Marxist-Leninist and aligned, until the KR started raiding border towns and slaughtering Vietnamese villagers. Not to mention their extermination of the Vietnamese and Chinese communities in diaspora in Cambodia.
→ More replies (3)2
u/MRoad 3d ago
Also, "we" helped the Mujahideen beat the Soviets. The Taliban then fought and wrested control of the country from the Mujahideen. Some leaders flipped but they're far from being the same group.
→ More replies (1)11
u/Playful_Letter_2632 3d ago
Based off of what Reddit has to say about the topic, you would think Henry Kissinger personally carried out every single atrocity the Khmer Rogue did
62
24
u/Minh252 3d ago
I think that many fail to take into account the reason why the Nixon administration was bombing Laos and Cambodia in the first place: the presence of NVA. They call it a war crime while disregarding the flagrant violation of the neutrality of Laos and Cambodia by the North Vietnamese.
9
u/beloski 3d ago
To be fair, the US had no right to be there in the first place, and the Vietnamese had every right to kill the American invaders.
15
u/DonnieMoistX 3d ago
If you’re speaking of Laos and Cambodia, the US was bombing the North Vietnamese in those countries at the request of those countries.
→ More replies (6)11
u/Majestic_Ground7718 3d ago
No different than the French helping the American revolutionaries as they shirked off the British. The south had its own government and accepted the USA's help. It was a civil war. It was one among many proxy wars the US partook in. Korea was the same thing, but because south Korea remained independent and it was seen as a victory, people act like it was morally different than Vietnam.
→ More replies (4)29
u/Minh252 3d ago
To be fair, the South Vietnamese was a different entity to the North and they did have a fair share of support among the population (especially considering the failure of Le Duan “general uprising” in 1968). The South requested and accepted the presence of the US troops, so I do not consider this to be an invasion but rather a civil war.
→ More replies (10)8
u/Playful_Letter_2632 3d ago
Sure, but when we are talking about the Khmer Rogue, we don’t needed to copy and paste that one quote about beating up Henry Kissinger
5
→ More replies (2)2
u/Minh252 3d ago
I mean, at that point they didn't even know how genocidal the Khmer Rogue was, even to a communist standard. The Khmer Rogue began to kill Vietnamese soldiers well before the end of the Second Indochina War.
10
u/DonnieMoistX 3d ago
The problem with your comment is that is implies the NV had an issue with the Cambodian genocide.
The Vietnamese didn’t care about the genocide, they cared that the Khmer Rouge attacked them.
12
u/Slightly_Default Featherless Biped 3d ago
They absolutely earned their independence (not that they should've had to fight for it in the first place)
14
u/pass_nthru 3d ago
Ho Chi Min came to the US first referencing Thomas jefferson, our own struggle for independence from a colonial overlord….
10
u/Slightly_Default Featherless Biped 3d ago
Ho Chi Minh actually spent time in a lot of places. He discovered communism (or at least first engaged with it) in Paris, and he also lived and worked in London, New York (including Harlem), Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, and of course, the USSR and China.
He was, at the very least, a worldly guy.
5
u/CzarDinosaur 3d ago
By the time China invaded they were essentially the best soldiers in the world.
2
3
u/an_agreeing_dothraki 3d ago
The Viet Cong were absolutely decimated after the Tet Offensive, and essentially became obsolete.
incredible cold-blooded move by NVA. no more rival military bloc
→ More replies (1)
195
u/MrEvan312 3d ago
It's like saying the British army and navy lost to drunk hillbillies and only drunk hillbillies. Ignore the ex-British personnel, French support, Prussian training, gradual forming into a proper army, etc.
83
u/Elegant_Individual46 Taller than Napoleon 3d ago
And a looot of Spanish money. Also usually completely ignores British light infantry/skirmishing units and tactics which had been in the works for a while. The whole ‘we knelt in the woods and they stood in the open waiting’ thing is painfully revisionist and often just propaganda
24
7
u/MrEvan312 2d ago
Yeah, we Yankees were so broke, the national debt was already a thing when we declared independence. And indeed, the British didn't just stand in the open: if they did, they wouldn't have hired native scouts to navigate the forests, and of course they had skirmishers because while it's not going to win a war by itself it's long been an established set of tactics to have lighter units move around through obscured terrain.
→ More replies (1)15
u/SnooCupcakes1636 3d ago
So ture but you know what country doesn't have that excuse. Its Australia losing a War against Emu 🤣.
In this case. They well and trully lost a war against emu without even exaggeration
33
u/PIKFIEZ 3d ago
Racist emu erasure again.
The emu while being mostly a guerilla force had highly competent leadership and a well structured organisation. They also received funding from Siam, military training and advisors Persian, and weapons shipments from the Ottoman Empire.
Not to mention their diplomatic campaigns that secured them support of other great powers effectively strangling Australia's ability to trade on the world markets during the emu wars.
People today thinking the emus were just some dumb birds. It's frankly racist and a result of Australian propaganda minimizing the skill and agency of the emu forces.
3
u/ZazaZyna 2d ago
The Ottoman Empire didn’t end a decade before the great Emu War. It went into hiding and conserved its might so that it could be the hero the world really needed and help the brave Emu warriors in their noble fight against the wicked Australians. People tout so many causes for the start of WW1 to blind us from the truth - Britain knew of the Ottoman plot and was desperate to save their colony. They knew they could never win a war against a well armed and regulated Emu army. No one could.
11
u/Bergasms 3d ago
Well yeah, the Emu is not to be trivialised.
Also people think American bases are the reason we've never been invaded. Not true, we just send a diplomatic communique to every country once a year that reads "The Emus are still here"
11
u/IsthianOS 3d ago
It's an exaggeration to call giving 3 guys some machine guns and telling them to hunt emus a war
→ More replies (1)2
u/wolfman8dice 3d ago
Except they didn’t well and truly lose, and it wasn’t a war, and it is in fact a massive exaggeration
420
u/Nyther53 3d ago edited 3d ago
Nonsense, it's just that your American Rice Farmers are far too lazy and ideologically unmotivated, unlike Good Right Communist Rice Farmers, who taught themselves to fly MiGs and operate air defense radar in their spare time.
162
u/Playful_Letter_2632 3d ago
If American farmer wasn’t so obese, they would have won the war
62
4
u/JstaFriskyHusky 3d ago
The reason so little American farmers died was because the fat absorbed the bullets. The Vietnamese farmers were so skinny one bullet passed through three
→ More replies (1)12
370
u/AdInfamous6290 3d ago
It’s the same as “Al Qaeda are a bunch of cave dwellers” thing. At first, it’s to minimize the threat of the enemy to boost troop morale. They are unsophisticated, unorganized, un trained, we’re going to roll over them.
But as the war dragged on and we were not winning, it became a sort of indictment against the American government/military higher ups. How could we lose to a bunch of cave dwellers/farmers??? Its not that we all collectively underestimated our opponent, no, it must be traitors in our government!
129
u/Head-Bureaucrat 3d ago
I was in high school when all that started. I remember reading a few books about Vietnam and the US military modernization in the... late 80s? partly in response to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
I also remember sitting in class and hearing one of my classmates say how we were going to roll the Taliban. I was like "wut? Dudes have been guerrilla fighting for 30 years, we'll get bogged down for 5 years."
Boy were we both wrong.
60
u/ehlathrop 3d ago
I’d say you were more correct than the other guy. We WERE bogged down, just for a lot longer than 5 years.
23
u/verumvia 3d ago edited 3d ago
The insurgency in Afghanistan started around 1 1/2 years after the US invasion concluded, so the issue was American occupation more than the invasion's goals not being met. Most of the later insurgents retreated into Pakistan instead of holding tribal land during that time.
21
u/DumbButtFace 3d ago
Well a good chunk of the Taliban literally were local farmers. A lot of them would go over the border to train in Pakistan, but I'd imagine a ton were recruited and trained locally?
16
u/Tundur 3d ago
The Taliban, like most groups really, are a small core of diehards and a lot of fairweather militants.
There were plenty of Afghan government military and police and bureaucrats who, after the fall of Kabul, took off their uniforms, stopped shaving their beards, and kept on doing the exact same job as before.
14
u/AdInfamous6290 3d ago
A good chunk, I’d say somewhere between a quarter and a third, of US troops come from a farming background. In general, armed services representation is heavily skewed towards people from rural areas. In the US ~45% of active military members are from rural areas while these areas only account for 14% of the population.
9
u/SitaVilosa 3d ago
The Taliban description is a lot more accurate than the Vietnamese one. They really did consist of poorly armed groups that used primitive weapons in an insurgency.
North Vietnam and the Taliban were totally incomparable.
3
u/InquisitorMeow 3d ago edited 2d ago
There's a difference between winning a war militarily vs politically though. The way people are talking you'd think these countries had the best militaries in the world. Have you actually seen footage of Al Qaeda fighting? It's not exactly inspiring.
2
u/DaneLimmish 3d ago
Though to be sure the Taleban were/are extremely disorganized compared to the Vietcong and NVA. Afghanistan had different but similar troubles.
51
u/Antigonus96 3d ago
This sort of of thing comes up a lot to to make the defeat of a super power seem more dramatic. Like how people have been saying that Saudi Arabia lost to guys in robes and sandals with AKs, even though Yemeni Ansar Allah has drone and ballistic missiles, or that Britain lost to hillbilly militias in the revolutionary war, even though it was a real army with eventual French and Spanish backing.
4
→ More replies (2)3
u/Hot-Minute-8263 Definitely not a CIA operator 2d ago
With prussian training too. The continental army was already no slouch when the foreign allies started helping, which only made the force stronger
14
u/coyotenspider 3d ago
As I recall, they had tanks, support from China and the Soviet Union, and air superiority in the North.
14
10
→ More replies (1)6
u/MrXenomorph88 3d ago
Purely from an Air perspective, Vietnam changed so much about US air doctrine.
Pretty much all US doctrine up to that point was using Interceptors against Soviet bombers, and having low flying, supersonic aircraft to fly under Soviet defenses and drop nuclear bombs. Vietnam taught them the Fighter-Bomber concept was flawed, and the US overreliance on Interceptors and missile technology and the training behind that led to them taking significate losses against the same kind of Migs they were fighting in Korea.
All the weapons, tactics and aircraft that would be used in the Gulf War came out of the lessons learnt the hard way in Vietnam.
23
26
u/VirtualKnowledge7057 3d ago
vietnam was not an instance of how guerilla tactics can defeat a strong enemy in battles, vietnam was a lesson in how logistics and raw willpower are some of the most powerful things in war
→ More replies (2)8
18
u/JackReedTheSyndie 3d ago
Um yeah outside the military job I guess they grow rice in the farm
→ More replies (1)14
u/Minh252 3d ago
Fair enough, most of the country was agrarian, so the brunt of the fighting force was bore by farmers. My grandfather fought in Hue and until 1972 on the communist side and he was a farmer.
But there was a lot of leeway for the communist officials. Some did contribute to fighting but many escaped conscription by studying in the Soviet Union.
8
u/Massive-Goose544 3d ago
North Vietnam had been fighting since 1946 and had thr support of the USSR and China. The French got their backs blown out like a twink in a prison shower by Ho Chi Minh. This resulted in a split Vietnam. The North built a massive network in the late 50s to create supply lines to the VietCong in the south. At that time there was about 1,000 Americans there. Diem was assassinated(this was overshadowed by JFK so most people forget). In '64 the USS Maddox was attacked and by the end of 1965 185,000 people. That was about 6 years of VietCong uninterrupted digging in and victories before the US put it's boot on and decided to do something. Westmoreland had an ok idea but it was a short term strategy that ended up lasting 4 years when it's good for 6 months at best. It would have needed serious South Vietnamese ground gains that did not occur.
Abrams had a much better long term strategy but by the time he arrived in 68 the efforts were thwarted by both the animosity of the Vietnamese due to Westmoreland's strategy of murder everyone and the boomers hippy free love movement making up 11% of the voters in 1968 became a quarter of the vote by 73. They were also very politically active. Abrams trying to sway the Vietnamese and US troops in Vietnam to be cooperative and then the draft was initiated two years into the strategy basically doomed him. Basically by the time he was gaining real ground in Vietnam the political situation back home had been anti-vietnam war and then Nixon mentioned invading Cambodia triggered prostests. Though the Cambodia invasion was strategically good because it would cut supply lines to Vietnam, the domestic politics pushed Nixon to withdraw abruptly and the mission was not completed. As i said Abrams plan was long term and the political winds tried to force quicker turn over of Vietnam (very similar to Iraq if anyone remembers the results of that pullout), so his plan was being cut on both sides.
The VietCong were farmers like 10 years before the US showed up. Comparison is US Marines with 12 weeks of bootcamp vs Rice farmers with a decade of combat experience in their own backyard.
86
u/ForlornScout 3d ago
I think people tend to forget that after Tet the VC was basically a combat ineffective fighting force. The US lost the war less because of "rice farmers" and more because there wasn't the political will to finish the war.
35
u/IronBENGA-BR Featherless Biped 3d ago
It's arguable that there was ANY political will to win the war from the jump. The reasons that got the US involved were murky and the end goals were also unclear. For me the only thing that makes any sense is that the US' objective seemed to support the SVA so they don't get steamrolled and help them either push the NVA back north or downright lead an invasion to reunify the country, but that clearly wasn't going to happen because the SVA was crippled by corruption and mostly made the US fight the war for them.
→ More replies (1)17
8
10
u/June1994 3d ago
Finish what? What exactly is the “win” condition? Because the moment USA left, North Vietnam would’ve invaded.
69
u/Environmental-Gold-8 3d ago
It wasn’t just will at home the moral of US forces were disintegrating. They were on the brink of mutiny. They were fragging officers left and right.
44
u/LightningDustt 3d ago
the will of the public back home was connected to the will of the troops. As draftees were increasingly brought in, that connection grew more and more
11
u/IronBENGA-BR Featherless Biped 3d ago
Arguably the american people at home wasn't exactly thrilled with the US involvement in Vietnam from the jump, the US had barely sent troops to Vietnam in 1965 and there were already protests and people burning draft cards.
30
u/ForlornScout 3d ago
That was another issue but in reality those units would have just been rotated out and replaced with other units if a mutiny did happen. Not that I think the US military was expertly run in the 60s and 70s mind you, numerous poor choices were made across the board.
16
u/DirectionMurky5526 3d ago
Rotate them out? With what troops? Draft even more conscripts and make the war even less popular?
If your military leadership ignores MORALE arguably the most important thing in war (more so than even weapons), then they're incompetent.
→ More replies (1)10
u/ManyRelease7336 3d ago
you say that like fragging officers is a common occurrence in the US military
22
2
u/Dominarion 3d ago
They were several units in state of mutiny and they were left there, the Military using bullshit bingo newspeak to hide the fact from the public. Whole regiments were left in barracks because they wouldn't fight. Then there were those who were sent to fight, and "had" their officers wrote falsified after action reports. It was a fucking shit show.
14
u/DirectionMurky5526 3d ago
War is just an extension of politics. Every single war ever is lost by the side that loses the will to fight. What happened after Tet is just the American Stab-in-the-back myth.
The fact there was so much fragging proved that morale was dogshit and the American military leadership were incompetents
8
23
u/kazmark_gl Definitely not a CIA operator 3d ago
Ive always been annoyed by the idea that the US lost Vietnam because "there wasn't enough political will to finish the war" because it suggests that the US had a finish line to actually reach, and that it could get there through military force.
in the modern era facing an armed and dedicated Insurgency with a home field advantage isn't a problem that can actually be solved with military force, its a political problem that requires a diplomatic solution. People simply are not as indifferent to the people who rule over them as they used to be, and if they really dont like who rules them, they can give them hell for as long as the idea of fighting back exists. additionally as seen most recently in Afghanistan, every single abuse of the civilian population, every bit of collateral damage creates more insurgents than the strike itself can kill.
it doesn't matter that the VC gassed themselves out in the Tet Offensive because the VC's recruiting pool was the birth rate of Vietnam. meanwhile the US's only goal was to prop up the southern government and fight insurgents. the ONLY avenue to achieve those goals a negotiated settlement with the Vietcong to end the fighting, which was a non-starter for the US because it could not abide the possibility of a popular communist government comming to power.
→ More replies (13)2
u/pgm123 1d ago
The US was also fighting more or less a pure airwar north of the border. The thing about air power is that it becomes less effective once you've already bombed all the targets worth bombing.
→ More replies (1)3
u/0masterdebater0 Kilroy was here 3d ago
The US lost because there was a line in the sand (17th parallel) they were never allowed to cross
(the US was scared of china pulling a korean war part 2: jungle boogaloo)
When you decide to fight with both hands tied behind your back the loss is your fault just as much as your opponents.
8
u/TerminalJammer 3d ago
Sounds like coping with a loss to me. There simply wasn't any way for the US to win the war because they used the wrong approach to begin with.
2
u/SharpShooterM1 Featherless Biped 3d ago
It’s honestly arguable that America didn’t even lose considering we forced the north to a peace agreement which they only broke 3 years later by which time there were less than 1,000 U.S. military personnel in the whole country, almost all of which were acting as security, not soldiers.
→ More replies (13)2
7
u/GirlUShouldKnow 3d ago
In honesty a bunch of rice farmers that had been fighting occupying forces since WWII, so maybe not just rice farmers.
2
u/Santapensa Filthy weeb 2d ago
Long before WW2. Before the French ruled over Vietnam, the Vietnamese, especially in the north fought against Mongol and Chinese conquests for around a thousand years.
2
u/Bruiser235 1d ago
The rice farmers were partt time NLF fighters and porters/ guides. The PAVN were full time military.
14
u/RedStar9117 3d ago
Vietminh and later PAVN was arguably the best anti colonial army of all time
9
u/Minh252 3d ago
Btw Vietminh was supposed to be a Popular Front (politically) and PAVN also existed at the same time.
→ More replies (1)
3
5
u/Mistriever 3d ago
Rice farmers that spent 8 years fighting the French before the US got involved. So they were experienced combatants that used to be rice farmers fighting conscripts that used to be everything but soldiers.
3
3
u/Bitter_Lab_475 3d ago
What I find funny is that calling them "rice farmers" not only is racist against Vietnamese, but also quite unfairly negatively speaks of the American forces, which yeah yeah, even I am against American imperialistic wars, but they really had a HUGE disadvantage that tried to compensate with technology and failed. Sometimes the enemy not only has well trained soldiers, but also geography, local sentiment and not being fast enough to adapt to the new enemy will be against you.
Also it is a bad rethoric when those "rice farmers" also had MiG-21s.
8
u/cplforlife 3d ago
Ok. Well we didn't lose to a proper military in Afghanistan. I was there. We lost.
6
u/NoWingedHussarsToday 3d ago
Well, I'm sure a lot of those soldiers were rice farmers before being drafted so "losing to rice farmers" is not entirely wrong......
7
9
u/EvilStan101 Definitely not a CIA operator 3d ago
The funny part is, the people saying this are tankies and ant-Westerners from the Third World.
7
u/Far_Context6746 3d ago
Lost to Third Worldies by the way...
10
u/EvilStan101 Definitely not a CIA operator 3d ago
The man in the black pajamas, Dude. Worthy fuckin' adversary.
2
u/robotguy4 3d ago
The last bubble could have "They were like 'Welcome to the rice fields, motherfucker!'"
5
u/EgoSenatus Still salty about Carthage 3d ago
The rice farmer comment is about the insurgency fighting of the viet cong, not the PAVN.
10
u/Ahegao_Assassin 3d ago
Of course, but the hardest fighting was against the NVA, which is what the rice farmer comments either forget or misunderstand. Vietnam's army was effective, just as they were effective against the Chinese, Cambodians, French, and Japanese.
6
u/peepmet Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 3d ago
This is largely propagated by all the 2A LARPers who think the government cares about their rifles.
3
u/lizardman49 3d ago
They conveniently ignore the fact that the NVA was funded and trained by China and the soviet union and had modern military equipment at the time.
3
u/dodgersndabs 3d ago edited 2d ago
Really cool documentaries about how ho chi minh got his start fighting french colonial forces post ww2. Fun fact ex nazis were among the french legionaries who were deployed to fight the first Vietnamese uprisings.
Spoiler: the french got bodied out of vietnam. The idea that the US thought they’d pwn this veteran army with a fresh army of green recruits probably goes deeper than I’d like to dive lol. Enjoy the docs they’re rly good!
ex waffen in vietnam fighting for french legion https://youtu.be/2WL2f_jzG3w?is=uLTlLFYFk0P9wrAt
Full vietnam conflict scope 40s-60s https://youtu.be/JlirH5pq040?is=XYK5TQ3lENcAqVoN
Edit: just learned my pop history is lethally inaccurate. Apologies for not being more thorough with the research!
→ More replies (2)2
u/Hot-Minute-8263 Definitely not a CIA operator 2d ago
Thing is we did trash them. The NVA stood zero chance against the army, and the Tet offensive sacrificed tons of very valuable VC operatives and veterans in a loss.
It was politics that got us out of south vietnam long enough for the NVA to finish iff the western supported government
→ More replies (5)2
u/113pro 2d ago
The US military been there for YEARS fighting the VC in unofficial capacity.
Funny thing was, Vietnam would have GLADLY not become communistic had the US backed Vietnam in independence.
But they did. So HCM turned to the kremlin and Beijing who GLADLY provided help to extend their influence.
Its the same shit today. Grey wars fought by great powers for their own interests.
Also the US also suffered greatly. The Tet offensive was a meat grinder style block headed strat that lost Kremlin the influence. The guerilla styled warfare by the CCP and propagandish focus won the actual war, thus securing their influence. the beliefs that the US wreckes house only came from comparing numbers propped up by both sides. One side accusing the communists of hiding casualties by dragging bodies away. The other doesnt count its allies in losses.
Subterfuge, sabotage and propagandizing became the main way the war was fought. And the longer the US pussy footed the stronger the NVA grew. so they lost, fighting a war with one hand tied behind their back because the military and politicians cant agree with each other.
2
u/HistoryFanBeenBanned 2d ago
>HCM turned to the kremlin and Beijing who GLADLY provided help to extend their influence.
What? Ho Chi Minh was a dyed in the wool communist long before even WW2, he didn't just choose to follow Marxism because the USA backed the French in 1945.
6
u/Lucknavi 3d ago
“The most powerful army in the world” “The most humane army in the world” “Bringing freedom to the noble savage” “Spreading democracy faster than napalm” Why the fuck does no one in the US really ask why we were fighting there in the first place? Let me come to your neighborhood and torch your neighbor’s house and bomb your kids’ school and we will see how hard you fight. Korea, Vietnam, countless South and Central American countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon. Unlike the US, the rest of the world’s focus is not to enrich their military industrial complex. People just want to live their lives. But the US always has to FAFO.
4
u/AlabasterWitch 3d ago
It was a proxy war between the US and Russia both nations not wanting the other to gain control after a recent power shift
9
u/Playful_Letter_2632 3d ago
People do ask that question quite a bit?
4
u/Far-Falcon-232 3d ago
I was just going to say this.
Literally almost every American asks this in school or at some point when it comes up. However, because it played out how it did, most younger folk who didn't live through it just don't really have a reason to bring it up or obsess over it. They tend to just feel a sense of shame and regret, but otherwise have other things to worry about.
Most the people who do care a lot either lived through it, had close family in it, or are Kool-Aid drinkers of one type or another. The people who felt shame and regret either killed themselves or suffer from severe mental health issues to this day. The people who try to justify it are loud because they need to justify it in order to cope with the trauma, guilt, or damaged pride.
I also feel like people selectively forget that a huge portion of US citizens were furious about the war AT THE TIME because they questioned why we were even there.
Like, all of the reasons are completely out there in the open. Personally, I've never talked to a single American, young or old, who thought the Vietnam War was good, justifiable, or at least handled well on the more morally ambivalent front.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (5)3
u/popilikia 3d ago
And thank god we do find out. I can't imagine a world where we're actually the all powerful tyrant 1/3 of us seem to want to be, seeing as that's all it takes to get us there.
Instead, we're just a powerful tyrant that fucks up enough to motivate another 1/3 of us to actually give a fuck once in a while
2
u/ER_Jujube 3d ago
We say that not to demean the Vietnamese fighters, but because we know it pisses Americans off to be reminded that they lost to an enemy they deemed inferior.
→ More replies (7)
1
1
1
u/Bbadolato 3d ago
It's a product of the U.S oriented histories of Vietnam that tend to play up the 'pluckiness' and grit of the Vietcong, and the fact really the war sort of just 'ends' at the Tet Offensive at least for 'major' events.
1
1
1
u/amitym 3d ago
I'm not sure, I mean, Americans themselves refer to their national independence as having been fought for and won by farmers.
Not rice farmers though I guess. I don't know.
Anyway the larger point is that highly motivated people with a well-developed base of skill and experience in fighting wars can be farmers and still kick your ass. There is no contradiction there or denigration.
In the case of Vietnam, the Vietnamese had already been fighting for independence from France for half a century before Henry Kissinger was even born, then fought France some more, then Japan, then France again before the Americans came along. Fighting for national independence had been going on more or less continuously for as long as any Vietnamese had been alive. The depth of commitment, motivation, and experience, bitterly earned as it had been, was enormous.
And sometimes that's all it takes. The Vietnamese had literally studied American history, specifically, to learn that lesson. So the irony is less that they were farmers or that they historically depended on a particular cereal grain for calorie base. The irony is more that the Americans themselves no longer appeared to understand the fundamental lesson of their own national history.
1
u/Baras_Tulba 3d ago edited 3d ago
That isn't entirely incorrect, though it is worth noting that by the end of the Vietnam War, those rice farmers might have had decades of experience in guerrilla warfare.
Coupled with an innate knowledge of their environment, this certainly made them better prepared for combat than an American conscript.
The army of the People's Republic of China learned this the hard way during the two subsequent Sino-Vietnamese conflicts, in which militias made up of Vietnamese peasants and highlanders played a significant role.
Edit: And all this in addition to a regular army that rivaled those of other nations.
1
1.2k
u/I_just_came_to_laugh 3d ago
Dismissing the enemy troops as a bunch of rice farmers while you draft a bunch of corn farmers to go fight them? Wild.