"People's War" & Bill Langston
Bill Langston
many in intelligence misinterpreted the facts on the ground. I have never
had a quarrel with that, it's just that I believe that it was still worth it
to have fought Communism no matter who they might have had running the show.
I get the impression from all the crap that I read about how the war was
just a 'civil war' and about how Ho was just a Nationalist, etc., that we
should have never gotten involved.
I believe that every struggle against Communism was worth it. I use the
collapse of Communism all over the world as my vindication, sort of, an ends
justifies the means type of thing.
It seems that most people, including the men who fought it, believe the war
was wrong. I don't believe it was wrong, I believe it was handled wrong.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that I think we HAD to fight in
Vietnam, just that once we committed to do it, we should have done it
differently. 20/20 hindsight and all that.
Yours truly, Bill Langston.
Ralph McGehee <rmcg...@igc.org> wrote in message
news:37400713...@igc.org...
>
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> In response to Bill Langston's comments below recorded in
> dejanews, I reply:
>
> Re "People's War," I could just as readily cite Vo Nguyen
> Giap, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung or Michael Charles Conley's
> study performed for ODCSOPS, Department of Army -- "The
> Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam: A Study
> of Organization and Strategy." But for many these references
> challenge their own comfortable view of the war and will only
> engender anger. It appears to me that if the objective facts
> re the war cannot convince true-believers, then there is
> little that will.
>
> In my time in the CIA, I do not recall in its intelligence
> any references to the various "Liberation Associations" or to
> People's War -- while Communist pronouncements and documents
> covered this topic over and over -- how did we "miss" this reality.
>
> The answer may be in William Colby's book "Honorable Men"
> where he talks of the Liberation Associations as skeletal
> organizations that had late appearances and no real existence
> when in fact they were the determinant factor in the war.
>
> I, like most all Americans, hope to see an intelligent
> Central Intelligence Agency -- but with that closed society,
> and its incompetent, entrenched bureaucracy, no reform is possible.
> Its record of intelligence failures over the past fifty-plus
> years is massive -- with the mis-location of the Chinese embassy
> in Belgrade being just the latest manifestation.
>
> Ralph McGehee
> http://come.to/CIABASE
WarLib'yUK
wrongly) have a bone to pick with that agency. Your characterization of
the agency as being incompetent, and having a entrenched bureaucracy makes
your lack of objectiveness comes out loud and clear. Every agency of the
federal government has an entrenched bureaucracy, it is after all the civil
service manned (or womanned) by people who spend the majority of their
lives until retirement in it. Every agency has a degree of incompetence -
after all in the civil service, incompetence seems to replicate itself with
incompetent managers promoting the persons least likely to challenge them.
But all in all the agency is no more or less competent than any other
agency - you are just pissed off at it, and that shows in your writings.
Nigel Brooks
ted gittinger
Ralph McGehee <rmcg...@igc.org> wrote in article
>
> In my time in the CIA, I do not recall in its intelligence
> any references to the various "Liberation Associations" or to
> People's War -- while Communist pronouncements and documents
> covered this topic over and over -- how did we "miss" this reality.
Pike, Douglas: "Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National
Liberation Front of South Vietnam. Cambridge, Mass., 1966.
Not everybody did.
Warm regards,
ted gittinger