Vietnam Revisited: Conversation With Mark Moyar

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Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabutski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is an author, scholar, cultural, and political critic.

He writes for American greatness, and he also writes for his own website, The Blade of Perseus.

And you can join that website at a $5 a month subscription or a $50 a year subscription.

So please come join us.

Today's show, we have a special guest, Mark Moyer.

He has written many books, but among which are The Triumph Forsaken, The Vietnam War from 1954 to 1965, published in 2006, and his most recent book, The Triumph Regained, the Vietnam War, 1965 to 1968.

He has a PhD from Cambridge University and has taught at Cambridge, Ohio State University, Texas AM, and was on the faculty at the Marine Corps University at Quantico as the Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism.

He is most currently working at Hillsdale College as the William P.

Harris Chair of History of Military History.

So we would like to welcome Mark Moyer and let's take a moment for some important messages and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

Mark, I just want to say before handing over this to Victor that I come from the generation of Chimino's Deer Hunter and Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which are rather bleak movies and a bleak portrayal of Vietnam.

So I'm looking forward to

an appraisal that's much less negative of the legacy of Vietnam in the U.S.

So, welcome to the show.

And Victor, I'll hand it over to you.

You might have mentioned Platoon, too, Oliver Stone.

Yeah, and full metal jacket, except

born on the 4th of July.

So, Mark, I'll get right to it.

This is volume two that has just come out.

And for everybody listening, that's triumph, regained the Vietnam War 1965 to 1968.

And this is the second volume in a trilogy.

And

as Sammy said, 16 to 17 years ago, you kind of made a big impression on people.

I shouldn't say kind of, you did with Triumph Forsaken.

And that theme was that most of the current journalistic and historical appraisals of Vietnam were either biased or incomplete or inadequate in some ways.

And that

far from being a complete debacle or a waste of time or a bloodbath or a war crime, that there was a viable pathway to save a sovereign South Vietnam, maybe analogous to South Korea, without the enormous escalation that followed with LBJ.

And then one of the hallmarks of that book was the,

and this is what I'm getting to, the

assassination of Diem, the president of Vietnam, who, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, he was one of the few that was not a military man.

And that coup either transpired with the willing assent of the United States or they knew about it in advance and did nothing.

And then, of course, he was assassinated very shortly within hours, I guess.

And

why did you think that that was one of the turning points?

You mentioned a couple of others in your first volume.

Before we get to this, this current, what was so important about that assassination?

Yes, Victor, that's one of the most controversial

parts of the whole Vietnam War, perhaps the most controversial.

And the consensus view has been that Giem was really a reactionary, family was corrupt, he was too autocratic, and the war wasn't going well.

And so it was reasonable for the U.S.

to support his overthrow in 1963.

Now, the reason we get that narrative is that people like David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Stanley Carnow have passed the mainstream version of that event down.

Where I looked at, first of all, in that period, is what were those guys doing at the time?

Well, it turns out they were actually cheerleaders for the coup, which is something they downplayed later because the coup is such a disaster.

But they actually are instrumental in convincing Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to foment this coup.

And they're not actually opposed to the war, contrary to much of what would be said later.

They actually want the U.S.

to succeed, but they're saying, well, if we only were to get rid of this President Ziem and put somebody else in, things will go much better.

And

they were really viewed it in sort of black and white terms.

And it's in some ways similar to how we see today the media picking.

friends and enemies with respect to the Ukraine crisis.

But

we now know one of the most telling things i found in that book is that the war is actually going very well in 1963

which the conventional narrative kind of denied so now that we know from north vietnamese sources that the war was actually going well

it it makes it very clear that ziem was not uh the ineffective leader we thought and also

one of the reasons he gets overthrown one of the main ones is that he wasn't accommodating enough towards these Buddhist protesters who are complaining about his regime.

And

it turns out those protesters become even more hostile to the government later.

In fact, in 1966, they stage another uprising and the government then puts it down by force.

And Ambassador Lodge himself now recognizes that these were charlatans who should not have been heeded.

fall of Ziem then sets in motion a chain of other events.

And it, among other things, convinces the North Vietnamese that now the time is ripe to invade South Vietnam, which they then do at the beginning of 1965.

And it's because the government has become so weak, it goes through a series of coups and purges that leads America into war.

Was Diem, was he, am I mistaken?

And I, as I, and it's been a while since I read the first volume, but you allude to it in the second.

And by the way, you can read a review of the second volume, the current volume, Triumph Regained in American Greatness online.

I wrote it Monday in 2,300 words.

It's a wonderful book.

And I tried to, I didn't give it justice because I didn't have enough length to cover the main points.

But was the anger at,

what was the attitude of Diem and American troops?

Was he all that hot or all that eager for America to pour troops in?

Or did he feel that

that would be problematic and he could handle the infiltration if he got support rather than massive

troop influxes.

Because I never quite understood

whether he was going to be as eager to have American troops in as his successors were.

Yes, that's a great question.

And

thank you, by the way, for that review, which was terrific and did hit great points.

Ziem

does not really spend a lot of time thinking about this because you've got to remember in time during his lifetime except in 1961 for a brief period there's no serious threat to the government and no one's really talking about committing u.s brown troops because the north is mainly fighting a guerrilla war and

guerrillas are not usually capable of taking over entire countries and so this is one of the reasons why his death is so problematic because

up until this time, the North Vietnamese, they've been afraid of massive U.S.

intervention and they don't want to launch a full-blown invasion like the Korean War.

But Ziem and the chaos that follows him, together with Lyndon Johnson's 1964 rhetoric about how he's not going to send American boys to Vietnam, will then incite the North Vietnamese to launch this invasion.

And so it's not until 1965 that you have the huge conventional battle that South Vietnamese do okay in some of them, but they get ground down.

And it's at that point that there's basically either the U.S.

has to commit troops or watch South fall.

When JFK is killed on November 22nd of 1963, was the American troop level of quote-unquote advisors and naval or aerial support about 10,000 or had it reached that level or gone beyond?

Yeah, like

when Kenny takes office, it's under a thousand.

And then he actually, by the time of his death, death, it's up to 16,000.

And he was very interested.

And, you know, there's a lot of mythology about how Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam.

I think that's completely false.

He was as committed to the Cold War, if not more so, than Lyndon Johnson.

And but at the time, these are just support troops and advisors, and they help with air power, other sophisticated equipment.

But there's not at that point really a need for U.S.

combat troops.

What I was, if we move now to the current volume, which is 1965 to 68, and this is the period of escalation where the war becomes LBJ's war, and remember, everybody, that he's trying to do this massive

today, multi-trillion dollar and today's dollars, great society program.

And he's he's reluctant to jeopardize that by having a full-scale war.

But one of the ironies that was in your book, Mark, was I had not realized.

so we the chief advisors that he inherits, I guess the Bundy brothers, him lodged for a while in Saigon,

Averill Harriman's always floating around somewhere,

and then he has Robert McNamara, and then he gets Walt Ross.

Walt Rostow and Dean Rusk, they're what I'm getting at is all of these people are giving him a consensus to escalate to save South Vietnam in the way that we save Korea.

But there's going to be a break or a divergence between them, aren't there?

What I found so ironic is that once LBJ accedes to their request and he pours this enormous number of troops and gets up to 530,000, as everybody remembers or has read about.

the people who were demanding that escalation, they break off and the old Kennedy best and brightest then sort of turn on him and want him to de-escalate or get out or have a bombing halt.

And then, yet,

there's this group of is it Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow, and maybe even Maxwell Taylor?

Were they Kennedy holdovers or were they Johnson men?

Well, Rostow

comes in under Johnson, although he was

also friendly with Kennedys.

But he will, Rostow and Taylor will diverge from the others, especially in 1968.

But you have initially McNamara being the dominant voice in 1965.

And right away, you have the Joint Chiefs of Staff arguing vociferously against what McNamara is doing, because McNamara has bought into the academic notions of conflict management.

he wants to use this policy of gradual escalation of the bombing of North Vietnam, whereas the generals are saying, no, we've got to hit them really hard.

And so then there's all these debates over is the bombing really having a military effect, as the generals say, or is it simply a symbolic act, which is what McNamara claims.

And

now that we know more from the North Vietnamese side, we can see that its gradual escalation was really disastrous because it prevented us from inflicting damage we could have inflicted and it also gave the North Vietnamese time to build up their air defenses.

Yeah, I'd like to, for our audience, I think some of you that are well acquainted with Vietnam know that there are these canards or these truisms that we've been told

that are iconic of the war.

And Mark's book really questions them.

And if it's okay, Mark, I'd like to go through them.

The first is

this idea that we all thought that under Nixon, when we had some laser-guided munitions and we had linebacker one and two, that it was very effective.

and it it basically won the war and i think you're going to deal with that in third volume but the earlier rolling thunder were area bombing they were sloppy we got all these planes shot down they had no effect we didn't we were all that's not quite true is it

no rolling thunder does have some serious military consequences that some of this we only know now from seeing what the north are saying but There's a huge debate over the enemy logistics.

And McNamara is saying the enemy has plenty of extra logistical capacity.

So, if we bomb them some more, it won't make a difference.

And the military is saying, no, no, no, that's not true.

That if we bomb them, it's going to hurt their logistical capacity.

Well, again, the North Vietnamese documents have now made clear that, in fact, there was not this great unused capacity.

And even with the limited bombing, the North Vietnamese are oftentimes unable to operate because they don't have enough food or ammunition.

And then we also know in 1967, Johnson starts increasing the bombing because there's a congressional hearing into the bombing.

And at that point, they actually bring Hanoi to the verge of starvation.

And people are speculating that

Hanoi may be ready to throw in the towel because if people can't eat,

it's going to break their will.

But Johnson doesn't fully understand this.

And he backs off in one of these many bombing pauses that are supposed to encourage the enemy to negotiate, which is another big fallacy that if we only stop hurting the enemy, they'll then negotiate when the truth is exactly the opposite.

Let's go to another, another really, I think, important

revisionist point.

I know when I was in high school,

everybody, you would turn on the news and it was William Wastemore Land.

And he was

Westmoreland, who had a distinguished record prior to Vietnam.

And he, I think he had been in Korea in World War II, but

this idea, we were told by Kong Kai and and John Chancellor and the entire network news that we were sending Americans out to mountains and jungles.

They were dropping in and then they were being ambushed and taking unsustainable casualties with minimal effect.

And search and destroy was a terrible strategy that lost us the war.

And then Creighton Abrams, who I think you were very fair to and said was a very good commander, but you made a distinction, and if I read it right, that while he was good, he did continue for a while the search and destroy.

And the reason he tapered off is they had already served their effect of preventing mass concentrations of North Vietnamese troops and then giving a cushion or sort of a safety guard for the RVN, the Republic of Vietnam's Army, to

be developed and to mature without being attacked in the South.

And so that books that I, and I know that you had a lot of respect for, you do, and I do too, Lewis Sorley's A Better War, they may not have been as fair as you were to Westmoreland.

Is that accurate?

Yes,

I am more positive than Westmoreland on Westmoreland.

Most people have been, and he's been attacked from a number of directions.

And

but in what I do, and partly why I've spent so much time and broken this up into three volumes, is you really need to dig into the particularities of the situation and look at, especially what's going on in the war because people oftentimes think this was sort of a static conflict uh guerrilla war from beginning end but in fact there are some periods where the enemy is much more active in terms of conventional fighting and we do see that and wes moreland argued i think correctly that when the enemies has battalions or regiments running around you don't want to wait for them to come attack you because they will attack your cities.

And then your only option at that point is to use massive firepower in the cities and the cities get destroyed.

And we actually see this in the Tet Offensive where the North Vietnamese are allowed to get, to bring large numbers of troops to the city of Kui.

And it turns out to be ultimately they're defeated.

But

you don't really want to be in the business of having

all your cities destroyed in the process of defeating the enemy.

And

we also, this is again where the North Vietnamese tell us they didn't think Westmoreland was a fool.

And in fact, they acknowledge that

what he does for the most part is causing them grievous casualties.

They're never able to win a significant battle during this period.

And the U.S.

is able to maintain the initiative because they go after the North Vietnamese rather than letting the North Vietnamese decide when and where they are going to fight.

Let's go to a third one that I think is equally controversial.

Most of us were told during the time and since that there was a indigenous communist movement, sometimes they don't even use the word communist, reformist movement, dissident group in the South called the Viet Cong, which was an entity separate from, although helped by, the North Vietnamese regular army and Russia and China, and that this was a very large group that reflected the idea that they wanted a unified South under a communist regime and that the South Vietnamese government was not legitimate because of the sheer grassroots support of Viet Cong and the ability of the Viet Cong to do so much damage independent of the North Vietnamese.

And yet, you sort of show that that was a construct, that they really

had a lot of support.

The Viet Cong was essentially, I think you were arguing after Tet was pretty much nullified, and it was never separate from or autonomous from the North Vietnamese.

Is that right?

Yes, the communists deliberately tried to depict the Viet Cong as a grassroots indigenous movement that was more nationalist than communist.

And this is something communists do in a lot of other places.

And now the Vietnamese people themselves, they mostly see through this as a charade because they've been around the communists for a while, but there are many in the West who buy this.

this propaganda that the communists in the south are independent and they're homegrown.

from the very beginning they are led by cadres who have been trained in the north some who went south and came and then came back uh went from the south came to the north and then went back but uh they make and they're very clear in their history they don't make any attempt to hide this and you have documents from them explicitly talking about how they need to deceive people into thinking they're a homegrown movement and another fascinating thing i I realize people often talk about well this was the first Viet Cong regiment or the second NVA regiment as if they're two entities.

But in the North Vietnamese histories, they don't even make that distinction because they know it's a fiction.

It's just, this is the first regiment, the second regiment, et cetera.

And so it's just impossible at this point to

try to argue in any sense that the movement, that there was an independent movement in the South.

We're going to take a quick break for here are some messages.

We're talking with Mark Moyer, a professor of military history at Hillsdale College, and he's the author of Volume 2, Triumph We Gain, in his trilogy of the history of Vietnam War, and we'll be right back.

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I'm back with Mark Moyer, and we're talking about

true, quote-unquote, truths about the Vietnam War that he shows were not true at all.

Another one, Mark, is that we have this idea that there were a few advisors and that this was a proxy war from

in the Cold War between Russia, China versus the US.

But we were the ones that were really driving it with this huge half a million person.

force in Vietnam and they were advising or helping.

But

from the research you did, there were 100,000 Chinese

construction workers or support troops inside North Vietnam.

And then there were, and I guess you're going to get to this in the third volume even in more depth, but there were Russians in almost every aspect of the defense of Haiphong and Hanoi.

And so it was more than just a third-party proxy war.

It was...

really Russia and China with sizable contingents.

And then the other corollary

I think that the listeners would really enjoy is that there was developing a split between the Chinese communists that were upset about the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the idea that Russia thought maybe that this war could be wound down and it wasn't bringing benefits, whereas Mao wanted it to be fought.

to the very bitter end.

And that caused a friction.

And I guess that was somewhat the fissure that Nixon would go later to develop when he went to China.

But it wasn't really just, they were really actively engaged as opponents of the South and the United States, weren't they?

Yes, the role of China and the Soviet Union are fascinating topics.

And part of

the hesitancy of McNamara and Johnson is they're afraid that Russia or China or Soviet Union or China will fight the United States directly, as happened in the Korean War.

And as you mentioned, mentioned, there are these 100,000 Chinese troops in the north, but they're helpful to the North Vietnamese because they free up North Vietnamese troops to go fight in the south.

But what we also know now is that the Chinese had no appetite for a direct conflict with the United States, and they explicitly say they took such a beating in Korea that they didn't want to keep fighting.

didn't want to fight the United States directly again.

Now, China undergoes a huge transformation in this period.

And part of it's because the U.S.

makes a stand in Vietnam and

blocks the fall of South Vietnam.

And then the other part is that American intervention in South Vietnam promptly triggers the overthrow of the communists in Indonesia.

And those two things together then cause Mao to turn inward and to launch his great proletarian cultural revolution.

which is a disaster, kills millions of people and decimates their economy and their military.

And this will then also lead to their falling out with their North Vietnamese allies,

as well as leading to this further poisoning of relations with the Soviets.

One of the things that was really fascinating is, and I think I used the word Hamlet,

a Hamlet-like character of Johnson.

So

I think he thinks he's going to be a Truman who took over, as he did, from a president who died in office and then had a huge re-election.

But

as he was looking at his second full term,

excuse me, in Truman's, it would be

his first full term, and Johnson has finished his first term,

Johnson doesn't run.

And in that process, he announces the bombing hall, and he's being pressured by his Kennedy people.

I think Kissinger said once, the people who got Johnson in turned out to be the real peacenicks, but McNamara, and then we have Avril Harriman, we have Cyrus Vance and the Bundies.

And so they're negotiating in Paris

and

your

research has shown that the North Vietnamese are willing to do this because they need a reprieve to recover from the devastation, both at Tet, which was disastrous for them, and the bombing.

But we also have this campaign going on where all of a sudden Eugene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy and the whole Democratic Party has moved left.

And Johnson is sort of self-critical, self-feeling sorry for himself, gyrating from one position with Rostow and Russ back the other way to give in to McMara.

And then he almost feels like, how can this be possible that my own vice president has to subtly but more insidiously criticize me during this election year for what I'm doing in Vietnam, even though the generals and even though my intelligence says it's working.

And the final irony is that Dick Nixon, of all people,

might be

more

pliable or more ready to follow the policies that I finally hit upon that are working.

Can you sort all that out, what was going on in 68 politically?

Yes.

Well, the

It's worth looking at sort of the evolution of Lyndon Johnson because he is in the first years, 64 through into 67, he's really under the spell of Robert McNamara and mostly doing what McNamara is telling him.

And he's also,

you know, as you mentioned, he wants to be this great domestic policy president who, you know, ended poverty with the great society, has all these civil rights advances.

And so he deliberately avoids rallying the people around the flag.

But by 1967, he starts, you hear him expressing some regrets about this because,

you know, people have been telling him he finally understands that the president is not out there explaining the war to the people.

You can't really maintain national support.

So he becomes a little bit more open to cheerleading, although he tends to have others still do it.

And then there is the

question of escalation.

So by 67, Johnson's starting to realize that what McNamara is saying, such as the bombing doesn't have any military main, that that is false.

And so

he starts to push McNamara out the door and he'll be gone.

Then he brings in Clark Clifford, who he thinks is going to be more of a hawk, but it turns out Clifford is about as bad as McNamara.

And

during 68,

he and Clifford will clash repeatedly because Clifford is

arguing that

for a more drastic, more rapid pullout.

And he's also, again parroting this idea that bombing doesn't have any military effect and johnson you know to his credit stands up to clifford and he he has the backing of uh his ambassador uh ellsworth bunker in uh in south vietnam who's a cornwall ally you've got rostow um creight and abrams and others who are pushing back so you know part of this narrative that the left has handed down is that you know the country is really demoralized and on its way out by the end of 68.

But in fact, Johnson does not reduce the troop strength at all during 1968.

And you have, in fact,

remarkably steady and strong support for the war, which I credit to the culture of the American people because they're still not getting a lot of direction from above, but they recognize that walking away from this and appeasing communism is not the way to go.

And you can also see it in terms of the election that even Humphrey himself is urged to adopt the liberal platform at the 68th convention, but he refuses to do it because he knows that moderates and conservatives are not on board with the cut-and-run policy.

But then, you know, at the very end, there, he tries to appease the liberals by sort of jabbing Johnson.

But in the end, the country ends up electing Richard Nixon, who, of course, has a reputation as a hardline anti-communist, which is another good indicator of the mood of the American people.

It's very funny that

we have the Paris Peace Conference going on,

but there are people there, Harriman and Vance and others, that are actively working with other candidates, or at least advising them, that are running against the president.

I mean, excuse me, the vice president, Humphrey.

And they're antithetical to the administration's policy, which is supposed to be represented by our own peace people.

Is that unfair to them?

Or whether the American contingent, at least some of them in Paris,

actively or subtly or insidiously sabotaging the position of the Johnson administration they were chosen and appointed to advance?

Yeah, I mean, Johnson is,

you know, one point's apoplectic because you have Abril Harriman, the chief negotiator, is leaking to the press and putting out information to support Humphrey in the campaign and to undercut Nixon.

And Nixon's position is actually closer to Johnson.

And Johnson

talks about maybe firing Harriman, bringing him home.

And

it is really remarkable the extent to which Harriman and George Ball and others will will go to try to undermine their position.

And then

they take this, can repeatedly have this view that

we need to be more accommodating to the communists and everything will turn out just fine, which, of course, we know from subsequent events that

these are not people to be trusted.

We're going to take a short break.

We're talking with Mark Moyer, the author of the just release, Triumph, Regain, Volume 2, and his three-volume projected history of the Vietnam War.

And we'll be right back.

We're back again with Mark Moyer and his new book, Triumph Regain.

Mark, one of the things that I thought was fascinating is that

we're getting on campus, at least until he dies, this idea that Ho Chi Minh is Uncle Ho,

that they are a softer form of communism.

They're not quite like the Soviets.

And there's people within the Johnson administration that actually have floated the idea.

And I remember it as a high school student, of a coalition government where peace can be obtained if you force these right-wing South Vietnamese elected leaders to allow communist people to roll.

But that's not true.

I mean, he was a pretty hardcore Stalinist operative, wasn't he?

Ho Chi Minh the entire time.

The whole agenda was to destroy the South and make it what it is today, a communist country, right?

Yes, that's right.

And at the time, a lot of sensible people pointed out that communist coalition governments had been tried in places like Czechoslovakia and Poland and quickly been subverted by the communists.

And there's no reason to believe.

things would have been any different.

But it is remarkable to see some of the things that people were willing to believe by the late 60s.

And I attribute this, much of this to the fact that there's this sudden surge in anti-war activity on campus.

It doesn't really start until 1967, which happens to be when they changed the draft regulations.

And a number of people who lived through at the time attest to this, including anti-war

people who were against the war, like Michael Medved,

that essentially you know, the war doesn't change in 67, but people turn against it because now they've lost their deferments for graduate school and now they they are suddenly against the war and they'll believe pretty much anything that will show that it's okay not to go to vietnam yeah i can say i was a uh at the university of california santa cruz i was a first year 17 year old student and uh i turned 18 during my freshman year and i got my lottery number

And it was amazing as soon as the draft was over and the lottery, I mean, there were still demonstrations, but it just sputtered.

And it was in reverse.

It showed you that much of the anti-war movement was based on the self-interest of a particular cadre

about which I think you make, and I think it's very fascinating.

And I think our readers will really enjoy this, our listeners, that while you're talking about the, and the, this history works on a number of levels, everybody, when you look at it.

It's a battle history of major battle and even some of the more minor but interesting battles throughout the Vietnam period in question, 65 to 68.

And then there's another ongoing simultaneous narrative about the diplomacy behind it.

And then there's a third about the media and the anti-war movement and the reaction at home.

And

while we think there was this huge anti-war movement that could put out, you know, a quarter million people later under Nixon, that Even the Chicago violence, the American people were, they didn't think the whole world was watching.

They were appalled by it.

And it's very valuable, I think, everybody listening because it has resonanced with the Iraq and

Afghanistan war and public support.

And I guess what you showed, Mark, was that the American people, if they feel there's an objective and it represents the values of their country, but more importantly, it's necessary for their own security, they're willing to to stick with it as long as they feel their leadership wants to win.

But they really didn't turn on the war until until they felt that we didn't have a leadership that wanted to win.

Isn't that more likely than they were repelled by the violence?

Yeah, I think that's absolutely correct.

And as I say, even at the end of 68, support levels are about where they'd been in 1965.

There's this mythology that support has been going down and

everybody's lost confidence in everyone's.

bleakly thinking about it.

But,

you know, and the war, I think, could have actually been

permanently sustained, as South Vietnam could have been sustained, had we kept up our support after 1972 when there was a big Easter offensive that the South Vietnamese fight off

very, very ably.

And

I think it's also worth mentioning: if you look at the Korean War, the Korean War actually fundamentally is not a whole lot different from Vietnam.

You've got a country

attacking its neighbor to the south.

And

South Koreans had all the faults of the South Vietnamese.

They failed miserably militarily at the beginning, but then got their act together.

They're autocratic.

There's corruption.

And so, again, the fact that we don't have this same perception of Korea as we do of Vietnam is, I think, more indicative of people's personal or political agendas rather than the reality of the situation.

It's funny how South Korea was looming, that model was looming behind all of the discussions of Vietnam.

And we know now from some of the archives that have been released that one of the reasons that North Vietnam

or China was not more, was not bolder than they otherwise would have been early, and especially China didn't intervene, is that we know that the B-29 raids and the artillery under Rum

Matthew Ridgeway, we may have killed or wounded

a million North Koreans, but a million included that in that number in just a year were communist PLA members from Communist China.

So, in their way of thinking, we don't want to get into war where they unleash artillery and napalm like they did against Korea, because the Chinese were thinking that.

They had still been traumatized by it.

I know that, and that brings up this last question I want to ask about this volume.

Then, I want to end on some questions, maybe

give us a peek of what you're doing for the third volume.

But so, when the Americans

were bombing

under Rolling Thunder, and they were bombing the North, and then they were doing this search and destroy missions.

And

from some, you end the book in 68, and there's 35,000 dead, I think, by then.

Where are those Americans dying?

Are they dying when they're lifting people and inserting them in these ambushes that are prepared or these massing of concentrations or around Quezon?

And

what could we have done at that late date?

You really outlined what we could have done earlier, but what could we have done, say, in 67 and 68 not to have lost at that cumulative point 35,000 dead?

Because Nixon, of course, is going to lose another 22 or 3

up until 73 or 4.

But

what would have, was there any way we could have fought those massive forces that were so well supplied and not suffered the level of dead that we did?

Yes, and

chance the first part of your question,

American casualties are taking place all over the country, except for in the Mekong Delta, which for the most part, there's not Americans there.

But

there's no significant defeat, so it's just, you know, Americans keep fighting.

But as the North Vietnamese keep throwing troops at them, there's going to be American losses.

And so the Joint Chiefs of Staff early on recognized this and said,

you know,

the way we're fighting this, North Vietnamese can just keep sending down huge numbers of people.

And no matter how many we kill, they, you know, can send some more.

And we could just end up in a situation where

they have a dictatorship that doesn't care how many people get killed.

And we have a democracy where at some point we question

the

validity or the value of ongoing casualties.

So the Joint Chiefs had several things they were pushing to try to get us out of this situation.

One was intensifying the bombing of the North.

The other one they pushed really hard is to insert American troops into Laos to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which is the north-south infiltration route that is used to send troops and men, troops and material from north to south.

And McNamara and Johnson consistently turned this down.

And also, Ambassador William Sullivan, who's in Laos, who's also the same guy that later gets us into trouble in Iran in 1979.

But they claim this isn't going to be that helpful militarily, and it's going to upset our Laotian friends.

And this again, here, again, we see from the North Vietnamese side, and in fact, this would have been

a deadly strategic blow to the North Vietnamese because even though we did some bombing, they could always get supplies through.

So, what you would have had, you would have had a much shorter front.

The North Vietnamese could have fought it in the style of the Korean War to some extent, but they wouldn't be able to go hide among the population in the mountains and jungles.

And I think there's a good chance they would have eventually kind of given up because in that sort of situation,

it would have been even easier.

You know, the U.S.

was inhibited in the use of its firepower within South Vietnam because it didn't want to harm civilians.

Whereas if you were fighting along this narrower front in South Vietnam and Laos, you could have just used massive firepower and inflicted crippling casualties on the North Vietnamese.

I was talking to Mark Moyer, and he's just published Triumph We Gain, Volume 2.

And I'd like to ask, Mark,

so

you had a hiatus because you wrote so many books about special forces and special forces operations between volume one and volume two.

Are you going to continue to write other books?

Are you going to go right into volume three?

And is it going to be,

I suppose it'll be 69 to 75 under mostly the Nixon and Ford administrations?

Yes, it will be 69 to 75.

I did,

you know, part of why I did these other books earlier was there was wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going on, and I wanted to try to lend a hand there.

And then also

we

moved a couple times.

You know, the life of a conservative academics is not nearly as easy as that of

someone else.

And so now that I'm in Hillsdale College, though, I have

a great place to be and work.

And I do have a book that I'm that I've pretty much finished on my time in the Trump administration, which is a whole other story.

But yeah, now I'm back to writing this

one and plan to concentrate on it.

Again, the research in these first two volumes was very thorough.

And so it won't come out quickly, but I do hope to get it out

a few years from now.

One of the things that's really interesting, and I haven't spoken about it, and I wanted to talk, I didn't have enough room in the review, but you had an associate or a friend that was able to help

access for you, I guess, through direct translation of North Vietnamese documents and archives, which really enriches the book.

And that's what makes, I think, the listener should buy it because we have this narrative of what we think is going on, and we get depressed.

But my gosh, when you read these translated documents and see just how close to defeat the North Vietnamese thought they were, it's quite alarming, quite tragic.

But why don't you talk a little bit about your access and use of North Vietnamese documents?

Yeah, so the North Vietnamese, Vietnam is still a police state, and they don't just let foreign researchers in their archives, but they have published a fair amount of material, including documents,

memoirs.

And so we know a lot more than we used to know.

And I cited a lot of this material also in, it was just trying to come out in Triumph Forsaken.

And then, you know, some people criticized me at the time because this translator, Merle Pribineau,

you know, he had given, I was the first person who got to see a lot of this stuff.

And so

thereafter,

he willingly translated and shared his translations with anybody who wanted them.

But it turns out that a lot of the people

who are wed to the conventional wisdom don't really have much interest in these documents.

And I think it's a lot of it has to do with the fact that they actually

counteract

a lot of their fundamental ideas.

And so,

but but yeah, in the intervening time, I've amassed a great number of additional documents that Mr.

Pribineau has translated.

And it is certainly

been

crucial to many of the arguments in the book because so much of the, so much of what we knew before was what we had from U.S.

sources.

And it was possible to say, well, maybe those Americans were just deluded.

Westmoreland didn't know what he was talking about, which

we didn't have definitive proof on a lot of these topics.

and now we do.

And I think everybody should know that if you're a historian in the American university system and you are overtly or unapologetically conservative, as I can attest, it's very hard to get grants.

It's very hard to work with colleagues.

The university itself

looks askants at you.

Of course, Mark is a Hillsdale is a wonderful place, so it's it's kind of an oasis.

But

what I'm getting at, Mark, is Cambridge University comes and they publish your first volume.

It makes a big hit.

Everybody's talking about it.

There's even a volume dedicated to people who support and criticize it, who write a whole book on your book.

And I think you replied to some of the arguments.

So now this comes out.

What happened?

Why the, and I have to offer a disclosure.

I'm the chairman of the board of Encounter Books via the Bradley Foundation, which I'm a board member.

But how did Roger Kimball and you get together?

And what happened to Cambridge?

I'm trying to search for words, but maybe you can just clarify us.

And who will publish the third volume?

Yeah, so I had a great editor at Cambridge who, Frank Smith, who

signed me up for the first book, and they did a great job.

Um,

but he's since retired, and as you, Victor, well know from all your books, uh, having a supportive editor is critical for an author.

And um,

the uh

the editor that I was then assigned later wasn't didn't seem to be very interested, and I requested another editor, um, and they said they wouldn't do that.

Um,

and so that was really the main reason why um

I decided

to part ways.

They have, you know, to give you some idea of, you know, I think the university presses were a bit later than the rest of the academy in turning towards the far left.

So one of the recent books Cambridge did

on Vietnam, shortly before this all happened, was called Pulp Vietnam, War and Gender in Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines.

And so that I think gives you an idea of

where the interests of these publishers

live today.

Also, you might find this amusing too.

There's an endorsement of this book from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, who, as you know, published, ran this big documentary series that

basically parlayed the traditional anti-war view of things.

And their comment is this

on this Pulp Phi Nam is: quote: This brilliantly analyzed history dismantles masculine archetypes portrayed by media during the Vietnam War.

The author explores the way fantasy images of war have been perpetuated throughout history and have given young men unrealistic work views on masculinity.

So

that's,

again, Ken Burns and

what they think.

So, yeah, it's so encounter's been wonderful.

They were, you know, I immediately thought of them when I was trying to find a new home and

I plan to publish with them.

You know, and it's a bit like Hillsdale in that,

you know, there shouldn't be a need for all these alternate

refuges necessarily, but

it's to the point that the

exclusionary tactics

are so pervasive that

we need these new places.

And I was actually just at Harvard, which is where I went for undergraduate, speaking to the students there.

And there's a recent poll that found that only 1% of their faculty identified themselves as conservative.

And I'm guessing those people were not in history or English or government.

They were probably in the hard sciences or something.

But

it's truly appalling what's happened to our higher educational system.

And

I had the opportunity to speak with some conservative students there, and they, you know, they,

you know, it's hard for them to have role models.

And Harvey Mansfield, who was sort of the conservative role model when I was there, still has stuck around, but he's about to retire.

And there are no,

you know, they don't even have token conservatives at these places anymore.

It's, it's, no, I know it.

Same thing is happening, unfortunately, where I work at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford campus.

And one of the things that I,

my job at the Bradley Foundation is to work with Roger Kimball.

And what he's done at Encounter, I think everybody should just investigate.

It's just phenomenal because it's profitable.

It's expanded its list.

It's done wonderful things like Wilford McClay's Land of Hope textbook.

And it's...

What's sad about Mark is that these marquee authors like yourself, but many more who have contracts with Hachette, Random House,

Doubleday, all of the main trade names in New York, have had their

contracts pulled.

Or

if they're not pulled ostensibly, then suddenly an editor will...

ankle bite or carp at them to drive them out and then they're all flocking to encounter.

So it's in an ironic way,

it's been an encounter bonanza because they can get this, all of these wonderful authors that

should be

dispersed throughout the publishing scene and they're not.

They're being canceled or they've been ostracized.

And that's something that's really disturbing.

One thing that I think everybody's listening as well, this book is beautifully produced.

And I must say, Mark, I thought Cambridge did a wonderful job.

I think the encounter has done,

it looks just wonderful, the production quality of it.

Yeah, they did a great job on it.

And that's another problem.

You know, academic presses increasingly are shrinking the size of their print and not

marketing to general audiences.

They're only writing for other academics.

And,

you know, again, not too many, if your average person wants to read about, you know, war and gender in the Vietnam War.

And,

but, you know, they don't apparently have too much concern about how much money they make.

And they're happy to

pursue things that conform to their ideological preconceived ideas.

One last question, and we'll finish.

So

between Vietnam and 75, and here we're almost a half century.

And we've had the MAGA movement and this resistance toward optional wars that are not strategically resolved in our favor, but can be very costly, Afghanistan, Iraq, or the bombing in Libya, et cetera, et cetera, maybe even the first Gulf War.

But

when you look at your first two volumes and you look ahead toward the third, and you look at the half century since then,

is there an argument that what we did in Vietnam?

I'm thinking of you, you've referenced, I think, in the first or second volume, Michael Lynn's The Necessary War.

And I won't get into that because it's another whole other topic.

But is there an argument to be made that

the cost of going in and saving South Vietnam would have resulted in a South Korean-like country, and that would have stopped, and it did maybe, as you point out, the communist aggression elsewhere.

It would have served as a buffer, and it could have been done at a far less cost than the tragedy that entailed.

Or do you feel that after you've looked at and spent a great deal of your life looking at it, it's just that we're not equipped to go into these places and we shouldn't go in?

Have you had a consensus yet when you look back at Vietnam?

Yeah, I think that

is, I think we could have certainly

kept up a South Vietnam that would look a lot more like South Korea than it does today.

So from a humanitarian point of view, that's tragic.

We,

you you know, by leaving, we

allowed the communists to move in there and also to kill millions of people in Cambodia.

But in the bigger picture, we did actually

save most of Southeast Asia, which was our objective.

And that in itself, I think, was worthy of great sacrifice.

But

there were, as I said, strategic opportunities missed that could have kept the war to a much lower cost.

Well, thank you, Mark.

It's been a very interesting hour.

And I urge all of our listeners to buy Triumph Regained.

It's available at the Encounter website, and you can buy it at Amazon and bookstores.

And Mark's going to be doing a lot of publicity in the next two or three weeks.

So let's hope that the word gets out because this is a wonderful reappraisal.

It comes at a very important time.

as Mark alluded to at the beginning, because some of the questions that he deals with and analyzes, I think, are relevant relevant today in Ukraine.

And, Mark, thanks for joining us, and I hope you'll come back for volume three.

Thanks, Victor.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

And this is Victor Hansen signing off.