Vietnam Veterans for Factual History Blogby LEWIS SORLEY Copyright 2. A Lecture Delivered at the Vietnam Center Texas Tech University Lubbock, Texas. No one account could hope to address all the many aspects of the Army of the Republic of Vietnams performance in such a long and complex endeavor as the Vietnam War. This morning, then, I would like to speak to selected aspects, and to do so in the form of eight chunks, two sidebars, and a very brief conclusion. The South Vietnamese government awarded campaign medals to Americans who served in the Vietnam War. Each decoration had affixed to the ribbon a metal scroll inscribed 1. The closing date was never filled in, for obvious reasons, but for our purposes 1. From that point forward increasing and eventually large scale American involvement in the Vietnam War provided an excellent vantage point for evaluation and appreciation of the performance rendered by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam during the period 1. Some years ago I published an analysis of ARVNs performance in the 1. Easter Offensive. I called the piece Courage and Blood, and it appeared in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College. The late Douglas Pike commented in a subsequent issue of his periodic Indochina Chronology Slowly but steadily the effort goes on to rectify the record and rescue the reputation of the South Vietnamese soldier, he wrote, those so casually trashed by the ignorant commercial television reporter and the academic left winger bent on some ideological mission. America Counterintelligence Domestic Fbis Program Spying SoftwareSorleys writings amount to historical revisionism and he is a sturdy yeoman plowing this particular patch. 1. I have always been grateful for that encouraging assessment, and wish Professor Pike could be with us now to observe how the emerging historical record sustains an increasingly well documented and objective appreciation of the heroic and ultimately successful maturation and performance of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Only when the United States defaulted on its commitments to South Vietnam, while North Vietnams communist allies continued and indeed greatly increased support to their client state, were our unfortunate sometime allies overwhelmed and defeated. Thus far there has never been a full scale evaluation of ARVNs evolution and performance over the years of its expansion and development that has been based solely on the record broadly considered. In the limited time available here, I hope to provide the beginnings of a corrective to the incomplete, unfair, and ideologically tainted view of ARVN that until now has largely constituted the conventional wisdom. Americans know very little about the Vietnam War, even though it ended over three decades ago. That is in part because it has been seen by those who opposed the war, or at least opposed their own participation in it, as in their interests to portray every aspect of the long struggle in the worst possible light, and indeed in some cases to falsify what they have had to say about it. James Webb identified the media, academia, and Hollywood as groups that have a large stake in having the war remembered as both unnecessary and unwinnable. 2 That they also to a large degree dominate the public dialogue helps explain why many have such a distorted view of the war even three decades after the fact. Such distortions extend from wholesale defamation of the South Vietnamese and their conduct throughout a long and difficult struggle to Jane Fondas infamous claim that repatriated American prisoners of war who reported systematic abuse and torture by their captors were liars and hypocrites. It is time to move beyond the unrelentingly negative, often slanderous, and overwhelmingly politicized denunciations of the Army of the Republic of Vietnamthe ARVNthat have characterized so much of the dialogue since the war. Chunk 1 ARVN in the Earlier Years. This was a period of American dominance in conduct of the war, with the South Vietnamese basically shoved aside, relegated to pacification duty which was itself a facet of the war pretty much ignored by the American command and given little in the way of modernized equipment or combat support. Many people, including some Americans stationed in Vietnam, were critical of South Vietnamese armed forces during this period. But such criticisms seldom took into account a number of factors affecting the performance of those forces. American materiel assistance in these early years consisted largely of providing cast off World War II American weapons, including the heavy and unwieldy for a Vietnamese M 1 rifle. Meanwhile the enemy was being provided the AK 4. Russian and Chinese patrons. In 1. AK4. 7, a modern, highly effective automatic rifle, noted Brigadier General James L. Collins, Jr. in a monograph on development of South Vietnams armed forces. In contrast, the South Vietnam forces were still armed with a variety of World War II weapons. Then After 1. U. S. buildup slowly pushed Vietnamese armed forces materiel needs into the background. 3. Before the end of the year, Congress must revisit the FISA Amendments Act FAA, a law which, together with its provision known as Section 702, is one of the U. S. s. Issuu is a digital publishing platform that makes it simple to publish magazines, catalogs, newspapers, books, and more online. Easily share your publications and get. Thus South Vietnamese units continued to be outgunned by the enemy and at a distinct combat disadvantage. General Fred Weyand, finishing up a tour as commanding general of II Field Force, Vietnam, observed in a 1. ARVN modern weapons and equipment, at least on a par with that furnished the enemy by Russia and China, has been a major contributing factor to ARVN ineffectiveness. 4. It was not until General Creighton Abrams came to Vietnam as deputy commander of U. S. forces in May 1. South Vietnamese began to get more attention. Soon after taking up his post Abrams cabled Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson. It is quite clear to me, he reported, that the US Army military here and at home have thought largely in terms of US operations and support of US forces. As a consequence, shortages of essential equipment or supplies in an already austere authorization has not been handled with the urgency and vigor that characterizes what we do for US needs. Yet the responsibility we bear to ARVN is clear. Abrams acknowledged that the ground work must begin here. I am working at it. 5. Abrams spent most of his year as the deputy trying to upgrade South Vietnamese forces, including providing them the M 1. By the time of Tet 1. South Vietnamese airborne and other elite units, but the rank and file were still outgunned by the enemy. Thus Lieutenant General Dong Van Khuyen, South Vietnams senior logistician, recalled that during the enemy Tet offensive of 1. AK 4. 7s echoing in Saigon and some other cities seemed to make a mockery of the weaker, single shots of Garands and carbines fired by stupefied friendly troops. 6. Even so, South Vietnamese armed forces performed admirably in repelling the Tet offensive. To the surprise of many Americans and the consternation of the Communists, reported Time magazine, ARVN bore the brunt of the early fighting with bravery and elan, performing better than almost anyone would have expected. 7 Nobody mentioned that the ARVN had achieved these results without modern weapons that could match those of the enemy. In February 1. 96. Army General Bruce C. Clarke made a trip to Vietnam. Afterward, Clarke wrote up a trip report which, by way of General Earle Wheeler, made its way to President Lyndon Johnson.