Posted on 04/28/2005 11:00:09 PM PDT by neverdem
Never forget and never forgive. Kerry has to sign the Form 180.
Thank you for the ping!
No...it's not over...until the last traitor (traitors to their Nation...traitors to the Vietnamese who BELIEVED in what we told them about Freedom..self-government...and that we would help them)...has been punished.
Never Forget.
redrock
Thanks for the ping!
Jonathan Bean, a professor in Illinois is being attacked as a racist for giving his students the optional assignment of reading a FrontPageMag.com article, he was attacked by treasonous Leftist professors, led by Marxist professor Robbie Lieberman, Kay J. Carr, Germaine Etienne, Mary McGuire, Rachel Stocking, and Natasha Zaretsky. University Administrators piled on.
It's obvious to everyone that America is in an education crisis, that's why we need to support David Horowitz in his Academic Bill of Rights campaign.
As Horowitz' explains:
An incident illustrating this problem was related by Representative Gib Armstrong, the sponsor of the Academic Bill of Rights in Pennsylvania. Armstrong referred to a biology class at a campus in the Pennsylvania State University system that was entirely taken up with a showing of Farenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s propaganda film against the Bush Administration. The film was shown to students during the presidential election campaign of 2004. The biology professor’s agenda in showing the film obviously had nothing to do with biology and was clearly political.
Students are a captive and vulnerable audience. They have paid tuition to be taught biology or English literature by professionals credentialed in these fields. These professionals have been given authority and power over students and their academic careers precisely because they themselves have gone through a long and arduous credentialing process that qualifies them as “experts” in their particular disciplines. Why then should students be subjected to the political prejudices of these same professors who have no particular expertise in the field of politics, particularly since students have not paid their tuition to attend a political lecture?
BTTT!!!!!!
The soldiers, most of them quite young, were remarkably friendly and happy to pose for pictures. It was a weird feeling to come face to face with the "enemy," and I imagine that was how they felt too.
As I reflected on my own remembrances of that day…
You can be absolutely sure that every veteran and every red state voter will have to hold a copy not only of the form but of the records in their hands and on a certified Dept of the Navy CD-ROM.
/s/Insurgent BloggerVet!
BTW:Thanks for the tag line.
Bump for the weekend gang...
I attended the "Vietnam and the Iraq War" presentation given at the University of Chicago Law School by Professor Geoffrey Stone 20 January 2005. As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I was keenly interested in the form that the lecture might take. After a cursory reading of Professor Stone's curriculum vitae, I suspected that Professor Stone's take on the South East Asian conflict might indicate a general disapproval of the United States war effort. My suspicions were proven correct. The lecture was an attempt to paint the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left was portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. He described the South Vietnamese government in terms that were heedless of the South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a relentlessly ruthless Communist assault while he stated the South Vietnamese government was engaged in an unwarranted assault on human rights. He neglected to mention ANY of the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). He described the Tet Offensive as a surprise for the United States in which 1100 American soldiers died and 2300 ARVN soldiers, and not much more about it.
I challenged Professor Stone on the following. The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel's book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the "ruling class." All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that "while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death." The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
I pointed out that the National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. I pointed out that the Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. I pointed out how the North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. I pointed out the antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland's request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.
When he tried to say that United States should have known it could not put down a local popular insurgency, I pointed out that the final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. I pointed out to him that it was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I said how I didn't recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place.
There were legions of half-truths and omissions that this professor spoke to in his extremely biased lecture. When I asked him why he left out so much that was favorable to the American effort in Vietnam, he airily dismissed my argument as being just another perspective, but tellingly he did not disagree with the essential truth of what I said.
Professor Stone struck me as just another liberal masquerading as an enlightened academic.
He was totally unable to relate how the situation in Iraq is comparable to the situation in Vietnam, so I volunteered a comparison for him. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. I said that in that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that "We Gotta Get Outta this Place," to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Never give up!
You never do. No wonder we all think so much of you. Thanks as always!
I was a very young kid in '66. I sensed that the culture was changing. I never did buy into the prevailing wisdom of that time -- that we were wrong to try and defeat the communists.
It must have been a real shock being away from the country at that time during such a transformation and then...coming home.
Thanks for your service.
LOL!!
I just have a litty, bitty ping list.
Yo Tonk!! Thanks for letting folks know about the Operation Welcome Home being held at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas and in other communities on Memorial Day 05. I was listening to G Gordon Liddy the other day. He was interviewing the author of a new book entitled "Naked In Da Nang" by Col. Mike Jackson and a co author whose name I did not catch. It is a book filled with the FUNNY stories of what happened to the author in VietNam. He also included some of the more serious sides to life at that time and place, and after some of the early readers who sampled his book, the feed back consensus seems to be, "You got it right! I want my family to read this!"
During the interview, it came out that they are planning a nation wide WELCOME HOME VIET NAM VETS event on Veterans Day. What they are hoping to do is coordinate parades and other events across the nation. The main celebration will be in Las Vegas, but they are hoping that when other parades are organized they will occur at the same exact time.
The web site is http://www.vietnamwelcomehome.org/
From their FAQ:
Q. How will this event be paid for?
A. Operation Welcome Home is being supported through corporate and organizational partnerships and private donations. This is a grassroots effort by concerned citizens, patriotic companies and civic organizations who believe it is finally time to heal the scars of the Vietnam era. Checks should be written to "Aviation Nation / OWH" Aviation Nation, Inc. is a 501 C (3) non-profit private organization that donates support to the Aviation Nation air show at Nellis Air Force Base. Aviation Nation is an official U.S. Air Force air show and one of America's top aviation events. Operation Welcome Home is a key component of the Aviation Nation 2005 air show and all donations will go toward supporting the Operation Welcome Home component of this world-class event. Since the organizing entity is a non-profit organization, donors will receive all the tax benefits of a charitable contribution.
Q. What will the event involve?
A. The Welcome Home celebration will be hosted by Las Vegas and Aviation Nation, but will include activities throughout the nation. Las Vegas will present a huge Veterans Day Welcome Home parade and the objective is for cities and towns nationwide to hold their own parades at the same time - thus creating the largest Welcome Home parade in history...
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