 Welcome to Asia in Review. I'm your host, Bill Sharp. Our show today, Vietnam War, Lessons Learned, Lessons Ignored. We think this is a really fitting show for today, since April 30th, exactly today. Marcel Fert, 43rd year since the government of the Republic of Vietnam, the South Vietnamese government, collapsed. And our guest today is a really well qualified person to speak on this subject, Ambassador Ray Burkhard. Ambassador Burkhard has often been on Asian review, and at those times, often to speak about Taiwan, where he also served and was the chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan. But today, we're going to draw on his expertise related to Vietnam, where he served, interestingly enough, his first tour in the Foreign Service and his last tour as ambassador. Welcome back to Asian Review. Thanks, Bill. Great to be here. Great to be here to have you. Well, wow, there's so many lessons from the Vietnam War. And as the title suggests, some were learned and some were ignored. But what do you think are some of the great lessons? What is, based on your experience, what are some of the great lessons of the Vietnam War? I think my personal experience, having spent more than five years in Vietnam and with a big gap in between, I actually went back in the middle at 1.2 as part of the, in a negotiating team to sort of begin the process of normalization. I think one lesson is if you're going to get involved in a civil war, be really sure that the side that you're helping has popular support. Be sure that it has a political base because the government in Saigon did not. It was really a house of cards and very weak support. They were, and was fighting against a well-trained, well-organized Vietnamese Communist Party. And so that made it very difficult. It really made it almost a hopeless cause in the beginning, in my view. That would be one lesson, that in one, and it was the way most of us who were young people there, young guys who spoke Vietnamese, were working in the embassy, were out on the field, or working on the provincial advisory teams as I did before I went into the embassy. We had this sense really very soon after we got there that, wow, these are great people and they deserve a lot better than this crappy government that they have. Wow. Let's pick up a couple of those points. You mentioned the lack of support, the lack of popular support for the government. In my view, too, maybe that means the same thing, but there's a lack of political stability. They were never quite sure who's going to be the government today or tomorrow. All the generals were fighting amongst themselves. How can you successfully wage a war in those circumstances? Actually, the period that I was there, which was very late in the war, it was there from 1970 to 1973. In that period, the sort of revolving door governments that they had with the generals, that had ended. And Wing Ventieu was the president the whole time I was there and until the bitter end in 1975. So it was stable in that sense. I should say another aspect of all this before we start blaming the South Vietnamese government for everything was that the communists very deliberately killed, off, assassinated political figures who did have popular support and who could have posed a challenge. Why wasn't it that the communists, the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong were so much better in motivating and mobilizing the people of Vietnam? Well, in the North, of course, they had been in power for a long time and had established a Leninist political system in which people were not aware of anything else except the Communist Party. And that worked well for the leadership in the North. In the South, I would say the North, the communists had the advantage of attack that a guerrilla group has of stealth, of secrecy. In fact, of course, the infrastructure of the Viet Cong in the South was very much weakened by the Tet Offensive. And in the end, the victory really was of the main force units coming down from the North. Right. I would agree with that. I personally got to Vietnam just after the Tet Offensive and at that time everybody thought, well, the war is won. It's all over. It's just a matter of mopping up a few odds and ends and we're done. Wow. What a surprise. Well, I mean, there was a period, I got there in October 1970. And there was a period during the late 1970 all through 71 when the situation actually looked pretty stable. I mean, I would drive all over the country. I mean, there were places you knew you couldn't drive. But you could certainly drive south into the Mekong Delta. And quite a bit of the area of three-core, out to Tay Ninh and so forth. You could go safely in those areas. I mean, much more so than people in similar kind of jobs today in Iraq or in Afghanistan. And then in 72, there was a new offensive. And things were less stable from then on. Wow. Do you think the Vietnam War was the biggest historic event of your lifetime? Well, as a personal experience, it was a big event. And going back as ambassador was quite fascinating. As we chatted before, I ran into people who I had met or known during the war and realized that they'd been on the other side all along. That was interesting. There's the mystery of the Vietnam War. Well, it was very enigmatic. But I mean, look, the biggest event for a foreign policy person, the biggest event really was the collapse of the Soviet Union in the end of the Cold War, which I think in some ways brings me to another sort of lesson from the Vietnam War, which is the very simple lesson that we can't perfectly predict the future. And the way things turned out in Vietnam was something really unimaginable in the sense that the Cold War ended in 1991. The Vietnamese being very pragmatic people, even under a Leninist communist government, they reoriented themselves. They established relations with all their neighbors. We established relations with them. They made clear that they were pretty fed up with the Chinese. And today Vietnam may be the most pro-U.S. country in Southeast Asia. So, I mean, there's an extraordinary outcome. The relationship is a very good one. And it improved a lot during the time I was there because the Vietnamese were ready to improve it. And that process has kept going under my successors. Part of one of the lessons is you can't perfectly predict what's going to happen and what the situation is going to look like 20 years from now or 30 years from now. I remember being in Vietnam. I went back in 2000. I haven't been back since, but talking to a lot of young Vietnamese, I had mentioned, well, I was here during the war, and they go, the what? I said, well, the war, you know, the Vietnam-American war. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there was a special subject. Tell me what MTV in America is really like. No, Vietnam is a very young country. And the majority of the people, I think the great majority by this point, were born after the war ended. They're not really interested in talking about the war. Neither are the most of their of their elders. I mean, in the two, in the three years I was there as an ambassador, there were only twice that there were incidents in which people were clearly bitter and express bitterness toward me. And they came from opposite directions. One was when I went with with then sync pack commander, Denny Blair, to a village to watch excavation to remove a plane where American pilot had crashed. And there as we approached the village, two old guys sort of glared at us. And one said, having you killed enough people here, you wanted to come back and kill some more. And I understood the Vietnamese. I unfortunately had to translate that for Admiral Blair. But then the other one came in the other direction. It was in Saigon during a function of some kind. The guy came up to me and said, you deserted us. You left us to this terrible situation we have to live with every day. I remember President Winh Van Thu always saying that the same thing, America deserted us. They should have dropped the nuclear wet bomb. And I was really holding out for that. I don't think we ever promised that. We did fail to deliver on what the Vietnamese had rightly understood we were going to do after the Paris peace agreement was signed in 1973. They had a right to expect that if there was an invasion, like the one that happened, that we would give them support, maybe air support and provide material and so forth. And we didn't do that. Henry Kissinger sometimes is implicated as being the one behind that abandonment of American responsibility. I'd have to go back and look at all that history. Actually, my recollection is it was the Democrats in Congress more than the administration. It was the Ford administration at that point. I believe that's the case. I think where people put responsibility on Kissinger is for the Paris peace agreement, which was controversial at the time. A lot of people saw it as a sellout. It was opposed by the two government. And it was opposed. I was there when all this was being negotiated. Oh, you were in Paris at that time. No, in Vietnam. It was opposed by President Thu because the main weakness from the point of view of the South Vietnamese government was that it left North Vietnamese units and communist units in place. They weren't with John. That was seen as pretty shocking, understandably, by the South Vietnamese government. The US government had lots of policies that it trotted out and tried to stabilize the situation in Vietnam. One, they put a lot of strength on, not that this song was the strategic Hamlet program. Did you have anything to do with it? That was early on. That was very early on. That was not part of the part of the jargon when I was there. That was even during the ZM period in the early 60s and mid 60s. That motivated a lot of ill feeling towards ZIM. Yeah, it was apparently, it was not a success. Right. And as I recall, that idea was also tried by the French and it was also copied from the British practice in Malaysia. I'm not sure about the British practice. The British practice in Malaysia, where there was this General Thompson, who was considered to have been the most successful person at carrying out guerrilla warfare during that era, that was more what we copied later on in development work that was done in some of these provinces and organizing the regular forces and the popular forces, which were militia forces. And some of that had success for a while. One of the great problems in the war was the terrible corruption of a lot of the General's sense so far. Not all. Not all. There were some great South Vietnamese generals and very honorable ones, but not enough. That's not right there because that's an interesting topic, but we want to pick that up when we come back. You're watching Asian Review. I'm your host Bill Sharp. My guest today is Ambassador Raymond Burkhart. This is the 43rd, should we call it, anniversary of the capitulation of the South Vietnamese government. So we're reflecting on that experience and lessons learned and possibly lessons ignored. And we'll be right back. My name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at three o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists both from here and the mainland on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. I'm Jay Fidel, Think Tech. Think Tech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and Me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangelsdorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on Think Tech. Aloha. Welcome back to Asian Review. I'm your host Bill Sharp. Our show today, Vietnam War, Lessons Learned, Lessons Ignored. And our guest is Ambassador Ray Burkhart, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam. Just before the break, we were talking a bit about the level of corruption in South Vietnam, so we want to finish that off and then move on to other topics. So we'll let you pick it up from where we left off. You were also talking about the fact that a lot of the Vietnamese high command was somewhat maligned. Some of them were really extremely competent. Some were great. Some were not competent at all. I mean, there was a minority that were competent, but they were, those guys really stood out. They really were, I mean, some of the core commanders in South Worth were fine people. But corruption was also very widespread. I mean, I ran into it personally. For example, a lot of one of my, the religious groups in Vietnam, Catholics, Buddhists, and these indigenous religions called the Cao Dai and the Huan Hau. In many ways, they functioned like political parties. The political parties were a joke. They had no significance. But the religious groups were important parts of the civil society, important interest groups, and they had important political weight in the South. And so we sort of cultivated good relations with them in order to understand how they felt, to try to influence them at times when we wanted to. But I followed the Catholics closely and also followed the Cao Dai. And the Cao Dai was this unusual religion that only exists in Vietnam. And it was headquartered, centered up in Tainin province that boarded Cambodia. It was about an hour and a half drive northwest of Saigon. So I spent a lot of time out there. And we came to understand from intelligence that the province chief, who was the two governments representative there, I mean, the other sort of guy, the governor, effectively, was selling ammunition to the VC. And the VC was very close. There still is this mountain right there called Nui Ba Deng, Black Lady Mountain. And it stands out because there isn't much that stands. There aren't a lot of mountains in that part of Vietnam. And the Viet Cong always controlled the mountain, and at least the top of the mountain, or maybe the middle rung or something. Sometimes, you know, sometimes like a donut. But so they were close by. And the province chief was selling them stuff, you know, lining his own pocket. So which, you know, the fact that we knew that and we worried that he might know that we knew that sometimes made me a little nervous when I stayed in his quarters at night when I visited there. I was always skeptical about some of those province chiefs too. They were usually like a colonel or above. And I remember in the Philippines, when Marcos was president, and he had province chiefs too, and they were in charge of shaking down the province and sending money to Manila, to Marcos, and also pocketing a reasonable percentage. Is it your understanding that province chiefs in Vietnam work like that? Yeah, a lot of it worked that way. Yeah, that's my take as well. Well, you also mentioned bombing and also the mining of... Yeah, we talked about that during the break there. I had a very odd assignment at the very end of my tour, first tour in Vietnam. After the Paris peace agreement, one of the annexes of the agreement was that we would clear the mines, the U.S. Navy would clear the mines in Haiphong Harbor and in the inland waterways. And when the Navy saw this, somebody didn't really show it to the Navy when they negotiated this because the Navy said, we don't remove mines. We'll sweep and declare them debt. That's all we can do. So we had to renegotiate the whole thing. And I was along with another guy because we spoke good Vietnamese. There were six of us actually in three teams. I was with this another guy up there for three weeks in Haiphong as the interpreter. And then we stayed in the hotel in Haiphong while the Navy was on ship and they would come in every day. And so we were sort of the liaison people on the ground also, working things out with the Vietnamese Navy. And it was very clear that it was the mining of Haiphong Harbor that really paralyzed them, really, really hurt them, and got the North Vietnamese to finally agree to the Paris peace agreement. And I think the history, historical research will bear that out. And it seemed to have more effect and get their attention more than all the bombing that we did. You know, generally speaking, we should have done the mining earlier. It's hard to understand. This comes out a bit in the Burns series about Vietnam, how Nixon was reluctant to do the mining because of how the Soviets would react and so forth. All that in retrospect was foolish to worry about. We should have done it much earlier. The bombing was generally ineffective, wasn't it? It didn't seem to be as effective as the mining had been. Right. I remember revisiting Vietnam in 2000, going through the Coochee Underground town, should we call it. And Vietnamese would just go down there, down all the way and the bombing was over and it was over, just come out and like nothing had happened. Well, a lot of students of warfare feel that bombing just makes people angry and more determined. I could see a lot when I went to Hai Phong in 1973, it was of course right after the Nixon's Christmas bombing at the end of 72, I could see the damage. I would say that most of it looked pretty well targeted toward report facilities and factories. There was one square block that looked like it had been a residential place that had been hit by mistake. Collateral damage. And of course that angers people. I can remember seeing B-52s flying and then they would drop their bombs and they would kind of like jump up as they dropped the bombs. They had less weight so they would kind of go up and they were just like a bouncing ball. Big bombs. Oh, wow. Well, you know, there was lots of programs that helped stabilize the situation. We talked a little bit about the strategic hamlet program which came real early in the during the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. But also Richard Nixon was really a big promoter of Vietnamization. Right. And what's your take on that? Well, Vietnamization was partly a genuine strategy that made sense to prepare the Vietnamese to defend themselves better. Right. It was also an exit ramp for us, obviously. It doesn't seem to work very well. It didn't work very well. And there were some big tests of Vietnamization that took place while I was there because those were the years leading right up to our withdrawal. And the Vietnamese attempted some, the Vietnamese military attempted some major operations going into Laos. There's something that was called Lamsun 19, I think, the name of the operation that went into Laos. And they got hit pretty hard. They didn't succeed. Those were bad signs. Right. I remember when there was the invasion of Cambodia by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, that didn't go well at all. It set off big demonstrations in the U.S. Kent State and that sort of thing. Yeah. I'm not sure. As to whether it was useful or effective militarily, maybe it was, I'm not sure. I can sort of see the logic of why we did that in some ways. I can understand that. From a purely military point of view. But yes, it set off all kinds of big demonstrations because it looked like we were just widening the war. Right. And then we also had the collapse of the Siena government to a place just after that. Right. And Long Nol came to power and he was more ineffective than even the Vietnamese leaders. That's really saying something. Right. I remember interviewing him here in Hawaii when I was a graduate student at UH. And I interviewed him the day that the Vietnamese came crashing into Cambodia. So my timing was real good. Oh, you mean that Hun Sen in the end. Right. And it's interesting enough, here he was, a person that's probably not very well-liked by a lot of people in Cambodia. He's living in this little farmhouse out in Waini. Really? And there's no security around. I just had a son and a wife there. And I was really shocked. I said, well, aren't you fearful of your security? No, no problem. And I was just totally in shock. That's interesting. Yeah, totally in shock. Well, how about some of the leadership of Vietnam? Now, I think, as we were talking about before the show, Nguyen Cao Ky, Nguyen Van Thu, Nguyen Cao Ky was pretty much out of the picture during your time there. Right. He was. He was still around. He was still looking flamboyant, and his wife was looking flamboyant. But she was always kind of hot. Yeah, she was. But they were not, but he was not a political figure of great importance up there in that period. I mean, I guess he was vice president at the beginning, but he really didn't have any power. Well, let me, I've just been informed that we're just down to the last minute and a half here. But let me squeeze in this question. What about the North Vietnamese leadership, the balance between Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan? And Le Duan, yeah. Le Duan. Well, Le Duan really, by the time I was at Le Duan, well, Ho Chi Minh had died, of course, but I think he died in 1969, I think. Right. But Le Duan had taken over, and he was a real hardliner. He was a Leninist-Leninist, and he was, you know, he led them to victory, really, along with, of course, generals, yeah, who I met several times, actually, while I was there. Interesting. Some people have said if Ho Chi Minh had lived longer and perhaps Le Duan had died, it would have been a more amiable conclusion to the war. That Ho Chi Minh was more flexible. You doubt that? I doubt that. I really doubt that. Okay. Faint hopes there. Okay. Well, looking back on, this is maybe a little unfair question to ask you, with like one minute or 45 seconds left, but looking back on Vietnam, did we sort of disregard anything that we learned in Vietnam at the time we got involved in Iraq? I think the first lesson I mentioned, looking carefully at who were your local allies? How much support do they have? You know, the move we made in which we destroyed the sort of Sunni structure there, including the military, in retrospect, even at the time, was really a mistake. I think we're going to have to stop here. Okay. Well, thank you very much for watching Asian Review. We've had a really great discussion with Ambassador Burkhardt today. As we mentioned, this is the 43rd year since the government of the Republic of Vietnam collapsed. And so we wanted to take note of that on our show today. Our show was Vietnam War, Lessons Learned, Lessons Ignored. We'll see you next week.