Teresita: To get away from polemics and evaluate your VN thesis:

You seem to make one fundamental error. Namely that the communist victory was the result of a successful insurgency that happened to be backed up by conventional military force.

When I departed there for the last time in late 1970, there was no longer an insurgency. The last vestiges of actual insurgent capabilities had been in northern Bind Dinh and southern Quang Ngai provinces
and they were kaput. In prior tours, I had been in both places and paid a price for same
primarily at the hands of Victor Charlies as NVA capabilities were grafted onto the support systems of the NLF.

The South Vietnamese forces had largely cured their problems vis a vis the VC (helped along by the brutalities of the l969 Tet offensive and the deliberate slaughter of VC chu luc battalions by NVA commanders sending them headlong into massed allied firepower.)

In fact, ARVN morale and motivation were clearly superior to that of the NVA who suffered from massive, say again, massive internal desertion rates. Few of them would rally because unlike VC who “di ve chieu hoi” a bo doi had to “di ra chieu hoi”.

The former returned to warm and familar surroundings, the latter had to jump off into the great unknown. Took a while to uncover this crucial difference in semantics,
but ti held the key. A contract spook and I shook hands over making the discovery, then kicked each other in the rear end for not recognizing it sooner.

The NVA went to ground, hiding out the best they could and worked on building up a combat engineering capability through Laos that would enable them to support a field army without popular support. They tried their first offensive this way in 72 and came to grief because US fire support was
still available to ARVN. They did it again in 75 when ARVN had no fire support and after friendly logistics had been depleted through a series of raids etc. That time they won. It was a 100% conventional warfare victory.

Said victory was helped along by various and sundry people here in the USA. Most of those meant no harm. “Useful idiots” are invariably the result of good intentions that do not match with reality.

Then there were and are those who knew full well what they were helping to accomplish
and did it so they could enjoy personal political advantage.

While wishing these latter eternal torture and damnation is a figure of speech, I would enjoy giving them forty lashes well laid on
and one or two do deserve a “suspended sentence”.

Can’t give them that, so some humiliation at the polls will have to suffice.