Veteran Issues Digest Number 1711

[admin]

1. Hoax, A Word from General Vo Nguyen Giap, It's total b/S.

Posted by: "Colonel Dan" colonel-dan@sbcglobal.net coloneldan1

Sat Dec 22, 2007 12:21 pm (PST)


<http://urbanlegends .about.com/ library/bl_ general_giap. htm?nl=1>
http://urbanlegends .about.com/ library/bl_ general_giap. htm?nl=1

_____

From: Waspscpo@aol. com
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 4:42 PM
To: undisclosed- recipients:
Subject: A Word from General Vo Nguyen Giap

Some of you have been forwarding this hoax around. Here's some news for
you..... It's total b/S.

Circulating in various forms since the 1990s, this statement attributed to
General Vo Nguyen <http://militaryhist ory.about. com/od/army/ p/giap.htm>
Giap of North Vietnam is not authentic,
has never been authentic, and no amount of repetition will make it so.

General Giap on How U.S. Lost the Vietnam War

Netlore Archive: Bogus passage allegedly penned by former North Vietnam
General Vo Nguyen Giap attributes U.S. loss of the Vietnam War to homefront
disruption caused by biased media

Description: Emailed quotation
Circulating since: Late 1990s (various versions)
Status: Inauthentic

Email example contributed by AOL user, Dec. 13, 2007:

Subject: Fwd: From General Giaps Memoirs...

General Vo Nguyen Giap.

General Giap was a brilliant, highly respected leader of the North Vietnam
military. The following quote is from his memoirs currently found in the
Vietnam war memorial in Hanoi:

"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of
Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just
for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the
battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it.

But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were
causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We
were ready to surrender. You had won!"

General Giap has published his memoirs and confirmed what most Americans
knew. The Vietnam war was not lost in Vietnam -- it was lost at home. The
exact same slippery slope, sponsored by the US media, is currently well
underway. It exposes the enormous power of a Biased Media to cut out the
heart and will of the American public.

A truism worthy of note: ....
Do not fear the enemy, for they can take only your life. Fear the media far
more, for they will destroy your honour.

Comments: Circulating in various forms since the 1990s, this statement
attributed to General Vo Nguyen
<http://militaryhist ory.about. com/od/army/ p/giap.htm> Giap of North Vietnam
is not authentic, has never been authentic, and no amount of repetition will
make it so.

The quote surfaced most recently in an anonymous forwarded email (example
above) composed in December 2007, days after being mentioned
<http://urbanlegends .about.com/ gi/dynamic/ offsite.htm? site=http: //www.rushli
mbaugh.com/home/ daily/site% 5F120307/ content/01125104 .guest.html> on Rush
Limbaugh's website, which in turn cited an October 3, 2007 NewsMax.com
<http://urbanlegends .about.com/ gi/dynamic/ offsite.htm? site=http: //www.newsma
x.com/metcalf/ iraq%5Fwar/ 2007/10/03/ 37840.html> column by Geoff Metcalf as
the source. According to Metcalf, the passage came from "[Giap's] memoirs
currently found in the Vietnam War memorial in Hanoi."

Rewind to three years and one finds the same passage being used
<http://urbanlegends .about.com/ gi/dynamic/ offsite.htm? site=http: //groups. goo
gle.com/group/ soc.culture. vietnamese/ browse%5Fthread/ thread/bcb74ae85 652a653
/86dc93e72c023c32% 3Fhl=en%26lnk= st%26q=benge% 2Bgiap%2B% 2522you%2Bhad% 2Bwon%2
522%2386dc93e72c023 c32> as a weapon against John Kerry during the 2004
presidential campaign. It was repeatedly cited in texts inferring a
connection between the candidate's antiwar activities during the 1970s and
the Communist victory in Vietnam. This example, authored by ex-POW Michael
Benge, is typical:

General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese general, the architect of the
military campaign that finally drove the U.S. out of South Vietnam in 1975,
is cited as crediting Presidential aspirant John Kerry and his VVAW with
helping them achieve victory. In Giap's 1985 memoir about the war, he wrote
that if it weren't for organizations like Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against
the War, Hanoi would have surrendered to the U.S." Giap was quoted as
saying, "What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the
bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little
harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the
same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you
knew it. But, we were elated to notice the media were definitely helping us.
They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the
battlefields. Yes, we were ready to surrender. You had won!"

-- Michael Benge, "Open Letter," Web-posted October 29, 2004

The charge against Kerry was couched in slightly different terms by
conservative columnist Greg Lewis, who also made reference to alleged
remarks by General Giap:

In the early 1970s, Kerry's group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, was
highly visible in the antiwar movement in America. North Vietnamese General
Vo Nguyen Giap goes to far as to report that Hanoi was considering
surrendering to the United States during the early '70s, but that groups
such as Kerry's convinced them to stay the course because America was not
firm in its resolve. According to Fox News Analyst and decorated Vietnam
Veteran Colonel Oliver North, "The Vietnam Veterans Against the War
encouraged people to desert, encouraged people to mutiny." North puts it
bluntly: "John Kerry has the blood of North American soldiers on his hands."

-- Greg Lewis, "Fellow Travelers, Useful Idiots, and Other Innocents,"
February 19, 2004

I have not been able to find a trace of the alleged Giap quote in any source
published prior to 2004.

Vietnam War historian: Giap made no such statement

According to Clemson University history professor Edwin Moise, General Giap
never wrote or stated any such thing. From Moise's comprehensive Vietnam
<http://urbanlegends .about.com/ gi/dynamic/ offsite.htm? site=http: //www.clemso
n.edu/caah/history/ facultypages/ EdMoise/commlead .html> War Bibliography
(emphasis added):

Supposedly, General Giap had written in How We Won the War that in the
aftermath of the Tet Offensive of 1968, the Communist leaders in Vietnam had
been ready to abandon the war, but that a broadcast by Walter Cronkite,
declaring the Tet Offensive a Communist victory, persuaded them to change
their minds and fight on. This rumor was entirely false. Giap had not
mentioned Cronkite, and had not said the Communists had ever considered
giving up on the war.

Several variants of this rumor appeared in 2004. In these, Giap is supposed
to have credited either the American anti-war movement in general, or John
Kerry's organization (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) in particular, for
persuading the Communist leaders to change their minds and not give up on
the war. Giap is sometimes said to have made this statement in How We Won
the War, sometimes in an unnamed 1985 memoir. All versions of the rumor are
false. Neither in How We Won the War, nor in any other book (the 1985 memoir
is entirely imaginary), has Giap mentioned Kerry or Vietnam Veterans Against
the War, or said that the Communist leaders had ever considered giving up on
the war.

In his own words

The most relevant statement I could find that is actually attributable to
General Giap was uttered in a 1989 interview with Morley Safer, as excerpted
in The Vietnam War: An Encyclopedia of Quotations by Howard Langer
(Greenwood Press, 2005, p. 318):

We paid a high price [during the Ted offensive] but so did you
[Americans]. .. not only in lives and materiel.... Do not forget the war was
brought into the living rooms of the American people. ... The most important
result of the Ted offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it
brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory....

The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was
American public opinion.

"Keep on, Keepin' on"
Dan Cedusky, Champaign IL "Colonel Dan"
See my web site at:
http://www.angelfire.com/il2/VeteranIssues/

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