Posted on 05/15/2005 8:09:23 AM PDT by thelastvirgil
Edited on 05/15/2005 8:29:52 AM PDT by Lead Moderator. [history]
Sit down to a steaming bowl of pho on a bustling Hanoi boulevard. Kick back on a languorous boat ride down the Mekong Delta. Swim at a secluded highlands waterfall. Welcome to Vietnam.
This is from a travel brochure from 2005. It's certainly not from an Army recruiting poster from 1965.
(Excerpt) Read more at lmtribune.com ...
Do you have a link for this?
Thanks,
SB
Except that we didn't lose, we conceded. There's a big difference.
Anyone interested in the history of the whys and wherefores of the Vietnam War should read Richard Nixon's book "No More Vietnams."
I would recommend Bright Shining Lie by Paul Vann.
I would have posted a link, but it is a pay-per-view rag. You can find the earlier editorial at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1400643/posts go to comment #12 for the entire article. I am new to posting, and wasn't sure if I could post the entire article, but finally got it in.
Conspicuously absent from this "analysis" is the communist genocide that followed our withdrawal from Southeast Asia...
Yes, but I don't wish to post the scatological reference that would answer your question.
211,471 is the total number of American casualties in Vietnam. I'm not sure if John Kerry counts as one "lost life' or three "lost lives."
.
VIETNAM is definately NOT better off.
See:
Pictures of a vietnamese Re-Education Camp
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1308949/posts
.
We did neither. We won. We left. The war ended. Two years later, the North disregarded the peace treaty and overran the South while our Democrat congress watched and refused to reengage.
I'm not sure if John Kerry counts as one "lost life' or three "lost lives."
Didn't Kerry lose one of those lives in Cambodia, I
remember it was seared, SEARED into his memory.
Another kind of steaming item comes to mind.
.
And then there's...
Vietnam's war orphans set to return 30 years later (operation baby lift)
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1403483/posts
.
Good Book!
got that number - I suppose by application of what we called "Beer math" when I was on active duty. OR maybe he
added in all those who have died since plus those whose lives were affected by them SE Asain war Games -- or maybe he got th enumber from Hanoi Jane -and is really taking about the number of Viet Cong,NVA, and Chi-coms killled.
a whole world of possabilities if one is talking to an America-HATER.
Add War in the Shadows ,by Robert Asprey; Kiss the Boys Goodby,Monika Jensen-Stevenson;In the Jaws of History,
Bui Diem; and "the Palace File ,Nguyen Tien Hung & Jerrold
Schecter-IMO
Could have -Possibly-- But not when one lacks the political will. Might benefit from reading a cult classic Victory Denied:Why your Son faces death in "No-Win Wars",by Major
Arch E. Roberts ,the guy who prepared the Code blue /citizen soldier program Who now runs the Committee to Restore the Constitution Out of Ft.Collins ,CO (1966) Goes far to explain WHY our Government lacked the balls to win
in Vietnam --Why we haven't won any war since we joined the
godless Soviet shill called the UN.
i seem to recall he lost a whole swiftboat load of 'em --every time he told the tale.
You talking about that old ,stale foul smelling wind?-or
that that generates such after eating that --stuff?
Anyone know where he got that number?
It probably includes all those who died in car accidents during the war, maybe overdoses too.
I thought we just quit in Vietnam, we lost our desire to win, sadly.
"I'm not sure if John Kerry counts for "one lost life" or three "three lost lives." LOL
You are absolutely correct. It is simply mind boggling as to how this fact, this holocaust, is almost completely ignored; especially by those that argue against our involvement in Vietnam, or ANY other country, for that matter. It is a perfect example of what I call the Robert Kennedy Jr. syndrome: 'I don't care HOW many people you slaughter, just so long as I don't have to look at it!'
Before I get flamed: No, RK Jr. did not say this, but I am summing up his isolationist views, that I have personally heard him espose many times.
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 German 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.
Anyone know where he got that number?
I have no idea where he got that number. All I know is that it is totally inflated (in more ways than one). It's actually one of the weirdest statements I've ever heard. In the long run, we did not lose Vietnam, BUT we should use the lessons we learned from it. ONE THING ESPECIALLY is that we should NOT dishonor returning veterans who fought valiantly. I was only a little one when they came home, but if I remember right, weren't even some of the POW's attacked?? That was inexcusable if so.
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