A Vietnam vet ponders Iran, presidential lies and the People’s Republic

I was on the front lines of a war that outlived expectations. Our incursion into Vietnam was planned to be short and decisive. Our intervention was intended to be limited. Our display of military might was supposed to stabilize the regime we supported. Our enemies were expected to quickly back down and negotiate. 

The war was supposed to be this and supposed to do that and so on and so forth, but as it turned out, the “this and that,” whatever they were expected to be, never materialized. As to “so on and so forth?” It turned out to be a decade of wasted blood, a sense of futility that was reflected in our grunt lingo. When one of us was killed we said “he got wasted.”

What happened is this: We met up with a small, determined enemy that got support from a powerful ally named China … and it took us more than a decade to extract ourselves from that tangled mess. We accomplished nothing. Our adversaries took over the entire country.

American hubris turned into American humble pie.

As I review the flashbacks I still get from Vietnam, what keeps coming back to me isn’t just the war that was in front of my face. What I also get is a strong sense of China’s presence.

It was plenty obvious during my war that support from what was then called Red China was a major, possibly decisive, factor in keeping our enemies in North Vietnam intact and persistently on the offensive. Chinese armaments kept the North Vietnamese afloat.

I know something about those armaments. I was on the receiving end of countless Chinese 107 mm. rocket attacks, and the enemy never seemed to run out of them.  

I doubt that the Chinese will become such conspicuously involved military supporters of Iran during this latest American attempt at imposing our will on a region that’s on the other side of the globe. 

I do think that China will become a factor by supporting Iran economically, which in its way could be just as effective a support mechanism as the arms that China’s forebears supplied to North Vietnam.

The Brookings Institution has done a study on this, concluding that China has benefitted from the U.S.-Iran war. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman recently published a piece titled How China Won the Iran War. There are those who disagree, but I have to lean with those who see the war in Iran as a net positive for China, if only because the U.S. has lost a lot of good will over this ill-advised venture that seems like it will fester for a while.

Trump’s pathetically poor prognostication that the war will end in a matter of weeks has taken its place alongside some of his other monumentally fatuous claims (prices will come down on day one, tariffs are paid by foreigners, the national debt will be reduced). 

Unlike Vietnam, Trump’s war may eventually end before it sinks into a quagmire, but the lying? It will be an indelible part of the Iran war’s history … same as it was in Vietnam.

John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.  

Photo: American troops conducting maritime interception at the Strait of Hormuz, public domain, wikimedia commons

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