I'm baaaaack. I won't use Mark Twain's line about not being dead. I've just been distracted. So, sue me (no, I'd better not say that. I today's litigious society someone just might). Okay, so get upset and never come back. What? You've never read my blog? Oh.

So, by 1959 some of the Viet Minh troops that had returned to the North after the Geneva Agreements had started oozing back into the South. Communist-led uprisings in 1959 in the Mekong Delta and Centra Highlands captured some areas from free into Communist control.

In 1961 the increasing insurgency by the Viet Minh in the South Vietnamese countryside brought President John F. Kennedy to decide to increase US support for the South. Both economic and military aid was provided and the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) was formed in Feb. 1962. The South Vietnamese government, with US assistance, started the "strategic hamlet" program, which was to consolidate 14,000 villages into 11,000 self-contained secure hamlets. The intent was to isolate the guerrillas from the people, or in Maoist terminology, the fish from the sea in which they swim. The program tried to do too much, too soon, and the hamlets were poorly defended by poorly trained locals, and support by Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) units was inadequate. 8,000 hamlets wer established, but only about 1,500 were viable.

In 1961 al communist armed units in the South were unified into a single People's Liberation Armed Force (PLAF) .

Diem grew more and more unpopular as his regime became more repressive. on May 8, 1963 ARVN troops opened fire on demonstrators protesting the regime's oppression of Budhist monks. In June a Budhist monk committed suicide by self-immolation, and by the end of the year six more had.

Kennedy's administration told the South Vietnamese military leaders that they would be willing to suppor a military-led government, and a coup in early November resulted in Diem being assassinated.

Vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the Presidency after Kennedy was assassinated November 22, 1963, and decided to increase support for the embattled government of General Duong Van Minh. Vietnamese Communist Party officials hoped an escalation of the war would result in the same kind of compromise as the US had agreed to in Korea, and thought a quick increase in the tempo of the war would lead to this. The USSR and Communist China were also part of the calculation, and when Moscow disagreed with the escalation but Beijing agreed, Moscow's influence and support diminished, while China's increased.

Now let's just jump ahead to the Tet Offensive. Yep, I know what you are thinking. "Can that old Retired Curmudgeon have anything new to say about THAT?" Well, not exactly new, but reletively unheard. There's a book out titled "Unheralded Victory" by Mark W. Woodruff. He went to the original sources and found that we actually WON that war! The Tet Offensive broke the back of the Viet Cong, almost totally wiping them out. Any activity from that time on identified as "Viet Cong" was actually PAVN troops not in uniform. Of course, they didn't have the support of the locals like the real VC had, and weren't very successful.

The TRUTH about the Vietnam War is being hidden by all those college students who were protesting US involvement. They now have the mid- to top-level positions in almost all the media and are refusing to let any other point of view out. For example, the US lost 58,000+ killed in the war. The North lost 1,200,000! Reported by AFP in 1995. You can google it. The much-maligned Vietnamization program worked. US ground troops were withdrawn following the Paris Peace Accords.

By the Paris Peace Accords in (signed January 27, 1973) the North was whupped. The cumulative effect of the defeats on the ground in the South, along with increased bombing in the North, had brought them to the negotiating table.

Once US ground troops were gone the PAVN was convinced South Vietnam would roll over under attack. A major attack was launched across the DMZ. Tanks, artillery, APCs, regular army troops, but oops, the South defeated them.

So, they got their sugar daddies (USSR and CHINA) to rebuild, restock, reorganize and retrain their army and waited for another opportunity. The Democrats elected an anti-Vietnam War Congress in 1974 and the North invaded in in early January 1975. The Paris Peace Accords permitted both the USSR and US to provide $1 billion annually in aid, which, of course, the USSR exceeded. The anti-war Congress passed a law cutting off US aid to the South. President Ford vetoed it, and Congress over-rode his veto. Without aid, without hope, the ARVN collapsed and the North finally defeated the South.

More next time.