undefined | Better HN

0 pointsalephnerd5mo ago0 comments

As someone who knows people who fought that war on the other side, the vast majority were professionally trained soldiers, not Huy the illiterate rice paddy farmer who took an AK-47 and took pot shots at Americans.

There's a reason much of the older generation of Viet military and political leadership studied in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, BSSR, and RSFSR and why both the Vietnamese Army and the MPS still send their officers and leadership track personnel to train in Belarus and Russia to this day.

Heck, Russian is still an fairly popular language choice for Viet students targeting civil service or police careers.

Furthermore, a ragtag army of farmers would not have been able to fight against the PLA in 1979 or overthrow the PRC's lackeys and backed by the US in Cambodia and Laos in the 1980s-1990s.

It's also why you find so many Vietnamese in Prague, Warsaw, East Germany, Minsk, and Moscow to this day.

The fiction of "illiterate paddy farmers pushed American soldiers out" is just a salve around the reality that the US abandoned South Vietnam in order to seal the US-China deal in the early 70s that helped contain the USSR in the late 20th century.

0 comments

achierius5mo ago

Do you not think the same thing would apply in the US? If we were having serious domestic conflict there would be veterans on both sides, not to mention that other countries would certainly train officers to help their preferred side. The real point is that "technical superiority" (air power, artillery, mechanized equipment) is not on its own sufficient to win a war when the populace is opposed to the occupying military presence, and that military is not willing to totally butcher that populace.

esseph5mo ago

Now do Afghanistan and Iraq.

s1artibartfast5mo ago

There are similar biases there about the technological sophistication of what the Americans were up against. The image of a Taliban soldier rarely includes an engineer with a spectrum analyzer on his back to probe US jamming signals, or plasma cannon IEDs, but they were a big part of that conflict.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse