Allied Victory Loses Public Support
Militarily, Huế was an Allied victory, because the NVA and VC forces (ultimately numbering about 12,000, more than a full division) were driven from the city paying heavy price for their offensive, but from the opinion of the American public, Huế was the beginning of the end. Marine Captain Myron Harrington who commanded a one-hundred-man company during the battle: "Did we have to destroy the town in order to save it"? (in a 1981 interview, Harrington answered in the affirmative, saying "I think in the case of Huế that it was required, because the NVA wanted it") From this time forward, American support for the war in Vietnam declined, and during the next five years American involvement slowly but steadily decreased until 1975 when the last American troops left Vietnam.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of Hue
Famous quotes containing the words allied victory, allied, victory, loses, public and/or support:
“A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.... From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
“I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There’s a victory and defeat—the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats—which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world. But it is found that the machine unmans the user. What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“An ... important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“I support all people on earth
who have bodies like and unlike my body,
skins and moles and old scars,
secret and public hair,
crooked toes. I support
those who have done nothing large.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952)