This week (April 30) in 1975, South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, fell to the army of North Vietnam, ending a brutal war that America, then the world’s mightiest military power, had helped South Vietnam fight for nearly 10 years. Yet, for all its power, America still lost the war to an army of peasants, which made Vietnam America’s first outright military defeat in its history.
That was because the Vietnam War was unlike any other war America had fought.
And that was because, unlike other American wars, the only way to measure success, or lack thereof, in Vietnam, was “body counts” — by counting the number of enemy soldiers dead — which virtually guaranteed that the American people would eventually turn against the war.
The American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I and II, even Korea, all had been measured by defeating armies and capturing enemy territory. Sherman’s “March to the Sea” in the Civil War, World War II’s D-Day invasion and the march to Germany, and the U.S. Navy’s island-hopping from Iwo Jima to Okinawa to Japan, were all about capturing enemy towns, cities, islands, mountain ranges, coastlines, and so on. Whereupon we would use the spoils of those victories — naval ports, enemy airfields, transportation infrastructure, manufacturing plants, left-behind military equipment — to advance further into the heart of enemy territory.
In Vietnam, however, there was no “heart of enemy territory” because the fighting was done in dense jungles and barren countryside, and one stretch of jungle or countryside was like any other. So, for example, when you engaged the enemy in the jungle, even if you won the battle and gained control of that small patch of land, militarily it was still just worthless jungle — there were no spoils of victory to be gained — and the next battlefield, and the next, were also worthless jungle, so you were hardly advancing or “capturing” enemy territory. You were running in place. As a result, by default, counting dead enemy bodies became the only way to determine who was winning or losing.
But, of course, accurately determining enemy casualty figures in a guerrilla war, in thick jungle or barren countryside, was impossible. What’s more, since the enemy often hid in small villages, where they and the village peasants were often similarly dressed, casualties often included civilians. Couple that with wildly inflated body counts — the result of political pressure back home — and the eventual exposure by the press of both those inflated body counts and innocent civilian deaths, and you can see why the American public became increasingly cynical and eventually lost faith in the war.
That loss of faith was the main reason America lost that war.
