Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War. John A. Wood

training, advisement, and funding, the ARVN counted 219,000 soldiers in its ranks and seemed to be making some headway against the Vietcong insurgency.¹³⁰ It was a shock to many Americans, then, when 1963 began with an embarrassing ARVN defeat. On 2 January, an ARVN “battalion of regulars . . . and a company of M113 armored personnel carriers complete with air and artillery support” attacked a contingent of Vietcong near the village of Ap Bac.¹³¹ The outnumbered guerrillas held off the assault “until nightfall, when they slipped away undetected.” The Vietcong, who possessed no armored vehicles or aircraft, shot down five helicopters and killed or wounded almost 200 ARVN soldiers before they retreated.¹³²

      Andrew Wiest maintains that the ARVN, despite the debacle at Ap Bac, made significant gains against the Vietcong during most of 1963.¹³³ This progress, however, was wiped out virtually overnight when a November “military coup led to the downfall and assassination” of President Diem.¹³⁴ The chaos resulting from the political turmoil in Saigon allowed the Vietcong to build strength and go on the offensive throughout South Vietnam. US President Lyndon B. Johnson finally decided in 1965 that this dire state of affairs could only be rectified with the deployment of American combat troops.¹³⁵ The US military subsequently sidelined the ARVN and, in Wiest’s words, “simply decided to win the war for them.”¹³⁶

      America’s next president, Richard Nixon, promised the American people that he would bring their boys home from Southeast Asia while fulfilling the nation’s promise to protect its Vietnamese allies from Communist aggression. He would achieve this feat through “Vietnamization,” a gradual withdrawal of US troops accompanied by the strengthening of South Vietnam’s military. Suddenly, fostering ARVN victories became a US priority again. Between 1968 and 1975, the US provided South Vietnam with billions of dollars in military equipment, including top-of-the-line infantry weapons, tanks, and helicopters.¹³⁷ By the end of 1972, South Vietnam’s armed forces (the ARVN plus other branches) “had grown to over one million men and women,”¹³⁸ and its air force was the fourth largest in the world.¹³⁹

      Despite America’s attempt to prepare South Vietnam to fight on alone, the post-1968 ARVN was, for the most part, just as disappointing as its earlier incarnations. The Saigon government withstood the Tet Offensive in 1968, and the US was encouraged by the ARVN’s performance in the 1970 US-led invasion of Cambodia. But Operation Lam Son 719, the 1971 ARVN invasion of Laos, which quickly ended in a frantic, ignominious retreat back to South Vietnam, proved that such optimism was unfounded. News media images of terrified ARVN soldiers hanging off the skids of evacuation helicopters were broadcasted around the world. Nixon asserted that Lam Son 719 was a success,¹⁴⁰ but the demoralized “South Vietnamese forces who retreated from Laos knew they had been defeated.”¹⁴¹