And they had to do it without Agent Orange.
Posted on 04/24/2019 6:03:37 PM PDT by naturalman1975
One late afternoon in 1966, in a Vietnamese rubber plantation, 108 young and mostly inexperienced Australian and New Zealand soldiers held off a force of 2500. This is their untold story.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
The Battle of Long Tan was one of the most significant Australian engagements of the Vietnam War - when Australian soldiers held off an attack by a much larger enemy force.
They were supported in doing this by their allies - New Zealand and American artillery and American air support was critical.
D Company, 6th Battalion, Royal Australia Regiment, was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, by the President of the United States.
How could so many battles be won and a war lost?
I’ve never actually read up on how strongly the south Vietnamese wanted democracy and wanted to win.
Did the South Vietnamese soldier really believe in what they were fighting for?
I don’t know. I figure others might.
One thing I DEFINITELY believe is that our men could have won this war if they were given half the chance.
Get Max Hastings recent book on the Vietnam war.
Hue’ 1968 by Mark Bowden
“How could so many battles be won and a war lost?”
Democrats. That’s how.
L
God Bless Diggers, past, present, and future.
And they had to do it without Agent Orange.
I shall. Thank you.
Nailed it.
Lyndon Johnson was warned by the military before he sent in the first American combat troops in 1965 that it would take 500,000 men and 5 years to win a war in Vietnam.
This would have sucked away all of the money that he wanted for his Great Society domestic spending and it would have required dramatically increasing the Army. He wasn’t willing to do either.
He also wasn’t willing to lose Vietnam outright so LBJ’s war planners, which consisted of two lawyers, came up with a half-assed strategy that had America doing nothing more than “demonstrating our resolve”.
This is all extensively documented in McMaster’s “Dereliction of Duty”, a book based on his college thesis.
It always seemed to me that the solution was to treat Hanoi like we did Berlin and Tokyo 20 years earlier. Invade the north, conquer Hanoi, and arrest or kill Ho and Giap and all of their comrades. I don’t think that would have taken anything like 5 years. It simply would have required the will to do it.
Awesome flick.
The enemy exploited any divisions they had, keeping the Buddhists upset against the Catholics and vice versa - that was the enemy's specialty.
The proof of that was how they got our own people to be our worst enemy during our war. It wasn't a "peace movement": it was an enemy-sponsored and enemy-directed opposition to the United States and its objectives.
To Tijeras Slim: don't trust anything by Max Hastings - he's a Brit and he's always sided against our role In Vietnam. If you need to trust anybody's history of our time in Vietnam, trust people like me - 17 months in combat over there.
Agree. Johnson picking bombing targets...ludicrous.
We were winning in Vietnam when I left in 68.
Fonda and the fifth column at home were never held to
account for their treason.
Wow.
Thanks.
I HATE when presidents fights wars not to win!
Our men deserve so much better.
And from what i’ve read, I HATE johnson.
Not too fond of FDR either.
Kennedy was a liberal but he did change the terrible highest tax bracket and did some other things right.
I think this action happened around the time I
arrived in country in 66. Fortunately I was an
aircraft mech in Chu Lai and was not out in the bush but in
the time I was there was mortared and rocketed
on numerous occasions and especially during Tet.
17 months. Wow.
My BIL, who died 6 years ago, was a medic embedded with the marines.
He spoke about his time there for 5 minutes once.
Called it “one year of being in hell”.
Mentioned crossing through rivers and coming out with leeches on him.
I would have fainted and drowned.
My sister didn’t ask for it, but the govt sent her a check because somehow Agent Orange had been linked to heart attacks.
He was a healthy guy and only 63.
I don’t know.
I do know you guys are in a class all by yourselves and it must be tiring explaining what it was like to us domestics.
Nice work, It’s no Battle of Kaypong 3RAR sister unit, but good nonetheless heh.
1. Nobody, anywhere, sat down and decided to fight a limited war in Vietnam. There was no magic meeting where somebody thought it could all be over in five years. The enemy conducted a war of terror against the South, bombing schools and restaurants and infiltrated two full NVA divisions before the first conventional US units even arrived. When we did get there, the enemy sent more NVA units south - and so on. At one point, there were two million enemy effectives in the south. As we introduced more troops the enemy matched and surpassed it and it just kept going until Tet, when the VC were essentially annihilated as a fighting force.
2. We didn't assault North Vietnam (although we sure wanted to) because we had more than enough warning that China and the Soviets would intervene if we did. We had a full-on Cold War going back then, remember?
3. Besides the Great Society to pay for, we had the Space Race to the moon going, the Civil Rights riots and responses, the Arab-Israeli wars - and as I posted earlier, a well-developed Communist obstruction/propaganda effort going camouflaged as an "antiwar movement".
Great fun for the few of us with the guts and patriotic fervor to go and fight back then.
The Odd Angry Shot (1979)
Lyndon Johnson was warned by the military before he sent in the first American combat troops in 1965 that it would take 500,000 men and 5 years to win a war in Vietnam.
This would have sucked away all of the money that he wanted for his Great Society domestic spending and it would have required dramatically increasing the Army. He wasn’t willing to do either.
And this is also why we don’t have a colony on the moon.
LBJ’s great society hurt this country in many ways.
Lunar exploration couldn’t buy votes like free stuff.
We can expect to see NASA’s budget be slashed if Bernie
and other socialists get their hands on the throttle.
The war was lost because the american (no capital letter for those pukes) people believed the traitorous news media, the doped out hippy, make love not war freaks and all the politicians were CHICKEN SHIT.
I was with 3rd Bn 12th Marines 3rd Mar Div; we never lost a single fight we were in during 68, and 69, it took the civilians and the puke politicians to hand us a loss.
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