It was a battle of ‘David vs Goliath’. On one side was the world’s most powerful country, boasting the most advanced military and unmatched economic power. On the other side was an army of irregulars, mostly Vietnamese farmers.
And yet, in one of the biggest upsets in the history of warfare, the ragtag army of North Vietnamese farmers surprised the US army, registering a glorious victory.
Half a century later, people still debate what went wrong for the US. Books have been written, movies have been made, and yet, there is no consensus on what lessons the US should draw from the war.
Not only did the US Army take heavy casualties, over 58,000 soldiers dead, but the war also eroded the myth of American invincibility.
In many ways, the Vietnam War set the stage for the Iraq War and the two-decade-long Afghanistan War, where the US was unable to translate its military superiority into battlefield victory.
After Vietnam, people understood that a highly motivated guerrilla force, fighting on home turf and using geography and landscape to its advantage, could beat the US. They understood they just had to bide their time, and that at some stage, the US commitment to a war fought thousands of miles from their home country would start to wear thin.
However, was the US commitment to carry on fighting the only cause of the defeat? Did the US withdraw from Vietnam because it lacked the will to fight, or did it understand that it was fighting a losing battle from the start?
Were strategic and tactical mistakes made at higher levels?
Who was to blame for the US’s only military defeat in the 20th century? Was it the hippies, the peaceniks, or the war hawks, the cultural/student revolutions of 1969, or Richard Nixon, or was it purely a military failure?
And most importantly, was the US defeat in Vietnam inevitable, or could the US have won the war had it not made some tactical mistakes?
And could a complex military and political board wargame that simulates the last decade of the Vietnam War provide conclusive answers to these questions that have troubled military planners, war historians, and politicians for the last 50 years?
Can a game offer better insights than the dozens of books written on the topic?
Vietnam: 1965–1975
War games have always been popular. So many games have been designed on the two World Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, and even the wars fought between the Greeks and the Persians before the correct era.
However, ‘Vietnam: 1965–1975’ is different in its sheer scale. The 2022 GMT edition includes a 44-page manual, a 5-foot-by-3-foot map, and 1,328 small cardboard pieces that depict combat battalions and regiments.
The rules include detailed treatment of movement, terrain, search-and-destroy operations, special operations, firepower, airmobility, riverine operations, brigade-level formations, limited intelligence, and auxiliary units in each scenario.
It is a two-player board wargame in which one player controls American and South Vietnamese forces comprising more than a dozen U.S. Army and Marine divisions and brigades, artillery and mechanized battalions, and aircraft, while the other controls North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, mainly infantry, with some support from artillery and mechanized units.
The original game was published in 1984, when Nick Karp, a Princeton University student working on his thesis on the Vietnam War, designed it.
GMT Games relaunched it in 2022.
There are several small scenarios and a couple of campaign games. Each year is divided into four seasons (Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter), and each season has two turns (so, roughly 6 weeks per turn).
Unlike traditional wargames that use a simple alternating system of movement and attack, Vietnam uses a more complex game system in which the player must declare an operation type: Search & Destroy, Holding, Patrol, Clear and Secure, or Strategic movement. Then the players go through a series of phases, including targeting, movement, alert, combat, retreat, and pursuit, which are repeated until the operation ends.
To win the game (or the war), the North Vietnamese Communist forces have to capture Saigon, or control the bulk of the South Vietnamese population. On the other hand, the US and allied forces have to suppress the North Vietnamese forces; if they can hold their ground till 1975, and if the South Vietnamese government survives till 1975, they win the war.
At first glance, it appears to be an easy victory for the US and allied forces. They have overwhelming air power; they can bomb the Communist holdouts in the North, and their helicopters can ferry the troops anywhere.
The US-allied forces also have overwhelming artillery power, and the mechanized divisions and tanks roam the streets and jungles of Vietnam, suppressing any resistance.
The combat result is decided by rolling the dice. Firepower is critical. Whichever side can field more firepower wins the combat, and it is rarely the Communist forces that can deploy more firepower.
It seems like the dice are loaded in favor of the US-allied forces since the beginning.
However, the game also differs in the fact that the US side has to contend with the effects that military actions, victories, and defeats, or heavy casualties, have on morale in both the United States and South Vietnam.
As the game designer Nick Karp told the New York Times, “Every action in the game has a corresponding morale effect in the U.S. and in South Vietnam: bombing the North, sending new troops, high casualty levels. The U.S. has to balance military needs with the ability of the U.S. to cater to them.”
And this is the joker in the cards. The US forces have unlimited resources at their disposal; they can summon more aircraft, more helicopters and tanks, more troops, they can carpet bomb the adversary forces; however, their every action will have a corresponding impact on the morale back home in the US and will impact the US’s willpower to carry on the fighting.
A crucial handicap that the US forces were to encounter in Iraq and Afghanistan as well: for how long and at what cost.
The game proceeds by maintaining a delicate balance between strategic military decisions at the battleground in Vietnam and the political mood back home to continue fighting.
The US involvement in Vietnam fueled the student revolutions and the anti-war movements in the US and Europe.
Another problem for the US Army is the hostile population, local support for Communists, and a lack of familiarity with the landscape. The forests and mountains of Vietnam favour the guerrilla forces of the North.
The US also could not deploy its full firepower.
Neil Sheehan writes in ‘A Bright Shining Lie’ that massive bombing and search-and-destroy operations alienated the South Vietnamese population and strengthened the Communists rather than weakening them.
Carpet bombing of Communist forces will also fuel the anti-war movement in the US.
The game’s strength lay in its “morale” and “commitment” systems.
The US started the war in 1965 with a “morale level” of 520 and a “commitment level” of 25. The US has unlimited military resources. The player controlling US forces could summon more troops, more mechanised divisions, more aircraft, but it would cost them commitment points.
The thumb rule is simple.
America’s military commitment in Vietnam cannot outrun the morale and political will sustaining it. If it does, the United States must scale back its forces to restore balance between the two.
As the US commitment to continue fighting declines, the player must pull back troops to maintain the delicate balance between ‘morale’ and ‘commitment level’. And so the slow US withdrawal from Vietnam begins.
It’s not a revelation that one of the leading causes of the US defeat in Vietnam was waning support for the war back home. The game’s strength lies in allowing the player to experiment with the US strategy.
Throw in more troops at the start to build battlefield momentum, or make a cold start, preserving high commitment levels at home for later stages of the war.
However, the whole game is designed so that a US victory seems highly unlikely.
“I wasn’t trying to make a deep statement about favorites to win, nor the futility of the war, either. The victory conditions are far off, the road to achieve them vague and wandering,” Karp said about his game design.
While playing the game, the players understand why the US failed to win in Vietnam, despite overwhelming military superiority.
- Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee News, Economic Times, and Microsoft News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK.
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- He can be reached at ahlawat.sumit85 (at) gmail.com
