Mark Moyar

But Kennedy listens to his civilian State Department, and they decide to negotiate neutralization, which means North Vietnamese are supposed to leave and the Americans.

But the North Vietnamese, being good communists, violate the agreement, and they keep going in.

And so you have an unending supply of equipment and manpower.

So the North Vietnamese will take very heavy losses, but they can keep sending stuff down

through the Ho Chi Minh Trail and keep things up indefinitely.

Well, and this is also a point of a lot of debate.

General Westmoreland, who's the commander at the time, argues that the American forces should concentrate on what he calls search and destroy.

So go look for big enemy units, no matter where they are, even if they're in the furthest reaches of the country, in the mountains and jungles.

And the South Vietnamese, our partners, they will focus on securing the villages and towns where most of the people live.

And this does have the advantage of keeping Americans, for the most part, away from the population because Americans don't speak Vietnamese.

They don't understand the customs.

One of the problems is the Vietnamese government this time is in disarray, so they're not very good at this kind of stuff.

But the Americans, the search and destroy is also a very interesting topic because most of these operations, they don't find the enemy.

So a lot of people say, well, this was...

of wasteful but we now know especially from looking at the north vietnamese side that uh for one thing they still inflict very heavy losses on the north vietnamese uh because sometimes they do catch them and that this really keeps the north vietnamese off balance and if you were just to let the north vietnamese run free

they would be able to mount massive attacks, you know, concentrate in overwhelming numbers at a city or a base.

And when they are able to do that, the only way you stop them is destroy the city, essentially, which occasionally happens, but for the most part doesn't.

That's correct.

Yes.

And in the early years, China is the main partner.