One of the strangest assertions which has popped up in response to my comments about John Kerry’s treasonous behavior during the Vietnam War is that the war there was somehow fundamentally “unwinnable” and, therefore, those who opposed the war were justified. This is nonsense, the defeatism of the seditionist brigades crystallized into the conventional wisdom and spoon-fed to the gullible and stupid through the state-sponsored leftist indoctrination camps which are laughably labelled ‘schools’. Vietnam was absolutely winnable in a military and strategic sense. It was not won for exactly two reasons: the politicians waging it lacked the will to win and a large segment of the population, their minds diseased by the traitorous ideology of the modern left, deliberately set out to hand victory to the enemy.

There is something about Vietnam which cannot be repeated often enough: the American armed forces did not lose a single major battle in the field. While no reliable count of the number of communists killed by our forces in that war exists, it seems reasonable to assume that more than ten of the enemy died for each loss of our own. Those areas where the military had difficulty (high aircraft losses, poor unit cohesion, etc.) were almost entirely the result of goofy policies imposed upon the military from the outside.

The war was not lost because America’s warriors were defeated on the field of battle. It was lost because a disloyal cabal, in keeping with its own agenda, deliberately set out to betray America’s heroes. Seditionists and traitors in America, seeking to advance their own agenda, deliberately stabbed their country in the back.

So, how would the war have been won? By aggression, audacity, and ruthlessness. First, all prohibitions against attacks on North Vietnam proper would have had to have been lifted, turning the entire country into a free-fire zone.

A major part of the logic underlying the theory that the Vietnam War was ‘unwinnable’ is the idea that the war was a ‘people’s war’, and that such wars cannot be defeated. This is patent nonsense: any insurrection or guerrilla war can be put down by an army in possession of sufficient force and the will to use it.

Deploying hundreds of thousands of US troops into the country was a bad idea. A terrible one, in fact, driven largely by the desire of President Johnson to appear to be active as a way of insulating himself against charges that he was soft on communism. The Nixon Administration’s strategy of steadily reducing American forces while training and equipping the South Vietnamese to replace them was a fundamentally sound one which should have been adopted from early on.

Additionally, it would have made a great deal of sense to revert to the earliest strategy used in the war: deploying small groups of US Special Forces to individual hamlets to guarantee security and work with the people. This strategy was abandoned because it was considered to be slow, and potentially dangerous (after all, the VC or NVA could overrun a Green Beret Squad, but not an Infantry Battalion). This would, I believe, have gone a long way towards winning the “hearts and minds” of more of the South Vietnamese.

Assuming that these tactics were adopted early enough, we’d see the US troop strength in the country rapidly reduced, and never would there be half a million soldiers stationed across the country, making tempting targets for the communists. Other Special Forces would be used to make aggressive raids into North Vietnam itself, ordered to destroy bridges, dams, and other things that aircraft then lacked the precision to destroy. Such missions, obviously, would be dangerous and result in heavy losses. However, they would result in far lower losses than hundreds of senseless air raids which cost hundreds of aircraft for few concrete successes.

Instead, I would use the considerable US air power in theatre to make war upon the North Vietnamese people. If we accept the concept that (at least for the North Vietnamese) the war effort was a “people’s war”, then it logically follows that the North Vietnamese people were as much an enemy as their masters in Hanoi. Defeating them, breaking their will to resist, is the key to winning the war.

For saying this people will accuse me of “advocating genocide.” Nothing, in fact, could be any further from the truth: genocide would be trying to kill all Vietnamese people; we would simply be trying to kill exactly the number necessary. While it is, of course, necessary to avoid overkill, this ought not to be done at the greater risk of underkill.

I would have assembled a fleet of about one hundred and fifty B-52D bombers and supporting aircraft, using this as my main strike weapon. Some attrition would naturally occur, but I would seek to keep this fleet at this strength on a constant basis. Modified to allow them to carry about 60,000 pounds worth of bombs, this fleet would, if carrying out daily raids, be capable of dropping about 1.5 million tons of explosives on North Vietnam in a single year. To put it another way, this fleet would drop a quantity of conventional explosive equal to the Hiroshima bomb each and every week.

This fleet would have been turned against the civil infrastructure of North Vietnam. Clearly, hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs did little against isolated jungle trails- so I’d pick a better target: downtown Hanoi. Terror bombing had a strong effect against the Japanese in the Second World War, and I imagine that it would have a similar effect against the communists here. Under heavy escort, this bomber fleet would have been used to systematically destroy the capability of the North Vietnamese to wage war or, for that matter, to function as a civil society.

One must recall that, at this time, the US did not have the advanced weapons that it has today. Repeated raids against major bridges did little damage while costing hundreds of aircraft. When attacked with precision-guided weapons late in the war, these same bridges were destroyed in a single stroke. Lacking these weapons, there is little choice but to return to the tactics of World War Two: massive raids. Naturally, these raids would have an official military target but these would, given the technology available, serve as little more than an official aiming point.

At the same time, I would have unleashed chemical agents against North Vietnamese food production. The extensive use of various pesticides would, naturally, be a covert operation, but it would nonetheless receive extensive support. The goal of this would be very simple: to force people to set out as refugees in search of reliable crops. The hope here, of course, is that they would therefore disrupt North Vietnamese military activities and that, possibly, they will seek to head south for a bowl of rice and the protection of US forces.

Naturally, one reason that such actions were not taken was the fear of Russian or Chinese intervention. Frankly, I think that such fears were often exaggerated or used as an excuse for inaction. Russia, after all, didn’t start World War Three when the United States finally got around to mining North Vietnamese harbours in 1972, and I don’t imagine they would have if the United States had chosen to do so in 1964.

The problem wasn’t that Vietnam was unwinnable, it was that the United States- as a result of the actions of a well-organized group of traitors- was unable to take effective and proper action to win the war.

Remember this, when you look at John Kerry. However heroic his service in war, he ultimately chose the side of treason. He worked to undermine the war which he now places on the top of his resume, he sought to dishonor and render worthless the sacrifices of the men who he now claims to venerate.

If he’s elected President, what will he do? Unlike many others, John F. Kerry has never sought forgiveness for his disgusting and dishonourable action. In fact, he followed them up by fighting for a nuclear freeze, seeking to handicap the CIA, fighting for communism in Central America, and signing on with every other fashionable cause of the treason legion over the past three decades.

Already, because of him and his ilk, 55,000 dead American boys have been spat upon. By him, and those who joined him in his immoral cause. What will he do to those who fight the war of this generation? Will he betray them, as he did those other gallant heroes?

And to this you might say, “John Kerry served honourably in the United States Navy. He’s a war hero.” This may well be true but, don’t forget, Benedict Arnold was a war hero too.