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It's hard to deal with your skewed view of reality: The US Army Air Force did their best - at great cost - to hit strategic targets in Germany and the occupied countries as precisely as possible. Your Father participated in some of the most difficult attacks in the war - Schweinfurt cost us almost half of our aircraft and crews - and those attacks were that difficult because we insisted in bombing in daylight to accurately attack heavily defended military targets. The actual accuracy was lousy and as you point out, achieved results were poor in some cases but you utterly smear those men by implying that their mission was to murder civilians to reduce German morale. You Father and the men with him were the best of the best and they will always deserve the highest honors for what they tried to do. If you want to discuss Curtis LeMay and the bombing campaign in Japan, particularly his decision to go to low-level night firebombing, OK. That was a conscious decision to target the city centers and was a response to the resistance of the Japanese and the poor results achieved by the high altitude attacks and is certainly contentious in the hindsight of history.

You are still way off base to smear Vietnam Veterans with the crimes at My Lai. That was an isolated occurance that was committed by draftees under a particularly weak set of commanders. The unit in question hadn't even really been in combat - a few booby traps and one guy shooting himself in the foot to get out of things. An Army Warrant Officer Huey pilot distinguished himself by landing his helicopter and attempted to save some civilians and stop the soldiers from shooting. The men that prticipated in this crime should have been hanged. The enemy in Vietnam and here in this country used this crime the smear all of us who fought in that war with some success, given your statements. The truth is that the young men I saw in Vietnam were the best young men this country had to offer and we conducted ourselves with honor and courage. We did our best to protect the civilians and they knew it. When we would first patrol into a ville that had never seen us before, everybody hid. Then a few kids would come out and we'd give them our candy discs from our C-Rations and cigarettes (the kids smoked). Then the old people would slowly come out and see that we weren't going to harm anybody and soon everyone else would come out. We had good relations with the locals and we understood that they were the real reason were there to fight. The next time we approached the same village, they would greet us warmly and some would carefully point out where the mines were for us. Our unit actually would run medical visits in some of the villages to treat the dieases and wounds for the locals when we could. I applaud you and thank you for your career in the Navy but I don't think you have much of an idea or appreciation for infantry combat much less what we achieved in Vietnam. I am proud of us and as you can tell, I have nothing but contempt for those other young men of my generation who found convenient justifications for avoiding service during our war. I still won't have anything to do with them.

Finally, when I was commissioned after I returned from Vietnam, I was trained as a Nuclear Weapons Employment Officer - so I know quite about that subject. Nukes would have been a lousy idea.