Hamburger Hill?

The next two years in the Congress look awfully bleak to one of our favorite wordsmiths, Hendrik Hertzberg, the editorial writer of the New Yorker. “Capitol Hill,” he writes, “will be like Hamburger Hill, a noisy wasteland of sanguinary stalemate.” Mr. Hertzberg is referring to the coming fray in which the Republicans are vowing to try to unravel Obamacare and other monuments of the 111th Congress, as President Obama and the minority leadership in the house work with the majority leadership in the Senate to preserve what they can of the administration’s first two years. No doubt it will be noisy and sanguinary, as was Hamburger Hill, but whether the famous battle was a stalemate, well, here is a brief history:The battle for Hamburger Hill took place between May 10 and May 20, 1969. The objective loomed over the Ashau Valley, a corridor into Free Vietnam for enemy troops and materiel that had come south along what was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Hill 937, as Hamburger was officially known, was not of great strategic value in and of itself. No city, say, or copper mine or port lay at its base or summit. The fight became symbolic of the seeming pointlessness or absurdity of the war in this sense: No sooner did our GIs conquer the hill than they were ordered to abandon it. Hamburger Hill, however, will never be forgotten as a symbol of American courage and prowess.So stalemate isn’t quite the right word for what happened at Hamburger Hill, which, in pure military terms, is generally recorded as a victory for America and South Vietnam, though body counts themselves and aren’t a meaningful measure of a battle. Our side slew hundreds of enemy soldiers at Hamburger Hill, while the toll of our own casualties, according to the account on Wikipedia, was 72 killed and 372 wounded. Yet the cost to us came at a time when America was losing its will to win in Vietnam. The decision to abandon the hill after we won it was greeted with cynicism. “Don’t mean nothin’,” was the argot of the GIs at the time, echoed in a movie about the battle that was brought out in 1987.In the view of Colonel Harry Summers, Hamburger Hill, “was one of the most significant battles of the war, for it spelled the end of major American ground combat operations in Vietnam.” He quoted Clausewitz as having “emphasized almost a century and a half earlier that because war is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it both in magnitude and also in duration. He went on to say, Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced.”That, according to Summers is “exactly what happened” at hill 937. “The expenditure of effort at Hamburger Hill exceeded the value the American people attached to the war in Vietnam.” To many of us, it seemed unjust that our side could win the fight in simple military terms only to lose it in the political theater. But that it was happened and Hamburger Hill was in the middle of the story. Wrote Summers: “The public had turned against the war a year and a half earlier, and it was their intense reaction to the cost of that battle in American lives, inflamed by sensationalist media reporting, that forced the Nixon administration to order the end of major tactical ground operations.”* * *Well, please forgive the long digression on Mr. Hertzberg’s simile. No doubt we’re in for what amounts to political hand-to-hand combat on Capitol Hill, with the Democrats holding the Senate, if barely, and the Republicans the House — and the Democrats the White House. But who is who in the analogy of Hamburger Hill? Who is it that has been pouring our national wealth into a fight with ever less satisfactory political returns? Is it the Republicans or the Democrats who are in the predicament we were in at Hamburger Hill? And who is in the predicament in which our enemy found himself?

Hamburger Hill?

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