Posted on 04/06/2024 6:30:25 AM PDT by daniel1212
Sad. I knew a Battalion commander that cut off his own leg cast so he could jump into Panama to get his combat jump badge. Jumped in, left the next day, got his badge. Guy was a flaming idiot (as were most of the commanders I ran across while on an exchange tour with the Army).
**I wonder if he was a farmer.
They were excellent marksmen in VN.
They grew up hunting squirrels and other very small targets.**
My father-in-law Calvin was such. He lied about his age, joined the USAAF at 17. He became a waist gunner on a B24. His fellow waist gunner was from the city. They kept in touch until my Cal passed away in 2003. The fellow warrior wrote a nice long letter to Calvin’s children, commenting, among other things, that Cal’s aim was superhuman.
Cal rarely talked of combat, but enjoyed talking about hijinks on or off base. When pressed by family once, about why he received the DFC, he got quiet for a moment, and with a barely audible voice muttered, “they say I shot down 7 fighters”.
Only one other time I recall him mentioning combat, when pressed by his grandson. He said, when you know you killed someone in war, you might not think about it at the moment, but you will over and over again later.
He mentioned raking a fighter’s fuselage from nose to tail, as it came at his bomber from 5 oclock high. He said their eyes met at the split second the fighter passed under the bomber, and Cal knew from the hits in the cockpit area that the pilot was likely wounded. The plane went slowly spiraling nose down without smoke or a parachute, hitting the ground, then bursting into flames.
Cal then said, “you feel bad about it later, but its war”.
There aren’t many Joe Ronnie Hoopers in America today
He sounds like he would have been an active and rambunctious boy. In 1938 America, such boys were allowed to exist, but not today.
He would be single-out early on by his Karen teachers, put on Ridlin and other ADHD drugs, told he had psychological or sexual-identity problems, turned into a depressed outcast, and then made prey to our corrupt ghetto culture and prevalant psychotropic street-drugs
Wow. I never knew where the ‘Airman Snufffy’ label came from. An amazing story. Thanks for sharing.
No Fear.
My friend went behind enemy lines, armed only with a knife. Orders were to steal enemy weapons and recon.
When he came back to US we gave him a job and protected him from the anti-war crap. He was wired all the time. A wonderful beautiful girl found him and supported him. He was so tough. He had red hair. No fear.
It was a Bowie knife.
He was a guy playing first person shooter games before there were personal computers. ;-)
It depends upon how it is identified, as with the user!
Amen, and may they win the unseen war, through Christ.
The Tet offensive the Left portrayed as a loss by the West.
A real candidate indeed.
Today, he would be considered "toxic."
“a withering hail of fire from rockets, machine guns, and automatic weapons.”
Machine guns AND automatic weapons.
Great post in a great thread.
Oh let us all hear your personal exploits during Tet-68.
Battle rifles like the ak47 even though capable of full automatic fire were not regarded as ‘machine guns’.
Thanks.
Good story, thank you.
? If your post was directed to me, I made no claim to such at all, or could, but referred to the misconstruing the Tet Offensive as a military defeat for the US. My immediate battle here is with liberal bias, as part of it's war against the God of Truth.
The Tet Offensive ended in early April 1968 as a military defeat for the communists. The enemy failed to keep any captured territory, the Viet Cong's southern infrastructure was decimated, the South Vietnamese refused to embrace the north's ideals, and thousands of enemy fighters died. At the same time, though, it was a huge loss for the U.S. cause. The shocking images coming out of Vietnam vividly showed the horrors of the war, and many were shocked by the enemy's resilience. Tet made it clear that a U.S. victory in Vietnam was not imminent, and the American public's support began to wane.
After Tet, U.S. generals at the heart of the campaign asked to add to the more than 500,000 troops already in Vietnam, hoping to start a counteroffensive. But President Lyndon B. Johnson and other leaders, taking note of growing antiwar sentiment at home, chose to do the opposite. Troop limitations were announced, and there was a halt on bombings. De-escalation began. - https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/story/Article/3291950/highlighting-history-how-tet-began-the-end-of-vietnam/
The Tet Offensive was portrayed by the New York liberal media as a defeat for the U.S., while in fact, it was an almost disastrous defeat for the North Vietnamese, as General Westmoreland and historians agree. The Viet Cong not only lost half of the 90,000 troops they had committed to battle, but it was virtually destroyed as an army.[69] Some false reports made by biased journalists include claiming the VC managed to overrun five floors of the American embassy, when in reality they never even managed to get past the main entrance, or Newsweek showing 18 out of 29 images depicting Marines either dead or huddled behind cover, neglecting to mention that they were pushing back the NVA onslaught.[70]
Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front, and a minister of justice for the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - one of the most determined adversaries of the US during the war - stated years later,The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang, The New York Review, October 21, 1982)
Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there." In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,
What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."[72] Ironically, it was also because of the bias from the Western press, in particular The New York Times, that caused the NVA to undergo their Tet Offensive with overconfidence that they would cause the entire South Vietnamese to embrace Communism and go against Capitalism and Saigon.[73]
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