Need help! Vietnam- History channel spreading false info

History Channel | 13 January 2008 | History Channel

[3AngelaD]

But who are “they”? Someone still had to say it. Someone still had to produce it. And I suspect someone still had to write talking points. There are responsible parties even in this kind of lame program.

[SkyDancer]

Sounds about right from what I’ve read - it’s the Dixie thing that put me off with History Channel, well that plus other things they’ve misconstrued .....jane

[ThanhPhero]

It was more than "Americans without money." The Russian wives and civilians stole from the bases to barter on the local economy for basic things like food and utensils and they stole from the locals, and this was in the starving time when Viet Nam was arguably worse off than Haiti in a depression.

'Americans without money' was the first impression and derived mostly from the European aspect of the Russians' physiognomy and it stuck because it was a neat phrase and suited the Vietnamese sense of humor.
The Russians never were respected at all. A lady I know who is a recent arrival and who lived through that phase outside of Cam Ranh was shocked when my wife and I took her and her daughters out to dinner to welcome them to the community. She said that as poor immigrants to a rich society from a third world country she had expected to be treated the way the Vietnamese had treated the Russians. What delicious irony!

[ThanhPhero]

I am not so sure it was actually planned that way but it sure turned out that way. It was a tactical loss in a border campaign and ultimately a strategic victory against the USSR. But, that Victory had in it the seeds of the next Long War in which we are now engaged and in which, as in the last one, the enemy is well represented here at home on the political Left.

[Brad from Tennessee]

Thanks for unique insight on this portion of Vietnamese history. The Vietnam War and the support they were obliged to provide after Saigon fell drained the USSR, just as did Cuba, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and other “victories” around the world. With a stagnant, artificial economy the Soviets finally spent all their gold, looted from Eastern Europe after World War II, on this expansion. Just prior to the Afghanistan invasion, foreign policy experts were predicting that the Soviets would either have to invade Western Europe, and loot it, or strike south to the Persian Gulf oil fields to survive.

[Brad from Tennessee]

[. . . the enemy is well represented here at home on the political Left.]

Yeah, many of them are the same Marxist freaks from the 1960’s. Now they have gray hair, bald spots, pot bellies and varicose veins. These people form the core of the movement today. Their colleagues have moved into Congress, the news media, Hollywood and academia. The 2004 election was a baby-boomer fight between an antiwar traitor and a Texas fighter pilot.

[Brad from Tennessee]

It is scheduled for Sat. 1-19 5:30-6 p.m. CST on History Channel on my cable. This one is titled “Soldiering On.”

[ThanhPhero]

The CIA assessments of the Soviet economy from the first one after WWII always estimated the USSR as having an economy about 50% of ours and expanding at about twice the rate that ours was. By 1980 the Soviet economy should have been way ahead of America. Reagan put in his own analysts to look at the data because he did not believe the CIA. Too bad for the USSR with that bit of second guessing. That was when he knew for certain that we could spend them into the ground. I wish Bush had the same insights about the CIA.