Making the Rounds

An Occasional Correspondent sends this along...

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

battle of TET. You defeated us!

We knew it, and we thought

you knew it.

But we were elated to notice your media was

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

same slippery slope, sponsored by the US media,

is currently 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, for

they will destroy your honor.

I did some slight reformatting to the above... like changing the font colors and sizes from about six of each to your run o' the mill standard stuff... but the verbiage has been left intact.

General Giap may or may not have actually said these things about the Vietnam war and our Wonderful Media's role in losing it.  Snopes doesn't like this e-mail or its variants that have been circulating since before 2004.  Neither does the web site Urban Legends, which quotes Clemson history professor Edwin Moise on the subject.  The relevant bits:

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 Tet 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 Tet 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.

So there's that. There's no doubt the daily horror show of pitched battles, bloody American casualties, and cynical commentary from both the war zone and inside the Beltway had a major impact on the outcome of the war.  The MAIN reason we lost the Vietnam war was we didn't have the national will to continue the fight.  That was the tragic part. 

I'm told Stephen Colbert has an expression he either uses or used to use: "truthy."  General Giap's invented comments have the ring of truthiness and serve as a reminder for the fight we're engaged in today.  The American people need to remember why we're engaged in this fight, what's at stake, and above all: sustain the will to WIN.