VIETNAM'S MYTHS LIVE IN NEW WAR; SAME CONSTRAINTS APPLY IN THE GULF

"This will not be another Vietnam. Never again will Americans be forced to fight with one arm tied behind their backs."

President George Bush

Vietnam myths never die, they don't even fade away. Now comparisons are made between the Vietnam War and the current hostilities. While there are some parallels, many Americans fail to recognize the difference between our doomed intervention in an insurgency and our current attempt to combat aggression across sovereign borders.

Most Vietnam combat veterans believe the war was lost because they were not allowed to win it. We recognize the perseverance and intransigence of the North Vietnamese described by one American general as "the best enemy we have faced in our history."

We less often acknowledge the unreliability, incompetence, cowardice, and corruption of our South Vietnamese allies. One U.S. Ambassador after another described the inability to establish a stable South Vietnamese government.

But still, conventional wisdom says, America could have won. Perhaps, but only if the South Vietnamese army fought on the other side.

Some of the strategies that were rejected in Vietnam are similarly unacceptable today. Some Americans, like General Curtis LeMay, wanted to use nuclear weapons to "bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age." It was unthinkable then, just as Bush finds it unthinkable now. Some wanted to take out the dikes on the Red River causing destruction and flooding that would have killed hundreds of thousands of people. The dikes were never targeted, nor would President Bush approve a similar target in today's conflict.

Some wanted Dresden-style "carpet bombing" of all sizable North Vietnamese cities. Permission was denied. General Norman Schwarzkopf today bristles at the same suggestion: "To do such would be mindless."

Some wanted to invade North Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff worked up a "rough plan." The results were discouraging because it would take an invasion force in excess of half-million U.S. ground troops (plus tens of thousands who were to remain in the south) and the "outcome could not be assured." Presidents Johnson and Nixon dismissed the concept, believing that, as in Korea, the Chinese would intervene if we invaded North Vietnam.

As to selecting specific bombing targets, Johnson was a continuing nuisance. He boasted that "they can't even bomb an outhouse without my approval." LBJ wanted to be certain that the risk to civilians was minimal and to insure the Chinese would stay out. Nixon turned site selection over to the generals but with the same caveat as to civilian loss of life. General Schwarzkopf operates under the same constraints. He states, "Today we have the capability to limit damage to innocent people. It does make our bombing missions more difficult and does put the lives of our pilots at greater risk. It is a great tribute to these young men, but they know it is necessary."

The constraints we operated under in Vietnam are for the most part still binding today. Vietnam was not lost because we pulled our punches. We dropped on North Vietnam (smaller than the state of Washington), triple the bomb tonnage we used in all of World War II throughout the world.

We did, after all, try to bomb them back to the Stone Age. It didn't work.