A Protracted War

Just like the top leaders in the North, even the lowliest guerrilla fighters in the South were aware that “they were in it for the duration.” So deep was their conviction that many lived in their underground tunnels for months or years at a time. Primary accounts from the South during the war show that, for the Vietnamese, “this was a struggle that didn’t simply punctuate their lives, it embraced them.” The popular commitment in South Vietnam to fight for as long as necessary was a strength that America, on the other hand, did not possess. Analysts in the U.S. at the time recognised the importance of a protracted conflict. Pike wrote in 1970 that “time, especially in terms of decades, is on the side of the communists.” Historians agree today that time was the crucial factor; Robert Schulzinger, for example, has noted that “the longer the war, the better [the NLF's] chances.”

Even General Westmoreland recognised the NLF’s strategy as “a practical and clever one to continue a protracted war and inflict unacceptable casualties on our forces” but was nonetheless unable to counter it. When the Americans halted their increase in personnel at approximately 500,000, rather than the one million that was “a prerequisite for dominating the whole of the war theatre,” the U.S. command was simply unable to win a conventional war. The war of attrition that necessarily ensued went in the NLF’s favour, because, unlike the Vietnamese, the American public was unwilling to undertake a total war, and the American economy “was not a bottomless well.” George Gallup, Louis Harris, and Oliver Quayle, the major independent pollsters at the time, told President Johnson that “you will continue to go down until there is some movement – either toward a military victory or toward a negotiated settlement.” Prophetically, O’Neill wrote in 1969 that “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the outcome of the war will be decided by political factors in the United States.” More recently, Schulzinger bluntly explained that “the end had to be in sight, otherwise public opinion would not tolerate the continuation of the effort.” U.S. public opinion, affected directly by the nature of the NLF’s war in Vietnam, was thus a crucial factor in American withdrawal.

Karl von Clausewitz’s insistence on the relationship between war and policy more than one hundred years earlier became hard fact once again, in 1968, with the opening of the massive Tet Offensive in January and its resulting impact on American policy. This NLF-NVA joint campaign truly represented the final straw in the Vietnam War, ruining any expectations that the war would end any time soon and solidly convincing the bulk of the American public that they were mired in an intolerable conflict. Though the NLF failed to achieve its tactical objectives, it finally succeeded in its strategy of creating a psychological shock great enough to “affect U.S. public opinion against continuation of the war.” Though its ranks were decimated in the Offensive, the NLF’s long experience with guerrilla warfare ensured that its hit-and-run attacks continued unabated. The fact that the war continued even after the Tet Offensive fuelled President Richard Nixon’s “consuming passion in 1971 and 1972” to win re-election by ending the war. By January of 1973, the Paris Peace Accords ensured that American forces would suspend offensive action and unilaterally withdraw all of their troops.