Article: How North Vietnam Won The War

[Rocky Raab]

While a lot of that is flavored with self-congratulatory hindsight and just plain exaggeration, the overall sense of it is correct: we abandoned that war when it was winnable because of politics and traitorous activity.

All of us who flew against it knew that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the key to it all. The part of it in my area of operations included the whole northeastern quadrant of Cambodia. That comprised the lower half of the HCMT. Much of the ground was invisible from the air, covered with triple-layer jungle canopy as much as 300' tall. We knew that millions of tons of military supplies were traveling under there, but could never say exactly where. We could control the obvious chokepoints like river crossings and non-jungled areas, but only in daylight. The HCMT ran mostly at night for that reason. If you can only control 10% of the problem 50% of the time, you can't overcome. Especially if you are prohibited from truly controlling it in the first place...