Posted on 06/24/2005 11:49:22 AM PDT by West Coast Conservative
A suicide car bomber slammed into a U.S. military convoy in Fallujah, killing two Marines, a Pentagon spokesman said Friday. Three Marines and a sailor were missing after the attack.
CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports that five female Marines are said to be dead, according to officials. They are members of a supply unit who were being driven into Fallujah to assist in searching local women for hidden weapons when their vehicle, which was equipped with armor, was struck by the bomber.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said another 13 Marines were wounded in the Thursday night attack and said some women were among the casualties.
The car bomber targeted troops assigned to the II Marine Expeditionary Force, an earlier military statement said. Fallujah, the Anbar province town 40 miles west of Baghdad, was the scene of a large-scale campaign in November by U.S. troops to rout militants.
An earlier report also had said six Marines were killed.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
I wasn't thinking in terms of necessary or unecessary when it comes to the drafting of women. I was thinking in terms of the current makeup of the Army. There are certain percentages of women in almost every MOS except the combat MOSs. If we are going to say, as a nation, it is okay to have women as enlistees during peacetime but that they should not face the same involuntary risks that the men have to face during a wartime draft, to me it smacks as a big double standard. And, in the case of women, they would be able to have their cake and eat it too.
It's time for the country to grow up. Either we tell all the women in uniform that they are not needed, or, we keep what we have and we include 18-year-old women in the requirement to register for the draft.
It's been pushed harder during the Rumsfeld DOD than ever before!
Probably, mainly because they're scratchin barrel bottom.
The Viet Cong got by on LESS than ten tons of ammo a day, when hundreds of tons were coming down the Trail. Read any book by Douglas Pike on the subject; he's considered the expert on such matters by the professional historian community.
Did the rest of the unit abandon these women in the field? This is unheard of in the USMC. What actually happened?
We were not only fighting the VC in the South, we were fighting the NVA. They were infiltrating into the South as early as 1965. The battle of the Ia Drang valley (near Pleiku)was a pitched battle involving almost a division of NVA regulars, the first such major contact with the NVA.
In the beginning, many of the so-called experts tried to portray the war in the South as a civil war, i.e., between the VC and the government of South Vietnam. In reality, it was North Vietnam trying to takeover South Vietnam by force. The VC were tools of the North. Unfortunately, this myth of poor, lightly armed peasants in black pajamas (the VC) going against the Americans continues to be perpetuated by revisionist historians. The NVA were in Vietnam in strength early on. They were mostly in the North of the country, but they supplied and eventually replaced the VC elements from their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. We were fighting NVA regulars, including some Chinese and Russian advisors.
I find the ignorance of the American public about what happened in Vietnam to be profound. If you are interested in learning the truth about Vietnam, I suggest you take a look at the following:
The Boston Manifesto: Prepared by the Vietnam Veterans to Correct the Myths October 18, 2004
How much armor can stop a 500lb bomb?
I'm familiar with your points, and have no quarrel with you.
Fact is, though, the bombing of the trail did no good, nor did green- and brown-water interdiction, since they needed next to nothing to fight with on any given day.
And the NV didn't really start coming down in significant numbers until after Tet, cause we blew the crap out of the VC, and a war abhors a vacuum.
My daddy, who was a Recon Marine out of Phu Bai, says that he was "finding" WWII M1's (leftovers from the French) as late as 1971 on communist bodies.
When the revolution comes, men and women will be fighting side by side to fend off the leftist rats, the courts in their filthy black hooded robes and the Godless commie Chinese.
We'll be glad to have them. My daughter's a pretty good shot.
G
That is simply not true. Please read the Boston Manifesto, starting on page 99 and you will see that the NVA were pouring into the South before 1965. It is well-documented based on North Vietnam's account of the war. I suggest you become better informed before debating the "facts" with me. I spent a year in country (in I Corps) and eight months off the coast.
"According to General Bam, the decision to unleash an armed revolt against the Saigon government was taken by a North Vietnamese communist party plenum in 1959. This was a year before the National Liberation Front was set up in South Vietnam. The aim, General Bam added, was “to reunite the country.” So much for that myth that the Vietcong was an autonomous southern force which spontaneously decided to rise against the oppression of the Diem regime And General Bam should know. As a result of the decision, he was given the job of opening up an infiltration trail in the south."
" After years of being deceived by Hanoi, after the war even the mainstream American media like the Washington Post acknowledged that the critics had in fact been wrong during the war. Consider this excerpt from a 1985 Post account of the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”: "
"According to an account published in Hanoi’s monthly Vietnam Courier in May 1984, the project to build “a special military communication line to send supplies to therevolution in the south and create conditions for its development” was launched in strict secrecy on May 19, 1959— the 69th birthday of then-president Ho Chi Minh . . . . [T]he route was used to deliver the first northern arms shipment to guerrillas south of the 17th parallel in August 1959, five years before the Tonkin Gulf Resolution paved the way for U.S. entry into the Vietnam War."
"The postwar accounts thus make it clear that, contrary to Hanoi’s persistent denials during the war, that it was infiltrating men and arms into the south, North Vietnam was doing just that, and well before the first American combat troops arrived in 1965. . . . From an estimated 10,000 North Vietnamese troops in 1964, the number of regulars sent south climbed to more than 100,000 a year by 1966." Source: William Branigin, “Ho Chi Minh Trail Led to Saigon,” Washington Post, April 23, 1985, p. A21.
"Yet another senior Communist official to confirm this fact was Colonel Bui Tin, the North Vietnamese Army officer who accepted the South Vietnamese surrender on April 30, 1975, at the Presidential Palace in Saigon and later served as editor of Nhan Dan (“The People”), the Party daily in Hanoi. When asked in 1995: “Was the National Liberation Front an independent political movement of South Vietnamese?,” he replied: “No. It was set up by our Communist Party to implement a decision of the Third Party Congress of September 1960. We always said there was only one party/
Two years ago, the University Press of Kansas published an English translation of a massive official North Vietnamese history ofthe war under the title Victory in Vietnam. In his forward to this volume, University of Pennsylvania Professor William Duiker notes that “one of the most pernicious myths about the Vietnam War— that the insurgent movement in South Vietnam was essentially an autonomous one that possessed only limited ties to the regime in the North— has been definitively dispelled."
I should be more accurate. NVA cadre were in South VN from the time of the partition. However, other than the Central Highlands, they mainly operated in the I Corps area, and left the more important Delta to the locals. After Tet, when there were no more locals, they moved regular operational ground units (higher than battalion) further south.
Weren't we talking about supplying these bastards? And why are they being wined and dined in the White House tonight?
I will read the download you provided for me.
The same Vietnam playbook is now being used for Iraq. Abu Graib and Gitmo are today's My Lai; we are losing militarily (even though we are not) remains the common mantra along with its description as a quagmire; we need to get out is the familiar theme song; Nixon's War (even though JFK and LBJ got us into Vietnam) has become Bush's war; and both wars are illegal. Hopefully, we will be better able to combat the disinformation campaign of the MSM and the Dems who are more interested in destroying GWB than winning the war.
We as intelligent human beings, should all understand whether we like it or not, at war. There is an enemy that is hell bent in destroying us which does not matter to them if we are civilians, children or even liberals. Ignoring them will not make them go away (8 years during of Clinton proved that). So since we have an enemy that is determined to fight us whether we want to or not than we must take the fight to them. It is better to the fighting done over there, whether it be Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, etc. etc. etc. than to have it here. I do not care to see again in my lifetime nor my grandchildren's, 3000 innocents incinerated in less than two hours in this country.
Thank God, we finally have adults in charge that understand this. So be cynical, nothing wrong with that but understand this war is not over till ever damn terrorist has been sent to their maker.
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