A Vietnamese reviews the Burns series on the war

The Royal New Zealand Artillery ^ | September 19, 2017 | Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Sang

[Big Mack]

ping

[dhs12345]

IMO.

The whole premise for the War was that Communism and its tyrants were evil and dangerous and had to be stopped.

Hindsight has made even wiser and nothing has changed — Communism and its tyrants were and still are evil and if anything, we now have more proof of this fact by the millions who died under the brutality of Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao.

Oh, and BTW, we/Reagan defeated Communism... it took China a few more years to follow but they too realized that it is a failure.

[oh8eleven]

all the low points hit as expected, like the body-count metric and burning the villages to save them.
I've watched all episodes and from them I got the distinct feeling that we never won a single battle over there. So much commie BS it's sickening.
And speaking of body count - if the NVA/VC were so much better than the American forces, HTF did we kill over a MILLION of them on the battle field?
Burns sucks.

[zot]

Thanks for the ping.
Bottom line: The Democrat-controlled American Congress betrayed South Vietnam.

[PGR88]

There’s a vietnamese restaurant in Arlington VA named “Pho 75” I went there when it first opened (its since expand to 7-8 stores)

Anyway, I asked the owner - what does the name mean?

He said: “Pho means “noodles.” 75 - Its the year we lost our country.”

[oldvirginian]

I read an interesting article some time back that ending the bombing of the north saved their bacon.
General Giap (?) stated that the north would have totally collapsed if the bombing had continued another six months.
Not sure about the truth of the article but I definitely remember reading it.

[PGR88]

I always wondered what would have happened if the US invaded the North, or occupied some islands opposite Haiphong

[oldvirginian]

At the least we would have captured some Soviet and Chicom advisors.
That would either have brought the Soviets and Chicoms into the open or sent them home.

Former Prime Minister and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky said the greatest disadvantage the US faced was that the US was front, center and on tv. The Russians and Chinese were in the background, virtually unknown to the world.

Ky had good things to say about US service members, not much good to say about US politicians.

He wrote a book “How We Lost the Viet Nam War”.
He kind of laid out the political situations in Vietnam between the government and the Buddhists and the relationship with the US gov’t.
It is pretty interesting.

[GreyFriar]

I highly recommend reading Dr. Sang’s review of Ken Burns’ new Vietnam PBS series.

Also, I have managed to delete my Military ping list. If you wish to be on it. please send me a freepmail.

Thanks,
GreyFriar

[otness_e]

Fully agreed there. Heck, the only correction I need to make is that Walter Cronkite didn’t even start the fake news meme. That started before even Walter Cronkite was a so-called “newsman.” If anything, that started under Walter Lippmann, who essentially encouraged in his book “Public Opinion” to manufacture public consent, in other words, use journalism to sway people’s opinions to stuff only the newsgivers support (and for the record, I’m strictly keeping it limited to America. We could go further and argue the whole fake news meme started with Voltaire and his ilk with their anti-Christian conspiracy in France, maybe even go all the way back to Adam Weishaupt and his Illuminati.). I don’t disagree with how Cronkite was a despicable excuse of a human being during Vietnam War. Seriously, thanks to him and Lippmann, not to mention other newsmen during that time and today, I’m actually feeling VERY cynical about freedom of the press. If “freedom of the press” means freedom to lie your butt off like what Lippmann encouraged, especially to influence an election or war to aid the enemy, then it’s a Constitutional “right” we’re better off not having.