Latest read: None So Blind

Regarded as one of the CIA’s premiere Vietnam intelligence experts George W. Allen wrote a 2001 memoir None So Blind: A personal account of the intelligence failure in Vietnam that remains an alarming insight of intelligence failures that forecasted both France and America’s defeat in Vietnam. Allen’s contributions set the stage regrettably for the Pentagon and White House to also follow France’s misplaced goals for the next twenty-five years.
My interest in Allen’s memoir developed from reading a series of confidential reports by the US military and CIA from the 1950s.

Declassified in the late 1990s the documents address the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

Many of those documents point to Allen’s intelligence reports and analysis. Naturally this peaked my wish to better understand the American intelligence analysis of the French defeat.

Allen holds a unique, deep understanding of the Indochina Wars (France 1945-1950) and the coming failure of America’s intervention on behalf of South Vietnam 1960-1974. The lessons in his book leave deep, haunting impressions today on the White House and Pentagon leaders who ignored our intelligence community.

Allen’s first work on Viet Minh troop strength began in 1949 when the American military established a new Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) advisory role to France. Allen notably wrote how the French military subverted information from MACV. But the Americans had their own intelligence sources to confirm the French were tweaking their reports to American advisors in 1950, three years before Dien Bien Phu.

Those declassified documents point to a very long and difficult relationship between France and the US for control of Indochina following World War II. France wanted to regain colonial control over Indochina lost to the Japanese, while the US chose Vietnam as their domino to face communist expansions in the cold war. I did not realize Allen’s analysis in the late 1940s would predict multiple intelligence failures for America fifteen years later. Clearly the US intelligence community recognized challenges that ignored at the highest levels of the Pentagon and White House.

Allen was a WWII navy veteran fighting at Tarawa. In a civilian role he reported to the Pentagon’s Department Intelligence Agency on Indochina. His intelligence career on Indochina spanned 1950 to 1968. In 1963 he moved to the CIA as a senior analyst in the Office of Current Intelligence where he served as Deputy Special Assistant for Vietnamese Affairs. The next year he went to Vietnam and then stayed on as a senior intelligence adviser an assignment that lasted three more years. Allen was even injured when a bomb exploded at the American Embassy in Saigon in 1965. He remained until 1966 returning to Washington as CIA Deputy Special Assistant to Director Richard Helms.

His intelligence reports clashed with Pentagon leaders who dismissed him simply due to his civilian status. Yet Allen accumulated more research experience on Indochina that most Generals, policy advisors and White House staff. He briefed Robert McNamara early in his appointment as Defense Secretary under Kennedy. Allen advocated for withdrawal from Vietnam based upon over a pattern of intelligence failures that led France to defeat in Vietnam in the previous decade. He saw history repeating itself as McNamara viewed a ‘GM assembly line’ approach to fighting the Viet Cong.

The Pacification program was the best example where Allen’s CIA was able to clearly delineate obstacles of the program against the perceived value reporting system established by the Pentagon. Allen ran into walls when the White House demanded reports only portraying positive outcomes.

His teams discovered repeated intelligence failures, yet those outcomes were overridden by military and White House policy advisors. The negligence in bypassing our intelligence community’s reporting throughout the war led to so many tragic errors that it becomes today, almost 75 years later, despicable to look back and understand how extremely valuable data was simply ignored.

There were multiple early warning signs in his intelligence work that indicated our defeat in Vietnam was due not to battlefield losses. He revealed the ignorance of MACV, the Pentagon and White House about the impact of Vietnamese culture upon their own military and a quickly evaporating French colonial rule.

Clearly Allen experienced multiple failures of the early Diem regime. Yet to a large extent the French vacuum could not be overcome by America as the new South Vietnam filled the void with their own political and military aims. Our defeat according to Allen was for the somewhat cemented before Eisenhower deployed the first American troops. The American intelligence foundation in 1954 revealed the Pentagon’s reports indicated even with 500,000 American soldiers in Vietnam the US could not sustain the floundering South Vietnamese government against the Viet Cong and NVA.

He briefed Pentagon and many South Vietnamese leaders with the intelligence reports that American efforts were not turning the war. Allen does not retreat in his disdain for Pentagon or White House members who denied the outcomes from their research and analysis. The phrase ‘get onboard with the team’ was repeated by those who saw him contradicting long-held views by previous administrations. The early, critical mistakes by the US military leaders fall between the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations.

Allen provides deep context to the American role in Vietnam starting in 1948. Most consider the Kennedy Administration the point in which America entered Vietnam. Clearly the CIA and DIA roles stretched back to the French control of Tonkin, Annan and Cocinchina. It is very frustrating to understand American intelligence laid the foundation for Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon yet were all led astray.

Truman’s launch of Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) included no training role. The French felt they needed no “advice” from the United States on how to conduct of a “colonial” war:

At the same time they naturally down played, discounted, or ignored these aspect that did not….there were indeed instances in which U.S. officials were deliberately misled or deceived by their French counterparts.
-Page 12

Again the American government was paying for almost 80% of the war effort to France. MAAG began with a 10 million payments in military munitions to France in 1950. By 1953 the MAAG commitment extended to $350 million. And yet the French had the nerve to slap us in the face when it came to military advice and planning? In a refreshing way it was somewhat satisfying to see France humiliated by the Viet Minh and forced off the global stage as a failed world power. Sadly Allen reveals the US ‘schadenfreude‘, having no understanding of the Indochina war:

Our comprehensive understanding of the nature of the Indochina war, did not exist in 1950 when the United States began its program of military assistance to Indochina. American decisions to support the French military effort were made in relative haste and ignorance.
-Page 18

France’s position in late 1945 revealed a nation bled white by two world wars felt compelled to return to colonial control of their former territories. Charles de Gaulle pushed for world power status while government leaders looked elsewhere:

The Paris government’s failure to work out a mutually acceptable formula with Ho Chi Minh led to hostilities in December 1946. In 1947 French military forces managed to seize most of the major cities and towns in the Red River and Mekong deltas and along the coast, leaving the Viet Minh in control of rural bases and the areas between coastal enclaves. Modestly reinforced, the French military launched a series of forays into Communist-held strongholds in 1947-1948 but failed to bring the Viet Minh to heel while suffering sever losses themselves. Realizing the military victory would require further reinforcements on a scale that was politically unacceptable, a succession of French governments there after became reconciled to a military stalemate. Most French leaders looked towards some sort of political solution centering on the creation of a French-influenced, non-Communist government with might be acceptable to the Vietnamese as an alternative to Ho Chi Minh’s Communist dominated Democratic Republic of Vietnam. But the French never moved seriously to let their Vietnamese allies learn how to govern themselves.
-Page 21

Clearly France understood after 1947 they could never win the war. They took a noble stand due to American assistance but after China recognized Ho’s government and began supplying arms and training the French government became embroiled in bitter internal politics while permitting a mediocre commitment to Indochina move forward. Until their surrender France took a view of seeking an ‘honorable’ settlement in Indochina. American policy makers continued to push Paris for military victory and prolonged their agonizing defeat for another seven years.

After the Korean armistice China provided hundreds of tonnes of armaments and supplies to the Viet Minh. Most importantly Viet Minh forces began traveling to Laos and China to receive months of advanced military training. They would return to face their French enemy with new strength and determination on the battlefields. This caught the French by surprise as they continued their stalemate approach. They were soon to meet a very formidable enemy at Dien Bien Phu.

Allen indicated this intelligence of the new order of battle was documented and reflected in DIA intelligence sent to Washington DC in 1950 and 1951. Dien Bien Phu was still two years away. China’s influence and materials fundamentally changed the nature of the war.

Throughout the book the compartmentalization of information in the Pentagon restricted key data from flowing upstream into the White House. At multiple points he compares this failure to Pearl Harbor.

Allen is also able to clearly define the grand misconception between American and French goals in Indochina before Dien Bien Phu:

The divergence of US and French objectives in Vietnam clearly surfaced in April 1953 during my visit to Washington of a French delegation headed by the Minister of Associated States, Jacques Le Tourneau. A bilateral conference in the Pentagon discussed US assistance to Indochina with senior State, Defense, Joint Chiefs and armed service representatives on one side of the table, and the French delegation on the other. As a backbencher I sat against the wall.

The Americans anxious to prod the French for a more vigorous French effort to “win the war” offered to provide the additional resources to accelerate growth of the Vietnamese army during the coming fiscal year (1954) if the French give us a plan win the war. The French replied that for them, “It is not a question of winning the war.” Their goal Mr. Le Tourneau said, was simply to maintain a position of strength from which an honorable settlement could be negotiated. This he noted was exactly what the United States was then doing in Korea. This statement seemed to pass right over the heads of the Americans at the table, who suggested that the French seemed not to understand the American proposal. The American spokesman and assistant Secretary of State, restated the American proposition, emphasizing our willingness to provide the means if the French simply provided us with a viable plan for victory. Le Tourneau, in turn, restated his possession, noting that if it was “not the policy of his government” to seek a military victory in Indochina, that indeed victory probably unattainable because of the likelihood that the Chinese will intervene in Indochina to prevent such an outcome, just as they have done in Korea. Therefore, he said, France hoped at some point to engage in talks to arrange an “Honorable” settlement in Indochina, such as America was even seeking in Korea. The senior American officials, evading any acknowledgment of the Korean analogy, continue to press the French for a victory plan. The conference broke off without the matter being resolved.
Frustrated at the French government’s unwillingness to commit itself to a victory plan that would justify our proposed major increase in military assistance, Washington chose to seek a commitment through the back door. Gen. John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, commanding US Army forces in the Pacific (USARPAC) was sent by Washington to Vietnam to obtain such a plan from Gen. Henry Navarre
-Pages 46-47

Dien Bien Phu was still over a year away.By the early spring of 1953 the French communicated a clear position on Indochina and repeated by the US almost twenty years later.

There are mulitple points of failure. Allen reflects upon two key failures: The clandestine efforts with France after surrender at Dien Bien Phu and the restrictive flow of US military intelligence within the Pentagon and White House. Allen casts a key role with twenty years of our military intelligence community’s efforts within Indochina, the Geneva Accords and the coming twenty year American intervention against Vietnam and the proxy war with China and the Soviet Union.

Allen describes how the French felt two early wins were setting up the Viet Minh for a sustained battle that would wipe them out and secure Indochina. History reveals they ignored their intelligence and that of the US military:

In 1952 to 1953 the Viet Minh twice attempted large-scale operations in the Northwest, feeling both at Na Sun and in the Plain des Jarrs to sustain an active siege at any great distance from their bases. Both of those campaigns were characterized by major Viet Minh buildups in the vicinity of French outposts. The French withdrew their isolated garrisons at the last minute, moving rapidly overland by forcing marches’ supplied by parachute drops in route and joining the airlifted reinforcements which had prepared strong new defensive complexes several days’ march away. In both of these instances, the pursuing enemy forces, lacking aerial resupply, rapidly outdistanced the supplies carefully cache in the vicinity of the posts abandoned by the French. Thus the Viet Minh were able to mount only piecemeal attacks, quickly using up the limited quantity of food and the basic load of the ammunition that they could carry on their backs. These limited attacks were readily beaten off by the French, and the Viet Minh troops had to withdraw quickly to their starting point to avoid starvation.

The French command had at some reason concluded from these two campaigns that the V8 men were unable to sustain active operations more than two or three days in March Beyond their forward supply caches. They took comfort also and the fact that the Vietnam had never overrun a prepared a defensive position held by a force larger than a Battalion. A well organized defensive complex, such as those at Na Sun, in the Plain des Jarrs, and at Dien Bien Phu, manned by a half dozen or more battalions isolated but resupplied by air could surely withstand anything the Viet Minh seemed likely to be able to throw at them.

The French also new that the Vietminh artillery, comprising fewer than 50 lack 75 mm howitzers and 105 mm howitzers lack combat experience and was not even trying in coordinating, and shifting mast fire. The French, on the other hand, consider themselves the master artillerists of the world. In the unlikely event Viet Minh managed to deploy their howitzers within the range Dien Bien Phu, they would surely be overwhelmed buy the superior artillery techniques of the French.
-Page 50-51

It cannot be stressed enough as documented by Fredrik Logevall’s Pulitzer winner Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam that French intelligence cracked Viet Minh radio communications. The intelligence teams were able to relay to Hanoi that China’s shipment of cannon and heavy artillery from Korea was now flowing across Laos into North Vietnam:

So the Viet Minh logistical problem in mounting an effective assault on Dien Bien Phu was most difficult. If the French meant to garrison a division or so at Dien Bien Phu, the entire Viet Minh corps de battalle would be required to mount a successful attack. This is meant moving about 40,000 troops (three infantry divisions and artillery division) to Dien Bien Phu, then re-supplying that force with at least 40 tons of food per day, including the fuel to move the trucks involved in order to sustain active operations 150 miles from their principal bases. This could not be accomplished without extensive reconstruction to restore the long unused route 41 for vehicle traffic and maintained. It also meant to establishing the required supply depots and truck maintenance facilities in route, all of this on a scale and the over distance never before attempted by the Viet Minh. Clearly their existing engineer resources were inadequate. Moreover, transporting supplies at the required rate for those distances was beyond the capacity of their existing 300 vehicle transportation regiment. To support a sustained campaign would mean establishing fixed facilities, which would being vulnerable to French air attack; this would require anti-aircraft capabilities beyond the handful of heavy machine guns then available to the Vietminh. And some means would have to be found to neutralize the French airlift; the French could easily deliver a greater tonnage of supplies to their defenders of Dien Bien Phu unless the French airlift capability could be curtailed.
-Page 52

Allen expands how American intelligence community gained valuable insights to the preparations for Dien Bien Phu, again only to be ignored by the French:

In January 1954 we learned that a new antiaircraft regiment of three or four of the towns, Equipped with 48 to 64 37 mm antiaircraft guns, and entered Tonkin from China, and that thousands of rounds of ammunition for those weapons are in route to Dien Bien Phu. By early February, the artillery division, The antiaircraft regiment, and other support units were known to have arrived in the area, along with a ford command post of the Viet Minh military General headquarters. We knew they had put in motion supplies of food and ammunition which were beginning to accumulate in the vicinity of Dien Bien Phu and on an unprecedented scale for the Vietnam.
-Page 53

The French command convinced itself that it’s position was nearly impregnable and gave little thought to the alternative of withdrawing overland once the scale of the Viet Minh buildup became evident. Most visiting American military officers were only somewhat less euphoric. The French defenses and preparations could be seen and inspected first hand; Communist preparations were largely hidden by the jungle canopy and could be judged only by reading intelligence reports.
-Page 54

The coming horror was soon to arrive, but not before an American General with a solid reputation was to pay a visit to Dien Bien Phu:

General O’Daniel returned to Indochina in November 1953 with orders to assess French progress in implementing the Navarre plan, and to encourage them toward a vigorous approach to the war toward the end of the month his first visit to Dien Bien Phu. Where he presented a favorable report to Washington, I have attended his briefing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when she opened by statin quote. Which nonetheless expressed confidence but the friends were making progress toward the ultimate defeat of the Viet Minh.

About mid-December, as General O’Daniel was about to leave Washington to return to his post in Hawaii, I was asked to bring him up-to-date on developments since his visit to Indochina. After relating the details the initial move of the elements of the Vietnam corpse de battaille toward Dien Bien Phu, go to beginning of, in the intensive supply activity, I can see that the general was becoming animated. When I concluded, he was filled with wide-eyed enthusiasm. “Brilliant strategy,” he explained.” Navarre has them trapped. It’s the old hammer and anvile tactic. The garrison at Dien Bien Phu is the hammer, and Cogny’s forces around Hanoi are the hammer, and he’s got the babies meaning force trapped in between. Navarre is a brilliant strategist he’s got the enemy right where he wants him.” I plainly attempted to point out that companies armored elements were 150 miles away from Hanoi; that, is the general himself has seen, the terrain separating Cogny from Dien Bien Phu and what’s the most difficult, trackless mountain land in the world; that, given the nature of the opposing forces in the kind of war they were fighting, Viet Minh divisions were far from “trapped”; that issue might well indeed soon be on the other foot unless the French withdrew from Dien Bien Phu. O’Daniel dismissed my caution as nonsense and returned to his post in Hawaii convinced Navarre was on the road to victory.
-Page 54

Again Embers of War compliments Allen’s reporting. O’Daniel misled his fellow military officers in the Pentagon. Allen further reveals the partnership between France and the US military was more deeply intertwined than initially known. The French Air Force supporting Dien Bien Phu from Hanoi was, in part a peacemeal effort. French planes were largely destroyed in World War II forcing the France to rely upon US planes and the acquisition of old German Junkers from World War II.

Here Allen revealed another key intelligence failure by the Americans. The French requested thirty-three US B-26 bombers as French intelligence presented photographs to US military leaders at the Pentagon:

Some French officials in Saigon were concerned that the increased Viet Minh capability warranted an increase in their air-strike capability to suppress the expected hostile fire. Accordingly they requested in about February 1954 that United States provide an additional group of B- 26 bombers under the military assistance program (32 to 36 aircraft). The Joint Chiefs asked Brig. Gen. Thomas Trapnell, who succeeded General Brink as the chief of MAAG in 1952, if he thought the French request was justified. Trapnell hedged; obviously unconvinced, you said he has no independent capability to verify French claims concerning the Vietminh deployment of new antiaircraft regiment in the DMV and food area. The French advised the American army attaché to notify us in Washington the presence of the regiment was not only based on “A-1” information (which be in Army intelligence already knew) but it was also reflected in aerial photographs. Trapnell was shown the photos by the French come but his staff had no trained photo interpreters the army arranged to fly song in from the US Eighth Army in Korea. Unfortunately, these technicians were accustomed to interpreting photos along the treeless demilitarized zone (DMZ) in Korea, where military units had been in static defensive positions four years, and where many of the rocks lining the pathways linking military facilities has been whitewashed. They were not experienced in analyzing the images of activity in a jungle covered theater of unconventional military operations they concluded, after studying the French photos, that while there were signs of activity in the area in some positions (open pits in the ground) that could accommodate antiaircraft weapons, these were unoccupied, and they might be intended for some other type of weapon or even for some other purpose. Although not specifically asked, they added that they saw no evidence to suggest an enemy buildup in the area on the scale claimed by French intelligence. This report — with this gratuitous final — judgment killed the French bomber request, which was disapproved by the Joint Chiefs. It also temporarily demolished the credibility of Army intelligence and the army attaches in Vietnam. Although the joint Chiefs themselves we’re clear for the sensitive data that enabled us to vouch for the validity of The “A-1” information provided by the French most of their working-level staff personnel were not so clear, we could not convince them we had valid reasons for excepting the French intelligence commands. They rejected our protests concerning the probable inexperience the Eighth Army’s photo interrupters. Trapnell’s Report of their findings reinforce the Francophobia prevalent in Washington, and we in Army intelligence were looked upon as dupes of the French. After the Viet Minh onslaught began in March 1954, the French renewed their request for additional B-26s, and the joint Chiefs approved in April. The aircraft arrived in Indochina in June, a month after the fall of Dien Bien Phu.
-Pages 55-56

This request must have burned the French beyond belief. At worst it was another splinter in relations for both countries. The results were, as we know today, catastrophic. Again Allen displays how the compartmentalization of information failed the Pentagon and the newly elected President Eisenhower’s White House in 1954.

Allen reveals in the Geneva Accords of 1954 that the Eisenhower Administration began moving military advisors around Southeast Asia. The strain between France and the United States was due simply to the crisis in Paris following the fall of Dien Bien Phu. The resignation of the Laniel government shifted the radical, communist leaning Mendes France government into control. This very tumultuous time in French politics made the military intelligence relationships strained.

While not directly addressed by Allen, the French Fourth Republic was a victim of their military failures in both Indochina and Algeria that caused the collapse of the Fourth Republic. It seemed since 1946 the Fourth Republic could not come to terms of their failing colonial empires. This was the trigger to the return of de Gaulle after a twelve year absence.

Allen also addresses the steps Americans in Hanoi had to take to support Diem against French interests to return control over South Vietnam under French influence:

The Geneva Accords found both sides the French Union and the Viet Minh to increase the size of their military forces in Indochina above that existing on the day the armistice was signed. State Department lawyers were in the opinion that the US military advisers then in Vietnam could be construed as being included on the French Union side, and therefore they interpreted the agreement to mean that our military assistance advisory group in Indochina could not exceed 342 officers and men, the number present on July 21 1954. To move some of these MAAG personnel to both Cambodia in Laos before the cease-fire took affect, to establish all rights to have military missions in those states as well as in Vietnam. This self imposed ceiling on the strength of MAAG was in irritant to US policymaking over the next eight years. Initially Washington strictly observed the limit, but late in 1954 the Eisenhower administration felt it necessary to augment our military mission to help bring order out of chaos in the French logistical situation following the relatively hasty with drawl on their forces from Tonkin.
-Page 96

This restriction inhibited the determination of the military take over from the departing French. Full responsibility for train the Vietnamese military forces. MAAG had become anxious to become involved in such training as early as 1951, and has been particularly frustrated during the accelerated expansion of the Vietnamese forces in 1953, when the French drag their feet in applying modern training methods and techniques. A Temporary Equipment Recovery Mission (TERM) was established for this purpose. Its creation was cleared with the international control commission responsible for supervising the Geneva Accords, which sanctioned a temporary increase of some three hundred in the number of American military men in Vietnam. Members of this increment were to wear civilian clothes rather than military uniforms while in Indochina, in order to avoid any visible impression of an augmented US military presence. This subterfuge that we were staying within the Geneva “ceiling” was maintained until about 1961, when we began an open reinforcement of our military mission. But as late as 1960 we continued to hamstring the effectiveness of our military activities by adhering into the fiction of the augmented ceiling, In the control commission meticulously kept count of the arrivals and departures of American military personnel at the site on the airport. But the French resisted our entry into the training field in Vietnam because it would have represented an inroad in their special standing as the Metropolitan state in the French union; they were reluctant to give up anymore of their status as the colonizing power then they had to our army was proud of its achievement in creating a large Republic of Korea (ROK) Army in the midst of an act of war, and believe that our experiences there applying to Indochina as well. The French visited our training facilities in Korea at MAAGs request but remained unmoved and insisted on adhering to their “less effective” techniques. They refused to knowledge that our mass production training methods in Korea were in any way relevant to their needs in Indochina. By the spring of 1955, however, they apparently saw the hand writing on the wall, And agreed, after protracted negotiations, to incorporate American military personnel in a joint training mission, which the American’s dubbed (TRIM) training relations and instruction mission. The MAAG had mixed reactions to the rapid reduction in the size of the French commission after that cease-fire. They were glad to see the French go, because this is Vietnamese the opportunity to mature flaky experience more senior positions in Air Force infrastructure, and it helped promise for greater American military influence. On the other hand, it was increasingly clear that the Vietnamese war prepare to assume full responsibility higher command and staff levels in a technical areas….There were simply not enough MAAG personal replace all of the six thousand French that were leaving Vietnam; MAAG could not provide advisers below the regimental level.
-Pages 97-98

Defeated in battle, Paris was not throwing in the towel. After seventy years of colonial rule French influence remained. All economic and banking institutions were French held. All South Vietnamese military officers were French trained and loyal. The higher education system remained French dominated. Diem could not count on their support after April 1956 when the last French military units departed. France flexed its remaining power to subvert Diem and re-install Bao Dai in the summer of 1955. The American intelligence community fully understood their plans. The American embassy was forced to utilize the CIA in order to suppress the French-led overthrow Diem in the Battle of Saigon.

Painfully Allen is able to display how the Pentagon and White House followed the French, ignored their intelligence communities and walked the country into a national nightmare.

Nonetheless, for 20 years after 1956 the US military expensive exclusive training and advisory responsibilities with the Vietnamese military forces MAAG, and later MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam), shaped ARVN’s (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) combat units after US models and concepts; we molded their training facilities in the image of our own institutions; we inculcated in ARVN our doctrine and practices; and supervise the operations and activities those forces in peace and war. We want thousands of Vietnamese officers to the United States to attend our own military schools for on-the-job training six thousand of them 1961. One of the great mysteries American involvement in Indochina Wars why the Vietnamese army failed to develop into a first rate military force common as did the ROK Army. Why did our efforts not take on the Vietnamese as they had on the Koreans? Why our training methods in techniques effective in one case in not the other? Eight chronic complaints our advisors in Vietnam from the 1950s to the 1970s was in adequate leadership and the Vietnamese army — inadequate in numbers and quality. Yet for twenty years we supervised the organization in train of that army and advised in its administration and operation.
Page 99

Allen’s work and dedication to our country is amazing in a time of great transitions. A dedicated patriot, ignored by Pentagon and the White House at the tremendous cost of American lives — 58,307 is such an overwhelming burden for our country. France lost 92,000 dead, 114,000 wounded and 28,000 captured. Total Vietnamese losses range from 966,000 to 3,812,000 killed.