How Cronkite and the SLIMC lost the Vietnam War for America.

With the whole SLIMC overwhelmingly Marxist, the Reds couldn't possibly loose politically and publicly that which they couldn't possibly win militarily in the Vietnam war.

Vic Biorseth, http://www.CatholicAmericanThinker.com

This page describes the Vietnam war for the Catholic American Thinker, and the treacherous way it was reported. It shows, in graphic detail, how the American people were lied to by the SLIMC¹ on a massive scale, and how the self documenting liberal lies regarding the Vietnam war continue to this very day. They have never been refuted. The whole major media, print and electronic, told lies of commission and omission, and their reports were heavily biased and slanted, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year, for the entire duration of the Vietnam war. Every single nationally known television talking-head media-crat lied, big and repeatedly, on this topic, including in particular Walter Cronkite, the grand master and high priest of the big Vietnam war media lie. They frequently took turns telling the same lie; you can almost imagine them standing in line to tell their version of the lie of the moment. And they carefully, excellently, documented their own lies themselves, in print, on film and on tape.

As a classic example, probably everyone alive in America at the time has seen the famous photo of the little naked Vietnamese girl running and crying, her cloths burned off by napalm. The caption, invariably, says this was the result of American napalm bombing, leaving the impression that Americans typically napalmed villages. In truth, the Americans had left the area, the napalm was dropped by a Vietnamese Skyraider which was called in by a Vietnamese ground unit. The girl, a grown woman now, is pro-Democracy, not pro-Communism. The media could ask her, if they were interested. They could get the facts right, if they had any motivation. They could correct their own error, if they had any honor. But the story stands, and the indelible image remains etched in our minds. (Just look at what America did over there.) The whole effort seemed to be to discredit the Vietnam war itself and all Vietnam war veterans.

The record of the Vietnam war and how they reported it still exists. They recorded their own lies. You can actually watch them lie, in instant replay, again and again and again, until you either wear out the tape or you vomit, whichever comes first. We'll look at some examples. Having served there with two functioning eyes and two functioning ears, and having seen and read the media's version of the Vietnam war from the start to the present time, it's hard to even write about these lies and these liars without complete revulsion. Such a travesty became not only possible but probable once most of the media took a sharp Left turn back in the FDR years, and the rest caught up later. You show me a real Leftist, i.e., a Marxist, and I'll show you an ends-justify-the-means liar.

This WebPage of the Catholic American Thinker is my small contribution toward the correction of a betrayal and an injustice so terrible as to be unforgivable, were it not for the teachings and requirements of Christianity. The people who got to write the history of the Vietnam war - the media - our so-called free press - did it wrong, to the detriment of all of the Vietnamese, American, Australian and South Korean veterans, living and dead, who served there, and of the Vietnamese (and Cambodian and Laotian) people, who do not deserve what has and what is currently happening to them. The SLIMC¹ directly caused:

1. the loss of the faith of the American people,
2. the broken spirit (and presidency) of an American president, and
3. the actual loss of the Vietnam war itself, by an official act of congress, possibly the only way it could have been lost.

But that’s not the way they reported it.

Contrary to current popular opinion, the initial government approach to the Vietnam war did not ensure eventual defeat, but only guaranteed that we could not win; a position we’ve been in before, and since, and are in now, in Korea. It doesn’t take a military genius to know that any strictly defensive action cannot possibly win, but may only survive; it is only by going for the throat that one ever wins, and we never invaded North Vietnam. Nevertheless we could have foolishly kept sending generation after generation of fighting men into South Vietnam with orders to defend themselves against the North Vietnamese invaders, for decades, without being defeated, just as we could potentially be doing in Korea, where whole crack American divisions are still permanently tied down defending themselves, in a virtually identical situation. Truman set the stage for the nature of the Vietnam war.

Truman introduced a new and dangerous military policy in the Korean action, by firing General Macarthur for pursuing the enemy relentlessly, despite Presidential orders to grant the enemy sanctuary. This placed American military forces in the unusual, at the time, position of needing to defend their ground and themselves, while having no winnable military objectives and no capital to attack and take, directly resulting in the fact that sizable and expensive American forces are still there, at risk, and that the dispute is not settled to this very day, all these years after the 1953 armistice “agreement.” The Vietnam war merely paralleled the Korean war, in strategy.

In Korea, there were three possible options available at the time:

1. pursue the enemy into China, making war with China and potentially with Russia;
2. take and hold North Korea; or
3. retreat behind the 38th parallel, and begin defending ourselves.

Truman chose option number 3; the worst possible option from our point of view, the very best from that of the enemy. This was the American “good-guy” precedent which set the stage for the Vietnam war, where American forces were sent into a combat zone with no winnable objective, with orders only to defend themselves (which they did very well), and where the taking of the invading nation and its capital, North Vietnam and Hanoi, which just happened to be the only possible way to win, was not even considered. The Vietnam war could have been over and done with in a matter of months.

In the Vietnam war, it took the media to cause our defeat, ultimately by act of Congress, cutting off supplies and ammunition and forcing government-committed American troops in a hostile environment to bug out on extremely short notice, leaving behind allies and comrades to be butchered and enslaved. And all this was done close on the heals of one of the most lopsided military victories, by the US, in the history of warfare, and while the severely defeated Communists were ready to negotiate, Ala Korea, some sort of armistice. An entire book could be written on this topic alone.

The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield, where not one single American unit ever lost one single battle. The Vietnam war was lost, first, on the American television screen. The Vietnam war was lost second on the rioting streets of America. The Vietnam war was lost, finally, in Congress. The Vietnam war was won for Communism by a fifth column of under-cover Communists solidly entrenched in the American media.

The Vietnam war page of the Catholic American Thinker looks at the brutal history of the typical Communist totalitarian and Russian citizen Ho Chi Minh and his betrayal and systematic deconstruction, conversion and absorption of the anti-Colonial nationalist movement, the typically brutal purging of the early resulting Vietnamese Communist Party, Communist terrorism in South Vietnam, and the examples of Khe Sanh and the Tet offensive in enough detail to show what our distinctly Leftist media did to us.

It then discusses how the upper five percent of the entire South Vietnamese population, in every village and hamlet, were then judicially murdered via the show trials and public executions so typical of Communism, for the “crime” of being slightly better off than their neighbors, and therefore, of course, exploiters. This very significant and, one would think, newsworthy event seems to be one of the best kept secrets of the American news room.

Media Portrayal of Poppa Ho

Throughout the Vietnam war the goal of the media seemed to be to show it as a civil war with citizen popularity always favoring the North. This was absolutely false. It was not a civil war, and citizen popularity had nothing whatsoever to do with it; it wasn't even measured.

It seemed to me that every time one of the talking-head media-crats, reporting on the Vietnam war, had something to say about Ho Chi Minh, they always showed the same background footage showing the sweet, smiling, grandfatherly Ho being climbed on and tickled by a bunch of smiling and laughing little children. Almost like one of those sickeningly sweet puppy-chow commercials. He was always portrayed as quite popular, and as a great nationalist leader in Vietnam. Typical Vietnam war coverage.

In point of fact, nobody in Vietnam ever even heard of Ho until the 1944-1945 timeframe. He was a Russian citizen who carried a Russian passport all the days of his life. He was graduated from Lenin Institute in Moscow in 1926 and went to China as an International Communist Organizer. He even spent time in a Chinese prison when Russia and China had their little falling out. But he eventually went back to work, "Organizing" the Communist takeover of all of Southeast Asia.

At the May 1941 Eighth Plenum of the ICP (International Communist Party) held in a cave at Pac Bo near the Chinese-Vietnamese border, the Viet Minh front group was established, to take advantage of the "Asia for Asians" sentiment against Colonialism. The front group would, sometimes directly, and sometimes in a sneaky or sly way, recruit and convert prospects from among actual and potential anti-Colonial revolutionaries.

In concert with the French Communist Party he lured various Vietnamese political leaders into China to convert them to Communism, and to accepting his leadership. Those leaders, even including Viet Minh leaders, that he could not convert and convince to accept him alone as complete sovereign dictator, and that he didn't just kill outright, he betrayed to the French, for gold, and when they returned to Vietnam they were imprisoned or assassinated.

Funny how you never saw any of that on any Vietnam war coverage.

He was falsely portrayed by PBS, not as an International Communist, but as a Vietnamese "patriot" and a "nationalist" opposing the Japanese. Which was typical of Vietnam war reporting, and of Communist reporting in general. Communism never portrays itself as being Communist in the media within non-Communist nations. The portrayal will always be of a nationalist or a patriot, or as one side of a civil war. In Nicaragua, for instance, the word Sandinista sounded more positive than the word Communist, so it was the universally applied term in the public news. It always played better in America than the word Communist.

But, how did Ho come to such prominence so quickly in 1944-45? The Japanese had combined Annam, Cochin-China and Tongking to form a new Japanese state of Vietnam under the Emperor of Annam. As soon as the Japanese surrendered, Ho, now becoming the new self-proclaimed “power" in Vietnam, installed himself in the government palace at Hanoi and proclaimed Vietnam to be a Republic. Before that, no one in Vietnam even knew who he was. So, at the close of World War II he just came to Vietnam, very quickly amid the confusion, and boldly established himself as "the" leader, among a people who didn’t even know him.

It soon became apparent to the French that they had to do something to keep control of what used to be French Indo-China, or get it back, and they sent an expeditionary force to do that. The French soldiers took charge, but were sniped at and convoys were ambushed. In 1946 there was a serious attack on residents in Hanoi and many deaths; but Hanoi was eventually relieved by the French, and Poppa Ho had to bug out.

And Ho began the typical "purging" of his "nationalist" Viet Minh movement, and converting it to total subservience to himself . Those who would not accept him as absolute leader were simply killed. This followed the familiar pattern; International Communism quite typically infiltrated and took over national revolutionary movements, appearing to aid and strengthen them while the whole goal was just to gain a foothold, in order to eventually take over for International Communism. It was done (or tried) that way in Europe, South and Central America, and everywhere.

But by this time he had made inroads into becoming what he had declared himself to be - the "head" of the biggest nationalist movement in Vietnam, and the head of the "Republic." Russia and China officially recognized his "government" and the Leftist Western media loved him; to the Left, he was a made man. But he remained, for life, an International Communist Organizer, as even his last testament attested to, in which he pleaded for Russia and China to put aside sectarian differences for the good of the International Communist Revolution.

Communism always fights in multiple ways, using military, negotiation, politics, publicity and disinformation. Ho played the SLIMC¹ like a fiddle. The proof is, as always, in the final pudding. All the information you are reading now was available then. The "journalists" working this news were typical either typical Marxist flagrant categorical liars, or they were mindless parrots, mindlessly parroting the copy put before them. A good term for them would be FLORMPORIF¹³ s. Whatever they were, they were certainly not telling the truth. The record speaks for itself.

But, this is just for openers.

After the Korean war, the Chinese began supplying arms to front forces and guerrilla forces in Southeast Asia. In 1953 the French gave up Cambodia and Laos. Then, in 1954, came the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu, which would later be universally misinterpreted in the press when compared to Khe Sanh.

Dien Bien Phu was no citadel or fortress or defensive position at all; quite the opposite. It was a temporary staging area for a major offensive. As luck would have it, it turned out to be, to the misfortune of the French, the worst possible place to put those troops at that particular time. In a major tactical and strategic error, they failed to take the high ground. And all the high ground around them would soon be occupied by vastly superior forces that were already in the area.

The historic defeat at Dien Bien Phu broke the prestige of the French in the area and the resolve of the French electorate. A conference at Geneva agreed to partition Vietnam between the Communists, who were (incorrectly) believed to predominate in the North, and a separate South Vietnamese government, pending elections that might reunite the country. What happened instead was the opening up in Indo-China of the fiercest phase since 1945 of the older ("1941 Asia for Asians") Asian war against the West in general.

Ho's purging and consolidation of Party power continued, and expanded to include complete, ruthless subjugation of the entire population. Millions voted with their feet, as it were, and fled to the South, in an event not even mentioned by PBS in their 13-part series "Vietnam: A Television History". Among the refugees fleeing South were Catholics who were being singled out and killed, by the thousands. PBS reported that those being hunted and killed had "collaborated" with the French, or were involved in "black ops" against the new government. That was a lie. Catholics were being killed in large numbers in completely unprovoked attacks, with possibly as many as 10,000 killed.

Another media lie involved media "fact" that the 1956 election promised by Geneva, which didn't occur because the U.S. reneged on it's promise, brought about the Vietnam war. The U.S. never made any such promise to renege on, and they knew it. Eisenhower stated in crystal clear language that the U.S. was not party to and not bound by article 7, and would oppose any election not supervised by the United Nations. Take a look at any election ever held in any Communist country and you will immediately see why.

At the same time that our Leftist media was proclaiming Ho as a Vietnamese and as a nationalist hero, the head of a popular movement, involved in nothing more than a civil war, they were portraying the government in the South, led by Ngo Dinh Diem, as, number one, completely corrupt, and number two, a "puppet" of the United States. Throughout the Vietnam war, they would seldom stray from this position. Diem was always shown as lacking popular support, when in fact he was always enormously popular with the Vietnamese people. In describing the North, they would accentuate the positive, and in describing the South, they would accentuate the negative.

Again, this is typical. You can look back at how Cuba's Castro has been most typically portrayed in the media as opposed to Batista or any other opposition. Even granting that Batista was corrupt and consorted with gangsters, he still never exported any particular form of revolution beyond his own shores. There were no Cuban soldiers in Africa or in Central or South American or Caribbean countries under Batista. Yet, Castro was and is the darling of our Leftist media in this fairly typical case.

So, even the plain, simple facts of what was going on in the first place, what we were doing there, the strategy and reasons behind the Vietnam war, was lied about, big time, by the media. One sovereign country, South Vietnam, was being terrorized and invaded by another Sovereign country, North Vietnam, for the overriding purposes of the International Communist revolution, whose goal was Communist domination of all of Southeast Asia. Period. To this day, the media will deny that statement. Either that, or they will have to admit that they were lying about it back then.

Why would the media knowingly lie to us in the news? For what the media perceives as a higher purpose. Marxists feel that the ends justify the means, and they seek to move us toward acceptance, voluntary or otherwise, of another, higher, international “governance” established over us and our constitution, not accountable to us, not subject to our constitution. In other words, foreign to us, but in charge of us. Another New World Order.

Here is Walter Cronkite, waxing philosophical:

So, in the new Marxist view, the UN is hoped to one day provide a kinder, gentler path to world Communism. The United Nations, a foreign power, not representative of us, not accountable to us, and not subject to our Constitution, is to be superimposed over us. The fact that no one in the UN was ever elected by anyone anywhere, and that the UN Democratically represents no one, should not be lost on the reader. It's a point the SLIMC¹ considers to be irrelevant. Because we need this new order this supposedly perfect world government.

See? So, are you ready to yield up some of our American national sovereignty to someone else, to someone foreign to us, someone not representative of us and someone not accountable to us?

Gee, that’s funny; neither am I.

The bigger question to ponder involves how a traitorous liar like Cronkite, publicly convicted by his own televised lies, ever became so beloved, and so believed by so many. He was the "leader of the pack," so to speak, but every other talking-head on every available network channel at the time was doing the exact same thing; they just weren't as beloved as Cronkite.

Vietnam War Action

As it happened, and as it was reported

The actual Vietnam war, as fought, and the Vietnam war as reported, were two entirely different Vietnam wars, with two entirely different outcomes.

The 1968 Tet Offensive is illustrative of the vast variance between what actually happened and what was reported by the SLIMC¹ to have happened in the Vietnam war. It was planned and in the making, according to the Viet Cong themselves, since 1966, to be the decisive victory in the Vietnam war. It was a concerted attack on American forces everywhere in South Vietnam, in the expectation that the Vietnamese people would join in the attack and the "revolution" would be complete. But, first, all the attacks were repulsed in a devastating way, and second, none of the Vietnamese people joined in on the Viet Cong side. The attacks not only failed everywhere, but casualties on the Communist side were so high that they broke the back of the Viet Cong movement.

The immediate result of the Tet offensive was that, from that point on, the brunt of the fighting in the Vietnam war would have to be carried on by the North Vietnamese regulars, for the simple reason that there were not enough Viet Cong left alive to carry on the fight.

That's how the most significant event in the Vietnam war actually happened. So, how was the most significant event in the Vietnam war reported in the American media?

Tet was reported everywhere in America as a victory for the North and a defeat for America. Talking-head after talking-head after talking-head prattled on and on, in breathtaking terms, about how devastating these attacks were, and how well coordinated all the different attacks were, and how this proved that this "popular movement" was beyond our limited ability to do anything about it. The Vietnam war itself was virtually lost already. They were lying through their teeth. All of them.

Just like the rest of the Vietnam war, Tet was miss-reported. When producer Jack Fern saw the truth of it and recognized what had happened and suggested to Sr. NBC Producer Robert Northshield that they had gotten it wrong and needed to correct it, Northshield's response was that it was too late. Because, since the Tet offensive was now "established" in the American mind as a defeat, that actually made it a defeat. See? The American people now believed it was a defeat, therefore, it was a defeat. Score a big one for the Reds, with extra special kudos to NBC for doing their part for the Communist movement.

Thus was one of the most lopsided military victories in military history turned into defeat, in "the American mind," for the purposes of the Marxists and the furtherance of the International Communist cause.

While the American military won, big, the media reported that they lost, big. And they were believed. The strategy is to tell a big lie, tell it often, hammer it, and it will be believed. Thus it is possible to "make" one's own "reality" that will become reality for the masses.

The media never recanted, never repented, never corrected this gross and obvious lie. They never changed it one iota. The closest they came to recanting is that, over time, gradually, they somewhat softened the story by using slick language. The story line eventually became a variation of:

The part they left out, and still leave out, is that the sole reason that Tet was a political victory for the Viet Cong was that it was falsely reported by the Leftist American media to be a military victory for the Viet Cong. It would never have been a political victory for the Viet Cong if the Leftist American media had not purposely made it into a political victory for the Viet Cong.

Tet, of course, like all the other battles in the Vietnam war, brought about multiple opportunities for one of the most frequent media lies, the usual one regarding body counts. Whenever lopsided body counts were announced, the talking-head would then lower his voice, raise a conspiratorial eyebrow and say something like, "military supplied body counts are frequently proven inaccurate."

QUESTION: How many times was an official military body count shown to be inaccurate?

ANSWER: None.

During the Tet offensive a bunch of Viet Cong tried unsuccessfully to attack the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Some 19 infiltrators blew a hole in an outside wall before they were all killed or driven off. None of them ever got past the three Marine guards at the front door, and none of them ever got inside. But, as usual, that's not how it was reported.

In a report typical of all Vietnam war coverage, here's what Walter Cronkite reported as "news":

Every bit of that was a purposeful, manufactured, flagrant categorical lie. Here's what the A.P. reported, again, in typical Vietnam war coverage:

Again, every bit of that was a lie. They were just making it up as they went along.

Westy (General Westmoreland) was personally on the scene just as the last of the infiltrators were killed, and personally toured all the floors of the building, and no bad guys ever got in there. Period.

It was in this period that, from Ben Tre in South Vietnam, Peter Arnett, then of the Associated Press, wrote a dispatch quoting an "unnamed" US major as saying,

That "quote" was a total invention of Peter Arnett.  The quote ran nationwide the next day in Arnett's report. No one has ever been able to find the mysterious major. So where did Arnett get his "unnamed" US Major? The same place Cronkite and the A.P. got their penetration, partial control and partial massacre inside the US Embassy: out of thin air.

And, there were the lies of omission. Everyone in America probably knows about what happened at My Lai, the site of the massacre of some hundreds of villagers by members of the Americal division. They might not remember that it was an aberration, that it was reported and investigated by the military, that courts-martial ensued and so forth. What they probably most often remember, rather, is that it was "typical" of American service in Vietnam. It was an incident that was heavily, HEAVILY reported on in the American media. You might say, hammered.

But, the entire American SLIMC¹ was studiously missing during the unraveling of the story behind the Hue massacre. The only place in South Vietnam that the Tet offensive was not immediately crushed was Hue, which the Viet Cong managed to hold for some twenty five days. During that time the Viet Cong officer in charge sent out lists of names on clipboards to have citizens gathered for some "education" and training in the new government ways. Five thousand people were rounded up in that way, and they all disappeared.

Later when a farmer accidentally found the first of the mass graves, the American media seriously avoided the story, to the point that the word "censored" would not be too strong. Eventually over three thousand bodies were uncovered there; there were still around two thousand missing, from the lists and the "educational" meeting invitations, who were never accounted for. No American media talking-head reported on the massacre at Hue. Not one. In the print media, it was buried; never anywhere close to the front page, if it was reported at all. It appeared to be religiously censored.

In the PBS crockumentary 13-part "Vietnam: A Television History" they put a former Viet Cong officer on the screen to explain how "the people of Hue" took matters into their own hands and killed all of these people, despite Viet Cong efforts to protect them. Right. It was the people of Hue who killed all those people of Hue. What PBS didn't mention was that the very officer they were interviewing was the perpetrator. He was the guy who handed out the lists and the clipboards. Which might explain why he got on so well with PBS. Birds of a feather flock together, you know. They were comrades, after all. 

But let's look at Khe Sanh, a good microcosm study of how the Vietnam war was reported. In fact, that's how they reported it, as a microcosm of the whole Vietnam war. Khe Sanh had another one of the most popular lies, repeated by just about every talking-head available. And it was:

No kidding. It would appear that Charlie made a whole heaping, giant, enormous pile of bad decisions along that line. Again, this reporting was typical, in microcosm, of how the entire Vietnam war was purposely miss-reported in the news.

When Viet Cong general Giap, the purported "hero" of Dien Bien Phu, brought some 20,000 Viet Cong to bear against the American emplacements at Khe Sanh, the media began perpetrating pro-Viet Cong, anti-American myths immediately. First, they reported that all of this was a surprise; the Marines were caught by surprise, see? The Marines disagreed with that. Second, they reported Khe Sanh as an "imminent disaster." Again, the Marines disagreed with that. Third, they linked it, strategically, to what happened at Dien Bein Phu. The Marines probably would have laughed at that if they weren't too disgusted.

The differences were staggering. At Dien Bien Phu, the French Legionnaires were the ones down-hill, surrounded and cut off, with no effective artillery or air support. Khe Sanh was somewhat different. The American positions occupied all the high ground in the area, were well dug in, with their own artillery and close tactical air support. And, of course, the infantry here were not conscripts or draftees, they were Regulars. And they weren't merely Regulars, they were members of an elite corps. And they weren't just members of an elite corps, they were genuine United States by God Marines, over six thousand of them, dug in, fully prepared, occupying all the high ground, with their own artillery and close air support. As I said, the differences were staggering. That whole area was under Marine control.

Nevertheless, the media consistently hammered the similarities between Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu. Bernard Fall's "Hell in a Very Small Place", which recorded the events of Dien Bien Phu, became required reading for all journalists on their way to Khe Sahn or about to report on Khe Sanh. They all read it, passed it around, recommended it, nodded in agreement that, yep, the same thing was going to happen at Khe Sanh.

But what happened there was totally different. The French, Moroccans, Legionnaires and others who parachuted into the valley at Dien Bien Phu were on an offensive mission, intended to take control of the valley. But - first and foremost - they failed to take the high ground. (The French ignored highest sites around as "impassible"; they were NOT impassible, as the Communists proved by turning them into gun emplacements, looking down on the French, and rendering air support impossible.) Thus, the French never even gained control of the valley.

Khe Sanh, on the other hand, was planned from the beginning to be a high-ground, highly defensible position, in a key strategic position, from which it could, and did, severely disrupt supply traffic on the Ho Chi Trail. The Marines SET OUT to be an un-removable thorn in the ass of the enemy, to GET THEM TO ATTACK. Which they did. From the low ground, because the Marines occupied the high ground. Which is something Marines always tend to immediately do.

No one in the American media was smart enough to figure that out. They couldn't tell the difference between an offensive position and a defensive one; they couldn't tell the difference between high ground and low ground; they probably couldn't tell the difference between up and down. Thus, with clear Leftist bias and obvious cognitive disability did the media report on the Vietnam war.

The "siege" at Khe Sanh was never  a siege, in the purest sense of the word. Air support, both tactical and supply, was never cut off or even seriously disrupted. There was never any real threat to re-supply. Marines on Khe Sanh took off to go home on leave, and came back to Khe Sanh after being home on leave. An aircraft landing or taking off while under fire is something military planes do in combat zones, and while it might get a little hairy sometimes, that is part of the job of the military. Taking some rounds is part of the job for a Marine, but a heart-stopping, pants-crapping, life-changing event for a typical journalist; thus, some exaggeration may be expected. However, what was reported by the media at Khe Sanh, as in all of the Vietnam war, went way over the top on a regular basis.

A total of four (4) aircraft of any kind, including one C-130, were brought down by enemy fire on or in the environs of Khe Sanh. The lone C-130 proved the point. Media reporters practically lined up to get in the right position, with the burning plane on camera behind them, to report breathlessly how air supply was practically cut off to Khe Sanh. Smoke and fire sells, I guess, so if you look hard enough you can probably find tape of lots and lots of different reporters with that same, lone C-130 behind them. After the flames died down, they were still getting footage with the smoke rising from the same C-130 behind more breathless reporters. Finally, there will be video tape somewhere of reporters in front of the same plane, but without any smoke or flames. They probably would have liked to pour some kerosene and light it up again for the cameras if they thought they could get away with it. All four downed aircraft were in good photo-op spots, all were used to perpetuate the "veritable graveyard of aircraft" version of Khe Sanh. Meanwhile, the supplies kept coming in on all the other flights that somehow or other didn't get on camera.

Another incident that got full camera attention was the time an enemy mortar made a lucky hit on an ammo dump; wild, highly photogenic pyrotechnics ensued, which the media used to great advantage.

Consistently, in the Vietnam war in general and Khe Sanh in particular, the situation was reported as hopeless by the media. Khe Sanh was quite strategically important to the NVA and the Viet Cong, and it therefore also important to the Marines. But here's how Cronkite saw it.

A Vietnam war report from Walter Cronkite, CBS News, on Khe Sanh:

Its usefulness was vastly diminished? Excuse me? I begin to wonder if the man ever spoke a truthful word in his life.

A Vietnam war report from David Duncan Douglas, ABC News, on Khe Sanh:

A Vietnam war report from John Lawrence NBC News, on Khe Sanh:

He had to make that up. General Giap was lucky in the extreme in both the timing and the opposing leadership at Dien Bien Phu, and he was downright stupid to put so many forces forward to be slaughtered as they were at Khe Sanh. But then, thanks to our media, he was winning another political battle through the American newsrooms, through “news” that was concocted, written and delivered, right down the Communist Party line.

A Vietnam war report from Don Webster CBS News, on Khe Sanh:

A Vietnam war report from Murry Fromson CBS News, on Khe Sanh:

The lies are boringly consistent. Time magazine showed a portrait cover of NVA General Giap, with a story inside of Khe Sanh as a re-run of Dien Bien Phu, with luminaries such as Bob Young and Walter Cronkite hailing the fact that "the victorious general of Dien Bien Phu was again in charge." Newsweek portrayed Westy on the cover, titled, "Man On The Spot," with typical negative reporting on the Vietnam war.

The March 18 1968 Newsweek was even more egregious than most. The cover photo was of the spectacular fireworks from back when the ammo dump was hit. No mention of the fact that all of this had happened over two months earlier; the readers were left with the impression that what they were reading was quite current news. With input from Cronkite and David Duncan Douglas, it put a typical negative spin on Khe Sanh.

And so we have another, quite consistent, flagrant categorical lie, reported as news.

Do you see what I'm talking about?

This is the common media reporting thread that can be seen in all reporting throughout the entire Vietnam war. None of them had anything positive to say about American prospects on Khe Sanh. Not one. If Cronkite had been a general instead of a journalist, he would have just surrendered all the Marines right then and there.

Bottom line, the Marines held Khe Sanh, the NVA never really made any progress at all, and they suffered so many casualties as to be considered "wiped out." No NVA ever got within 100 yards of the Marines before being killed, and the Marines sent out periodic patrols to go and kill some more of them. Direct assault on Khe Sanh proved so costly as to not even be tried again; they never mounted any direct assault that amounted to anything. Repeated attempts at trenching their way up toward the top, each time, only made certain amount of progress before the trenches were obliterated into a barren moonscape by heavy aerial bombardment, and they (meaning, replacements) would have to start the trenching exercise all over again. Getting and staying within three kilometers of the Marines to avoid heavy B-52 air strikes only brought on Marine Tac Air support that would strike up to within 1 KM of the Marine positions. Being within 1 KM of the Marines invariably meant getting killed by the Marines themselves. This is, in the words of media reporters, including most especially Cronkite, an example of how the entire Vietnam war was fought, in microcosm.

Quote the figures - 205 Marine KIAs on Khe Sanh versus 13,000 NVA KIAs - to any old Marine you know, and he'll think about it a minute and say, yeah, that sounds about right. Quote the same figures to any talking-head media-crat, and he'll say something like, "in the past, body-count figures supplied by the military have been suspect."

That typifies Vietnam war reporting.

Eventually Giap quietly pulled his few survivors out and the battle ended with a whimper. Just as quietly, the media pulled out; and, it would appear, the cat had their tongue. They didn't want to talk about it; or, to put it in their terms, there were other stories of greater importance at the moment. This too was typical of how the Vietnam war was reported. When the news was bad or could have a bad spin put on it, they couldn't report it enough; when the news was good, it wasn't important enough for real Vietnam war coverage.

So - at Khe Sanh, we had an enemy that entered the field with better than 20,000 NVA regulars, took some 90% casualties, with at least 65% of the total force killed, before quietly skulking off to hide and lick their wounds. The whole event, in microcosm, was typical of the entire Vietnam war, as actually fought, and as falsely reported.

And, we also had, in the overall Tet Offensive, a well orchestrated Viet Cong military disaster, in which better than 100,000 Viet Cong were killed outright, effectively removing the Viet Cong from the list of effective enemy organizations available for action against us in the Vietnam war. Again, each action in Tet was stereotypical of other actions throughout the Vietnam war, in how it was fought, and in how it was reported.

Results? Dominant civilian view of American Vietnam war veterans was as of common war criminals, baby killers, bombers of peaceful civilians. Degenerate draftee-soldiers, on dope and demoralized, losing battle after battle, always shown in defensive positions and postures, sometimes terrified, sometimes killing their own officers and NCOs. A military comprised of low-class minorities who couldn't get a job anywhere else, or who were drafted.

(For the record, less than one out of four Vietnam veterans was a draftee, and the overwhelming majority of draftees did not see action in Vietnam. No elite forces(Marines; Airborne; Rangers; Special Forces; etc.) ever have draftees. Among front line infantrymen, who called themselves "grunts," moral was quite high. Very nearly all of them volunteered for service in Vietnam. Use of dope, incidents of "fragging," cases of low moral, like war crimes or prisoner-abuse cases, were exceptionally rare, and not common, per capita. Abuse of drugs or alcohol and criminal activity was probably considerably lower among the military serving in Vietnam than among any similar male populations, including on American campuses and among American demonstrators, American journalists and other Communist revolutionaries at the time.)

Riots in the streets of America. Burning American flags, burning draft cards in public. Marches turned into riots, all televised. Chants of "Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?" on television. Burning campuses, and hijacked campuses. Bob Hope quipped that so many Americans had fled to Canada to avoid service that Canada was now known as "the land of the yellow son."

Again, all of the extremely CONSISTENT "news" reporting that brought all this on was patently false.

So there are two possibilities. Either the media was flagrantly and categorically lying, or, the media was acting as mere mindless parrots, mindlessly parroting the CONSISTENT copy put in front of them. Any who would claim to have not CONSISTENTLY lied should identify whoever supplied the CONSISTENT copy they read while pretending to have gotten it in the usual journalistic ways. Bottom line: it was CONSISTENTLY false. I had to invent a term for it; I call these SLIMC¹ so-called "news" reporters, individually and collectively, FLORMPORIF¹³ s.

Now, during those days, Walter Cronkite was almost universally described as "the most trusted man in America," which made his treachery even more insidious than that of the others. He even wrote in his memoirs, with apparent pride

Military victories reported consistently as losses, American losses emphasized, enemy losses glossed over, trivialized or called into question, American “imperialism,” “colonialism,” use of “puppet regimes” spin on the news had remarkable political effects on Capital Hill, in the Congress and in the White House. Lyndon Johnson could be described as a "media-holic," in that he was particularly fixated upon what the media had to say about the Vietnam war. Today, we have the instant poll; in those days, we had the Network News. Johnson would watch all three channels simultaneously, every day, to get all three major network's delivery of the news.

Despite the fact that he was a big, tough Texan, Johnson had a soft spot for the military. Having served himself with honor, distinction and valor, the public demonstrations, chants and slogans cut him to the quick. It preyed on his mind that anyone could even think that he didn't value life in general and the lives of American servicemen in particular. But the CONSISTENCY of the media news reports began to outweigh even his own intelligence reports regarding what was going on in the Vietnam war.

His daily briefings from the military and from intelligence were also consistent; we were winning, big time, kicking butt, with victories so overwhelming as to be epic and historic. But then he would watch his three networks, and get the media view. He began to nearly obsess over Khe Sanh because the media reports were so CONSISTENTLY negative; he pushed for more intelligence, higher and higher people to look into it, raising pressure on everyone involved, including especially Westy. "I don't want no damn Din Bin Foo" he famously remarked to all who could do anything about it. Even with all the intelligence available to the President of the United States, it was very hard not to believe Cronkite.

Negotiations in Paris had the Viet Cong leadership on the ropes, hoping to negotiate some sort of survival; Secretaries of Defense and State were calling for calm, speaking of a "light at the end of the tunnel." The media was pouncing on them at every opportunity as promoting false hope in a hopeless situation. Then Cronkite did his "special" on the Vietnam war in which he told America that the Vietnam war was "unwinnable" in a scathing attack on American objectives and strategy, in which he stated "There is no way this war can be justified any longer."

That was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Those words broke the American Presidency, and won the war for the Communists. A shocked, disconsolate Johnson, on watching Cronkite's special, said "If I've lost Cronkite, then I've lost middle America." At that point, the Vietnam war was really over.

An obviously depressed President Johnson announced to the nation that he would not seek and would not except his party's nomination for re-election. Immediately, the position of the Viet Cong negotiators changed 180 degrees, and it was all downhill from there. Under Nixon, the Case-Church bill passed Congress, stating that there would be "no combat activity in or over Southeast Asia," telegraphing to the Communists that we would not enforce the Paris peace accords. Even the provision to respond to violations was discarded by a quick further movement by Congress to cut logistic supplies to American forces in Vietnam. We can only hope that Congress is proud of itself.

Results: First, of course, no more elections. Millions of boat people, from Vietnam, from Laos, from Cambodia. People fleeing on anything that would float, often with no food or water, no real captain or navigator, and at the mercy not only of the elements of the sea, but pirates.

Show trials in Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City, of upwards of ten percent of the Vietnamese population, for offenses ranging from collaboration with the Americans to owning more than the average of two goats, or ten chickens. Thousands of show-trial convicted people taken back to their villages and hamlets for public execution, as object lessons for family, friends and neighbors.

As much as one third of the whole population of Cambodia killed in the greatest act of genocide, per-capita, on historic record.

The late "discovery" by the media that, why, yes, we see now, in retrospect, that it was actually, by golly, a Communist movement from the very start, rather than a popular civil war. Gee, what a shame. Meanwhile, in other news . . .

Aftermath

This Vietnam war section is about, primarily, phony Vietnam war heroes. You know, those guys you used to always see whose whole wardrobe came out of army surplus stores, who couldn't seem to get over the Vietnam war. Always in fatigues, but something always looked a little out of place; like the pony tails, or maybe the earrings, and just the general shagginess. They always seemed, a little too proudly, perhaps, to be trying to fit the ever growing, media-evolving stereotype of the 'Nam vet, the newest subculture of social outcasts, who most people were not willing to honor, and indeed might even spit on. Here's a clue: There are exceptions to every rule, but real veterans, in general, do not look or act like that.

By the eighties, the stereotype had blossomed into that of the weird, doper, victim of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome,) in and out of shell-shock induced and repressed-memory induced mental disability, suffering from various physical impairments brought on by agent orange, and these maladies were the real reasons behind the drinking problem and the drug problem and the criminal record and the unemployable problem. (I was cool, but then, the Vietnam war happened, see?)

Hollywood did all it could to help the Vietnam war veteran stereotype along with movies like Taxi Driver, and The Deer Hunter. A lot of those guys in the fatigues regularly got interviewed by the media, and seemed to love to regale whoever would listen with wild Vietnam war stories that always sounded improbable, to put it kindly. They wore the patches of some of the most distinguished units to serve in the Vietnam war, and the most popular headgear always seemed to be the Green Beret. You would think, by the number of Green Berets on the heads of these grossly over-obvious 'Nam vet guys at various memorial events that all Special Forces veterans were very screwed up.

A vet named B. G. Burkett looked into some of the ones who were always showing up at veteran memorial events, but seemed to be less interested in honoring the dead than in complaining about their condition, and their treatment at VA centers, and the world in general. He checked up on some of them and - guess what - they hadn't been involved in the Vietnam war, or they hadn't seen action if they went to Vietnam, and for the most part, they had military records as screw-ups, if they had served in the military at all. They were just using the Vietnam war as an excuse, or a crutch, or to feel like somebody, even somebody disrespected. They were all phonies.

Surprise.

That's what he said.  He testified that these

So, these were day-to-day normal activities. Officers at all levels of command were fully aware of them. That means, from the lowest Lieutenant on up the chain of command, through the Joint Chiefs to the Secretary of Defense, and the Commander in Chief. These crimes were, in other words, Standard Operating Procedures, or SOP. That's how he put it; war crimes, committed on a day-to-day operational basis, with full officer awareness at all levels.

That's what he said. 

QUESTION, for Vietnam war veterans: Does any small part of that televised, sworn Senate testimony sound even the least bit plausible to you?

ANSWER: Not to me, either.

He went on, this real, live decorated Vietnam war veteran, to testify that there was no Communist threat involved in the Vietnam war.

Right. Obviously, John Kerry is just another typical Marxist ends-justify-the-means flagrant categorical liar. These obvious flagrant categorical lies were somewhat different than Dan Rather accepting and reporting un-critically the wild-assed stories of fifty live-human-skinnings-per-hour, because everybody knows that Rather is just a particularly dumb jerk with a Leftist agenda. And, after all, it was just another show-biz TV show. But the fact that a Democrat-controlled hearing in a Democrat-controlled Senate could blindly accept, without any challenge, such obviously concocted crap from Kerry as honest "testimony" should raise serious questions about the participating Senators in the minds of all Americans. The lies are so obvious on their face that I only see two options: Either the Senators present were naive and gullible to the point of imbecility, or they were complicit in the lies.

Kerry himself, and others, have often raised the smoke-screen challenge that no one can legitimately challenge the patriotism of decorated "hero".

Sez who?

First of all, patriotism and heroics have little or nothing to do with one another. If we followed that logic to it's conclusion, we could not question the patriotism of Benedict Arnold, who was, at once, a genuine hero, and also a turn-coat and a traitor. We might note also that there are no outstanding questions regarding whether Benedict Arnold was a heroic man; he was quite conspicuous in his valor. And, he didn't decorate himself, or put himself in for his decorations, as did John Kerry. He didn't have to. Even at that, he was still a turn-coat and a traitor.

This whole piece of crap sworn testimony of Johnnie boy before the Senate hearing was founded upon his beloved "Winter Soldier Investigation," which was a Communist disinformation and propaganda event funded by Jane Fonda. Ensuing armed forces investigations found that none - as in, not a single one - of the "decorated heroes" of the Vietnam war that Johnnie boy testified to the Senate about would come forward to sign affidavits, and none of the gruesome stories that are always so typical of 'Nam vet phonies came with any verifiable dates or places, and those who few who gave statements were, guess what, not who they said they were. Many of them used the names of real Vietnam war veterans, but, for the most part, they were all just as fake as anything Dan Blather dug up in the woods. They were imposters. The whole event was packed with pretenders and liars. This was even a worse slur on the decency, integrity and honor of all real Vietnam war veterans than Rather perpetrated. So what else is new?

Well, one thing you might not know is how the VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War), John Kerry presiding, was taking its operational directions from the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. Don't just take my word for it. Go to Winter Soldier Dot Com and take a look at the Communist documents captured in 1971 providing the proof. You're not going to see this in the mainstream media, where it's religiously censored. Go to Swift Boat Veterans to see what the overwhelming majority of those who served with him during his tiny little four-month tour of duty, during which he just did so much that he just had to decorate his own buns off. Amazing what a young lieutenant with access to a typewriter can do.

Another item you might not know, because the SLIMC¹ censored it, and Johnnie boy denied being there, is how his pet organization voted on measures to assasinate United States Senators. It turns out he was there, after all. (He was probably the one holding the gavel.)

QUESTION, for Vietnam war veterans: Do you remember any lieutenant, ever, who carried around one of those big ol' sixties-era eight millimeter movie cameras in his combat gear, on combat missions?

ANSWER: That's funny, neither do I.

I'll bet you thought all that Presidential campaign footage you saw on TV of Kerry looking heroic walking through some village, all dressed up like an infantry grunt with an M-16 was actual news footage, right? Wrong. It was all shot by his personal film crew. Excuse me, I meant to say his Band of Brothers.

QUESTION, for Vietnam war veterans: Do you remember any lieutenant, after a battle, having you all go back and re-enact the battle on camera for him? Or, do you remember any lieutenant using his camera and his men to fake a news conference with himself?

ANSWER: That's funny, neither do I.

It looks to me like Johnnie boy spent his whole four months worth of in-country tour of duty just making himself look good.

So, what's the upshot of this whole thing?

The Vietnam war was a long time ago, the evil empire of the Soviet Union is now in the dust bin of history, as Reagan predicted, so why don't we just forget it and "move on?"

Well, the Soviet Union may be gone, but the perfection-now, utopian dream is still alive and pressing, in direct opposition to this imperfect, yet working and bearable thing we can call "Americanism." The problem with today's Marxists, or Lefties, if you prefer, is that, although they've lost something to be FOR, they have not moved one iota away from what they are AGAINST. And what they are against is the American way. Which involves, first, our sovereignty; then, our representative government, and our free market approach to economics. The Lefties are still against all that. They've got a lot more to be AGAINST than they have to be FOR, but the notion of Marxism lives on, remains dangerous, and must continue to be opposed.

As far as the Vietnam war is concerned, it would be nice to put it to rest. I think it might be possible today, or one day, for me to break bread with an ex-NVA regular. Perhaps, with more difficulty, I could sit at the same table with an ex-Viet Cong terrorist. But, with a Fonda, or a Cronkite, or a Kerry - never. I couldn't even occupy the same room with any one of them. In the Vietnam war, too many good men died and too many were disabled for a cause that was betrayed via purposeful lies that were consistently told in the interest of a truly stupid utopian ideal.

My faith calls me to forgive them; but it also calls them to repent, and none of them have ever done that. They are, to me, more than national traitors; they are obstinate unrepentant sinners, to put it in theological terms. Let them be anathema.

From Psalm 1:

Now there's a new group out there that's actually doing something proactive in the legal arena to set the historical record straight, and perhaps restore some of our stolen honor. I encourage you to visit them at the Vietnam Veteran's Legacy Foundation and give them all the support you can.

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Vietnam War Topical information:

VHS Video tape: Television's Vietnam, narrated by Charlton Heston, Sony Vietnam Video Collection, produced by Accuracy In Media.

Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982, Nguyen Van Canh; Hoover Institution Press.

How the Dominoes Fell: Southeast Asia In Perspective; John H. Esterline and Mae H. Esterline; Hamilton Press.

=====

Sarcastic Acronym Hover-Link Footnotes: For the convenience of those readers using devices that lack a mouse, these footnotes are provided for all webpages, in case any webpage contains any hover-links. (If you don't have a mouse, you can't "hover" it over a link without clicking just to see the simple acronym interpretation. Click any footnote link to see the acronym and a detailed explanation; "Hover" the mouse over it just to see the simple interpretation.)

SLIMC¹ Secularist Liberal Intellectual Media Complex
GESGOEAEOT² Gradually, Ever So Gradually, Over Eons And Eons Of Time
PEWAG³ Punctuated Equilibrium's Wild-Assed Guess
TTRSTF⁴ Them There Real Scientifical-Type Fellers
TTRSPTF⁵ Them There Real Smart Perfesser-Type Fellers
TTRSJTF⁶ Them There Real Smart Journalistical-Type Fellers
SNRTACBT⁷ Surely No Right Thinking Adult Could Believe Today
STNSEACPB⁸ Surely Today No Serious Educated Adult Could Possibly Believe
WDN⁹ We Don't Know
BMDFP¹⁰ Baboons, Mongrel Dogs, Filthy Pigs and ...
HBAACOTE¹¹ Human Beings Are A Cancer On The Earth
ACLU¹² Anti-Christian Litigation Union
FLORMPORIF¹³ Flagrant Liar, Or, Mindless Parrot, Or, Innocent Fool
MEJTML¹⁴ Marxist Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar
IEJTML¹⁵ Islamic Ends-Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar
MPAV¹⁶ Marxist Principles And Values
WBESSWG¹⁷ Wise, Benign, Elite, Super-Scientific World Governance
TRMITM¹⁸ The Reason Man's In This Mess
IYI¹⁹ Intellectual Yet Idiotic
TTRSCBTF²⁰ Them There Real Smart Catholic Bishop Type Fellers
IACMPVND²¹ Illegal-Alien-Criminal Marxocrat-Party-Voting Nation-Destroyers
PEJTML²² Palestinian Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar
PSYOP²³ "Psychological Operation" Mind Trick
CDC²⁴ Covid Developmentally Challenged
LGBTQ+ Every Letter Represents A Serious Psychotic sexual Identity Disorder
HEJTML²⁶ Hedonist Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar
SEJTML²⁷ Scientistic Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar

Reference Material

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oldest at the top, newest at the bottom of the list.]

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Date: Mon Feb 09 06:57:29 2009
From: Raymond
Email:
Subject: From Duluth, MN
Comment:

Just found your site, and happy to find a fellow musky fisherman with a brain. But I think you may be overstating the case against Cronkite and the rest of the media when you use phraseology like "every bit of that was a lie." A more measured criticism might be more believable. You begin to fit the Shakespearian line "Methinks thou dost protest too much."

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Date: Mon Feb 09 09:32:01 2009
From: Vic Biorseth
Subject: To Raymond from Duluth
Comment:

Raymond:

You might be right, except for the fact that every bit of it really was a lie. (I assume we’re talking about the “news” reports on the failed Viet Cong attack on the US embassy in Saigon.)

The reports were given as news – not commentary, not editorializing, not side-stories and not any sort of hypothetical or what could happen semi-fiction – but as hard news. It was indeed reported as hard, eye witness news, just as though the speaker were either physically present on the scene or delivering the eye witness report of another journalist who was physically present on the scene.

We can ask some very simple and very direct yes-or-no questions about the various points of this story reported to America and the world as hard, eye-witness news.

Again, all of these things, and more, were reported as hard, eye-witness news, as it was happening, and to my knowledge none of it was ever retracted or corrected. I submit that if the answer to any one of the above questions is no, then the “news” report was a lie, the reporter was a liar, and his employer paid him to lie, which explains why I elsewhere refer to the typical American journalist as a professional liar.

You can prove for yourself, with a little research, that the SLIMC¹ was and had been dominated by Marxist ideology for many, many decades, and still is.

The real stretch of credulity would involve the opposite approach – the notion that well meaning but naïve reporters, and their employers, were somehow duped by brilliant Communist manipulators. Or, perhaps, that every single war report coming out of the entire Vietnam War just happened to be so slanted Left as to be talking right down the Communist Party line, by some miraculous coinky-dinky.

Regards,

Vic

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Date: Mon Jun 22 19:54:59 2009
From: Bob
Email:
Location:
Comment:

There were no lies written by anyone other than those who got us in that war and kept us in it . . . they didn’t do the fighting and the dying, they weren’t on the ground. If we were allowed to pursue the NVA and the Viet Cong wherever they were as we should have done, we could have won the war in 2 years. It wasn’t the reporters it was your so called leaders over there and those in Washington DC here who would not let us bomb the capital, the ports and other countries where they ran and hid.....you can’t fight a war with rules.

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Date: Tue Jun 23 06:32:23 2009
From: Vic Biorseth
Comment:

Bob:

I really don’t believe that Eisenhower and Kennedy lied about the Communist threat in Southeast Asia when they “got us into” the war. Nor do I believe that the Australian veterans, the Philippine veterans, the South Korean veterans or the South Vietnamese veterans, and others, were lied to by their respective elected governments who “got them into” the war. What kept us in the war, far too long, was following the stupid strategy first developed by Truman in Korea, in which our forces are only allowed to defend limited turf rather than take any serious offensive action. Despite being limited by this crippling strategy, American and other democratic forces acquitted themselves so admirably as to be on the winning side of every major battle. Of course, that’s not how it was reported.

You’re quite correct about the overall strategy, of course, as I pointed out in the article. You cannot win if you don’t go for the throat. However, we did indeed bomb the capital and the ports. Bombing, in and of itself, is never enough. Even in this high-tech age, infantry remains the queen of battle. After the bombing, somebody has to get in there, root them out of their bomb shelters and occupy the ground, or it’s simply not over. As I said in the article, if we had invaded North Vietnam and taken Hanoi, it could have been over in a matter of months rather than years.

Lastly, of course, yes, it was the reporters who lied, big, long, continuously and repeatedly, all throughout the entire Vietnam War. I have said it before, but it always seems to bear repeating: you show me a Marxist and I’ll show you an ends-justify-the-means liar. The SLIMC¹ , by which I mean our entire mainstream electronic and print media, was and is dominated by “journalists” who were, and are, in fact MEJTML¹⁴ s. They are paid to lie; they are professional liars. They love their work, and they do it well.

You can prove me wrong, of course. Very simple; nothing to it. Just show me the first American mainstream media “news report” out of the mainstream media coverage of the entire Vietnam War that didn’t contain a flagrant categorical lie. Then we can begin building two stacks of historical Vietnam War “news” reports; those with pro-Communist lies, and those without pro-Communist lies, and see which stack gets the tallest.

Regards,

Vic

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Date: Mon Jul 20 15:29:15 2009
From: Mary Lou Knoles
Email: mlknoles@yahoo.com
Location: Flagstaff, Az/ USA
Comment:

I just read your comments on the reporting of the Viet Nam war. My late husband, B/G Tom Knoles was a USAF fighter pilot in Viet Nam. He sent us small cassette tapes telling us what was going on there during the Tet Offensive. My children and I could not believe that Walter Cronkite was telling us that we lost the Tet Offensive when Tom was telling us just the opposite. I never believed anything the press said about the war. It was so obvious that they were biased against the war. We resented their reporting, which gravely affected the morale of our fighting men and women there as well as that of the misinformed citizens here at home. I don't believe we ever lost a battle but you wouldn't know it by listening to the media. All the praise upon Walter Cronkite as being the "most trusted voice in America" rings hollow to me and to most Viet Nam veterans that I know.

Blessings,

Mary Lou Knoles

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Date: Mon Jul 20 20:57:03 2009
From: Vic Biorseth
Comment:

Mrs. Knoles:

The General had it right; Cronkite was lying through his teeth. Tet was an American victory of epic proportions.

See also the Old Traitors Never Die page for something I wrote after Cronkite did an interview some years ago.

I’m currently doing an anti-American politics page in which Cronkite figures fairly prominently, but I’m too tired to finish it tonight. Maybe tomorrow night after work.

Of course, man proposes, but God disposes.

Warmest regards,

Vic

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Date: Mon Jul 05 09:49:32 2010
From: MarDivPhoto
Email: MarDivPhoto@yahoo.com
Location: Raleigh, NC
Comment:

This is generally very well done essay, with mostly accurate facts. A few numbers quoted can be argued about, but the only serious error is describing LBJ as having served valiantly in WW2. FDR gave him Silver Star for having been on a plane that flew near one of the contested Pacific islands; that was as close to the war as he ever got. The medal was FDR's way of obligating LBJ to him in some political debates.

I was there during Tet, and had many friends at Khe Sanh, and everything you wrote about, and the false reporting done at the time, is spot on.

But you will never get the media or academia to admit the reality of the slanted/false reports, nor will any of the old antiwar fanatics acknowledge the sad reality of the war either. They cannot do so, since that would mean they were liars, fools, and tools of a ruthless communist movement that brought more death and misery to the area than anyone ever anticipated.

Sadly, the false legacy of Viet Nam plagues us to this day, and continues to make us ineffective in trying to fight our enemies in the world. Heaven help us.

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Date: Sun Jun 17 20:24:25 2012
From: Matt
Email:
Location:
Comment:

The napalm girl's real name is Phan Thi Kim Phuc. You are certainly right that she was horribly burnt by Vietnamese air attack, but the question is, which Vietnam? North or south? Which one was America allied to? And who gave napalm to South Vietnam in the first place?

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Date: Mon Jun 18 05:58:83 2012
From: Vic Biorseth
Comment:

Matt:

Those are very strange questions; I thought everybody already knew the answers. At this late date, why would anyone not know?

The Vietnam in question was the one with the elected representative government, not the one that had been forced to become a typical Communist dictatorship.

The Vietnam we were allied with was, again, the only one with an elected representative government, not the one that had become a typical Communist dictatorship.

And finally, the one to whom we supplied arms, training and support was the one with the elected representative government, not the one that had become a typical Communist dictatorship.

Since the answers to your questions are so clear and obvious at the outset, perhaps your intention is something other than a simple seeking of truth. Could it be a carrying on of the pro-Communist propaganda effort to oppose America in favor of world Communism, by continuing to portray a horrible accident of war as if it were part of a “typical” diabolical American plot to burn and kill children just for the fun of it?.

I know how much you despise liberty in general and America in particular, and I know how much you love the idea of the advance of world Communism, Matt, but what I don’t really understand is why you can’t be up-front and honest about it.

Perhaps your real hidden purpose cannot stand the full light of day.

Regards,

Vic

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Thursday, January 17, 2013
Converted Page to SBI! Release 3.0 BB 2.0. 

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Date:   Wed Sep 24 2014
From:  Vic Biorseth
Comment:  

Changes pursuant to changing the website URL and name from 
Thinking Catholic Strategic Center to
Catholic American Thinker.

Pulled the trigger on the 301 MOVE IT option June 1, 2014. Working my way through all the webpages.  . 

Regards,

Vic

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Date:  Sat Oct 22 16:03:15 2016
From:  Chris
Email:   
Location:  
Comment: 

Thanks for the article its a LIE that the "west" lost the Vietnam war. The book "unheralded victory" is a good analysis of the war and what really happened It did not help that there were all those rules of engagement that basically hamstrung the troops.

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Date:  Sat Sep 02 15:30:01 2017
From:  Tula
Email:   
Location:  
Comment: 

"Television's Vietnam: The Real Story (1984)"

federalexpression - Published on February 23, 2017 Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsYwdCoOIEI

Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaECqmMYtxM

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Date:  Sun Sep 03 2017
From:  Vic Biorseth
Comment:  

Tula:

Thank you! !!! 

I have what I think may be the last VHS version of Part I. 

It needs to be a part of this whole story! 

Regards,

Vic

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Date:  Sun Jan 28 23:12:52 2018
From:  Noah
Email:   
Location:  
Comment: 

Years ago a reliable source, unknown to me now stated Walter Cronkite basically pushed the general as acting police chief into shooting that officer Viet Cong war prisoner in the head,Years ago a reliable source, unknown to me now stated Walter Cronkite basically pushed the general as acting police chief into shooting that officer Viet Cong war prisoner in the head.

Really sad if that was the case.

Noah

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Date:  Mon Jan 29 2018
From:  Vic Biorseth
Comment:  

Noah:

I don't think it is. If memory serves, the man executed in the famous photo was a well known Viet Cong Terrorist who had been previously tried and sentenced to death in abstentia, and had been hunted and tracked for years before finally being captured. The Police Chief was merely carrying out the sentence. 

The News Media crime in publishing that photo was to simply publish it without comment about why the man was summarily executed. They just left the American public with the purposely false impression that that is how the horrible, corrupt, unrepresentative and cruel South Vietnamese duly elected government treated all of the wonderful, peace-loving Communists whenever they caught one. 

That's how all good Communist journalists reported the "News" back then, and that's how they still do it today. 

Regards,

Vic

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Date:  Sat Mar 23 20:26:55 2019
From:  Eric Otness
Email:   otness_e@mindspring.com
Location:  Dunwoody, Georgia, America
Comment: 

I agree with the article completely. It was truly a disservice how the media up and out lied to the American people about what was going on in Vietnam, and especially their promoting the Vietcong as the heroes, heck, even acting like the Vietcong won the Tet Offensive instead of losing it. Heck, thanks to that, George Lucas via "clever" framing, manipulated us Americans into rooting for the Vietcong, and rooting against us Americans in his Star Wars movies with the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire, respectively. It's truly sick, that they'd side with the Marxists. Heck, the mainstream media may have been Marxist even BEFORE FDR came into the presidency (namely, around the time Walter Lippmann published "Public Opinion", which practically gave birth to the fake news lying Marxist mainstream media). At least, the American media was that since Lippmann essentially founded it in its current form. For media in general, I'd even argue that media has been lying since the age of Enlightenment when Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and their ilk pushed their lies against Christianity specifically to orchestrate a massacre against it, replace it with atheism, and slaughter any and all religions for merely existing at all.

I also agree with you completely that we should have just invaded North Vietnam and stopped the thing. To be fair to Lyndon B. Johnson and Harry Truman, however, the former was trying to avoid a nuclear war thanks to China and the USSR having nukes by that point, and even the latter had to worry about the possibility of China basically responding especially after China pushed MacArthur back (his firing MacArthur was still very contemptible and unforgivable, though...).

If there is only one or two things I disagree with in your article, though, it's the idea that the South Vietnamese should fight for democracy. Democracy's a very dirty word, not at all different from Marxism, really. When I think of "democracy", I think of the Guillotine, Parisian mobs proceeding to butcher friends and enemies for no reason other than a sheer laugh, and also laughing when people are shot up and bled out, also "Republican marriages" where two naked people are bound together and drowned in a river. Oh, and also Christian persecutions and razing of church steeples because Robespierre viewed them as "undemocratic" due to their height. Yes, when I think of Democracy, I instantly think of the horrors of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. I certainly don't think of the ballot box or nominating our next president or congressman, or governor or mayor or what have you when I hear that term. And the Marxists ultimately are for democracy as well, French Revolution-style democracy that is. Marx even made that clear in correspondences with Engels that he created Marxism specifically in order to recreate Robespierre's Reign of Terror, and make it even gorier than before. That's why I'm against democracy ultimately, viewing it as no different from Marxism, and all in the worst ways possible. Now, republican-style governments (especially American-style republican governments), I can get behind, heck, even monarchies. I also think even letting the United Nations oversee the Geneva elections, with all due respect to Eisenhower and that other guy, was also a bad idea, since the United Nations was in fact a trojan horse for Marxism, Soviet Marxism at that. It's no coincidence that the UN Charter is the same as the Soviet constitution, or that one of the founders was Alger Hiss.

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