Last night, Battlefield with Peter and Dan Snow returned, having been rudely interrupted by I'm not sure what, but it wasn't on the last 2 weeks anyhow. This time around they were casting a wistful gaze over the Tet Offensive, a pivotal point in the Vietnam War. My knowledge of the Vietnam War, I'm afraid to admit, up until this point, extended no further than; M.A.S.H. , Platoon, Hamburger Hill, We Were Soldiers, Good Morning Vietnam, Air America, Casualties Of War, Deer Hunter, Jacob's Ladder and The Killing Fields. All well and good, but films don't give you a very good perspective of events in terms of the broader picture.
So now I know that the US were in Vietnam, supporting the South Vietnamese in order to stem the rise of Communism. The North Vietnamese (NVA), backed by the USSR and China, were the principal enemy, further supported by the Viet Cong (VC's) who would be termed insurgents nowadays. The NVA launched the Tet Offensive, when the South Vietnamese army had been sent home to celebrate the festival of Tet with their families, believing that the festival would mark an unofficial ceasefire.
Parties of VC's, who had been stockpiling munitions and supplies all over South Vietnam for months (via the Ho Chi Minh trail), launched attacks all over South Vietnam and even into Saigon itself, while the US soldiers and airforce were busy fending off a diversionary attack by the NVA at Khe Sanh camp, near the Vietnamese border. Meanwhile the VC's had captured a major part of the US embassy in Saigon, images of which were beamed into US households.
The next major battleground was the city of Hue, where US marines had a major task on their hands in driving out the VC, who had entrenched themselves in the city's ancient citadel. Not until the South Vietnamese authorised the use of artillery and air-strikes, were the VC's reduced to rabble. At this point, the Viet Cong had been fully committed to battle and having been overturned on all fronts, no longer represented a viable fighting force. In the North of the country the US soldiers had also repelled the NVA.
The American Generals thought they were well on their way to victory, but back home things had taken a bad turn. The US public had seen enough footage on TV to convince them that things were going very badly. They'd seen executions and dead US servicemen lying in the street. They gave the President Lyndon B. Johnson no option but finally to withdraw all American forces from Vietnam. Despite the US then training and equipping the South Vietnamese Army, South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975.
But, despite the victory of Communism in Vietanam, as we now know, there were other battlegrounds between Democracy and Communism, Afghanistan being one instance. Communism however, ran its course and even China it seems, buoyed by a booming economy, cannot remain a Communist country for much longer. Now the attentions of the West are focused on a new enemy, the invisible force, the terrorist, who has no specific nation or race, and who can pop-up anywhere at any given time. Here is the final irony. In order for Western nations to combat terrorism, our glorious leaders request that we kindly surrender our civil liberties. In doing this, they increasingly use Big Brother tactics not entirely unlike those formerly used by the Communists.
