Posted on 05/06/2007 1:44:26 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
KENT - Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan would like to see today's college students become more active against the war in Iraq.
``I wish college students cared enough about what's going on in Iraq and our country to be as committed as the students were in 1970,'' Sheehan said in an interview an hour before she was to address a crowd at Kent State University on the 37th anniversary of the Kent State shootings.
Sheehan, 49, whose son Army Specialist Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq in 2004, said she does not wish for any protest to become violent, but she said, ``I think we need a new revolution.''
The annual event marks the killing of four students and wounding of nine others by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti-war protest on the campus.
Student Kara Kear, 19 of Toledo, a freshman studied for finals as she waited for the program to begin.
``It's important to be involved with May 4th activities and to remember all the people whose lives were lost,'' she said.
She said she's sorry there aren't more members of her generation who would do what the students of 1970 did.
The Sheehan event drew a crowd of several hundred.
Give her time. She’s not done dancing on it yet. Come to think of it, I doubt she ever will be.
Hmmm...Is she going to have lunch with Hugo Chavez soon? The verbiage sounds like two peas in a pod, in my opinon.
This Ghoul of 60’s Past, needs new bodies from
which to feed.
The Ohio National Guardsmen were poor shots.
Really, have any of these liberal idiots thought about the ramifications of withdrawal for more than a nanosecond?
Cindy “Mother Moonbat” Sheehan was 12 years old in 1970, how the hell does she know much more about the “Kent State Massacre” and anti-war riots than these young kids do? What a crock of bullsh*t!
We appreciate what you've 'tried' to do for our cause,
But, you're using up WAY to much oxygen.
Please understand that this memo is not directed at you personally
or in any personal way. We love you CS, It's just that 'well'
your too old. And you're of no use to our cause any longer.
Sincerely,
Head Bitch.
Oh, so maybe The Rocky Horror Picture Show did shape her views. She would have been a teen when it came out. That would explain a whole lot :-). Of course I have little room to talk. I was a drooling 1 year old in 1970. ;-) I remember when Star Wars came out though. Sorry, went off a little bit with my post here.
“The Ohio National Guardsmen were poor shots.”
Unfortunately so. It really stinks that they managed to shoot a ROTC cadet who was just walking through to boot. I mean, what’re the odds?
Vietnam was a mistake we made by giving it back to France after WWII was over. The French asked us to help them retreat out of there after the Vietnamese turned on them for being treated like dirt. If we had given Vietnam their freedom after WWII, they could have been our ally or at least made the choice based on right and wrong. We never really had the advantage in Vietnam and had our hands tied by our rules of engagement so we wouldn't slip into WWIII. After the mid 60's, our troops there were not all volunteers like we have in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of protests on our campuses were more against the draft, which represented a war we had a hard time justifying. Kent State was a very sad day in our history. Some of the students that were shot had nothing to do with the protest. Cindy Sheehan is an idiot who has no business going anywhere near Kent State and her comments there were wrong like everything she says.
James Michener wrote an incredible book on the Kent State shootings, and as you read it you're struck with how incredibly divided families were over these shootings.
If she had any brains at all she would never wish this time in history on anyone.
So many factors contributed to these shootings, including the radical SDS underground involvement, National Guardsmen who had just been on duty for a trucker's strike, the smashing of windows in downtown Kent, and the burning of the ROTC building.
An incredible series of events lead to a situation that should never have happened. The Guardsmen were exonerated, and rightly so.
This woman is insane.
The responsibilities rest with both parties.
Wherever she goes with her simplistic and stupid bromides, Sheehan is committing blasphemy against someone or some memory.
...and that’s exactly why the Socialists want the draft brought back.
Much of the Tet Offensive failed on the first night. The worst of it, at Khe San and Hue City, lasted a month. After Hue was retaken, the discovery of thousands of civilians murdered by the communists had little effect on the politics of the war. The North Vietnamese could not have dreamed of a better outcome. Militarily, their initiative was a dismal failure. They lost perhaps 45,000 troops killed. There is no accurate count of their wounded. They murdered thousands of civilians and their actions were discovered.
But the politically driven media, and the protestors in the U.S., never delivered that message. America saw only what a few people wanted them to see. So, a few useful idiots in the press and the American outposts of the CP were able to use Tet to turn public support for the war.
Some of the facts about Tet can be found at this link. In comparison to the popular (left wing) version of these events, the difference is quite shocking.
You'll also find allegations that the Kent State protest was organized, at least in part, by communist party loyalists who wanted to provoke a violent confrontation in order to make the U.S. government look bad. It worked.
I sent this letter to an antiwar law professor at the university of Chicago after i attended a lecture that he gave on the Vietnam war.
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 your take on the Vietnam War. Your understanding of the US involvement in the South East Asian conflict indicates a general disapproval of the United States war effort, and you seem to accept the oft regurgitated leftist conventional wisdom as to it’s historical course and outcome. That is painting 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 is 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. The South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a ruthless Communist assault while engaging in an unwarranted assault on human rights .while ignoring the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) is also part of this narrative. The deceptive reporting of the Tet Offensive, the Communist’s worse defeat among numberless hundreds of others was probably the most grievous deceit perpetuated by the Press .
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.
The National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. 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. 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. 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. They were as thoroughly beaten as a military force can be given the absence of an invasion and occupation of their nation. The Soviets and Chinese recognized this, and they put pressure on their North Vietnamese allies to accept this reality and settle up at the Paris peace talks. Hanoi’s party newspaper Nhan Dan angrily denounced the Chinese and Soviets for “throwing a life bouy to a drowning pirate” and for being “mired on the dark and muddy road of unprincipled compromise.” The North Viets intransigent attitude toward negotiation was reversed after their air defenses were badly shattered in the wake of the devastating B-52 Linebacker II assault on North Vietnam, after which they were totally defenseless against American air attack.
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.
South Vietnam was NOT defeated by a local popular insurgency. 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. It was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. 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. At the Paris Accords in 1973, the Soviet Union had agreed to reduce aid in offensive arms to North Vietnam in exchange for trade concessions from the US, effectively ending North Vietnams hopes for a military victory in the south. With the return of cold war hostilities in the wake of the Yom Kippur war after Congress revoked the Soviet’s MFN trading status, the Reds poured money and offensive military equipment into North Vietnam. South Vietnam would still be a viable nation today were it not for this nation’s refusal to live up to it’s treaty obligations to the South Vietnamese.
There is one primary similarity to Vietnam. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. 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.
Great letter! Did he send you an autographed copy of his Little Red Book in return?
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