Easter Offensive

So it was an incredibly dangerous place to be.

In 1972, with American troops finally withdrawing from South Vietnam, John found himself in the middle of a highly volatile event, an advance of North Vietnamese troops known as the Easter Offensive.

The North Vietnamese crossed the border, surrounding the city of Hue.

John and a handful of civilian members of the US Foreign Service were stranded without hope of extraction.

Unless we do something, and I'm going to talk more about this in another segment of this, but unless we do something significant to make sure that the people, if they rise up, will have the arms and the support and the model to be used is what we did in 1972 when we supported the South Vietnamese going after the North Vietnamese who had attacked them.

And we were able, in the Easter Offensive, we supported them, not with people, not with our troops on the 101st Airborne or the 82nd or anything like that.

No Marines were there.

What we did was we had advisors and we had air power and naval gunfire support, all of which can be done to have a regime change in Iran because that's the only thing that's going to get the IRGC.

However, Nixon basically put Saigon in as good a state as it could have been in terms of political legitimacy and in terms of bolstering their case in the court of world opinion, which actually mattered then in a way it didn't, it doesn't now.

And the 1972 offensive, colloquially called the Easter Offensive by like, you know, military geeks and like historians all in sundry, that was stopped in its tracks.

I mean, American air power devastated North Vietnamese armored columns, but the Army of the Republic of Vietnam actually stood and fought.

And like, I think I made the point some weeks back that they get a bad rap, you know, because they're always kind of panned as like this cowardly force of like crooks.