NYT: Who Were the Real Nationalists in Vietnam?

Who Were the Real Nationalists in Vietnam? By Stephen B. Young

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/opinion/who-were-the-real-nationalists-in-vietnam.html?emc=edit_tnt_20180309&nlid=16428923&tntemail0=y

Excerpt: The Tet offensive was a turning point in the Vietnam War for Vietnamese nationalism. With North Vietnam having been turned over to the Communists by the French in 1954, Vietnam’s southern provinces had become a haven for non-Communist nationalists, just as the western states of Germany were a haven for German non-Communists and the southern half of Korea was a secure state for Korean nationalists. In the new state of South Vietnam, with American assistance, President Ngo Dinh Diem successfully built a functioning non-Communist state. Responding to this resilience of the nationalists, in 1959, the Communist regime in Hanoi decided to destroy what their rivals had achieved. Their intrusion into the internal affairs of South Vietnam made considerable headway, and set off what we now call the American war in Vietnam. But it took the Tet offensive to bring the various strains of southern nationalism together. In early March 1968, the American ambassador in Saigon, Ellsworth Bunker, reported to President Lyndon B. Johnson on a remarkable change among the South Vietnamese. Instead of falling apart, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam was growing — in February, after the Tet attacks, 10,084 South Vietnamese volunteered for military service, versus 3,924 the previous February. Some 10,600 draftees reported for duty that month, versus 4,006 the previous February. It wasn’t just that new recruits were signing up; veteran soldiers were staying, and stepping up. Of the 155 South Vietnamese regular maneuver battalions, 118 were rated combat effective. In the field, companies of the South Vietnamese Regional Forces, a militia that manned outposts and guarded critical infrastructure, were at fighting strength, with 99 out of a 123-man complement present for duty. The platoons of another militia, the Popular Forces, which guarded villages, were averaging 29 men out of a full complement of 35, another unprecedented turnout. The new civil defense militia was joined by 19,000 volunteers in 20 provinces. South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen van Thieu, stepped up to provide more vigorous leadership. He replaced corrupt and incompetent officials and personally headed the recovery committee charged with rebuilding destroyed or damaged infrastructure and buildings and resettling over 500,000 people who had fled Communist control. And elsewhere in national politics, new, surprising political coalitions formed to vociferously oppose Hanoi’s aggression. (Wow.... a really good NYTimes article about RVN! With actual facts and figures about the response of the nation to the Tet Offensive and how it brought about the strength and spirit that would have kept them free... if only we'd been as faithful an ally as Russia was. --Del)