nazi skins at my 7-11...

[Guest imported_Tesseract]

http://www.turnerlearning.com/cnn/coldwar/images/viet_ey6.gif'>

I agree with Smart, that war was fought with ignorance, the french and the US did the same mistake, same card was used by G.Giap in both cases...

[KaBar]

A Guaranteed Unpopular View

 

If the American people had supported the war in Vietnam, we would have won it. The most effective front was the American front. We held the best hand, militarialy speaking. But the North Vietnamese very wisely realized that the American public did not care about Vietnam, certainly did not care enough to see it's sons die there in a fight against Communism. And they exploited that. The American left is responsible for creating that opportunity. Richard Nixon tried to counter this with Ending the Draft, but it was too little, too late. Unless he was willing to fight one war in Vietnam and another war here at home, there was only one choice. Pull out. Which he did.

The North Vietnamese never did anything as stupid as attacking the United States by crashing airliners into buildings. If they had, they knew that it would have awakened the sleeping tiger, and that is the last thing they wanted to do.

 

All I can say is Giap was a shitload more sophisticated than Osama bin Laden. Al-Quaida has no jungle to hide beneath, either. The Middle East is near-perfect tank and air attack country. It looks like the Delta Corridor at 29 Palms National Training Center. "Bombs Away."

[Guest imported_Tesseract]

Re: A Guaranteed Unpopular View: I wonder why!?

 

Originally posted by KaBar

If the American people had supported the war in Vietnam, we would have won it.

 

*Yes, thats exactly the reason why vietnamese won the war, Americans didnt had in mind what ARMY OF ALL THE PEOPLE meant...

 

 

The most effective front was the American front. We held the best hand, militarialy speaking. But the North Vietnamese very wisely realized that the American public did not care about Vietnam, certainly did not care enough to see it's sons die there in a fight against Communism. And they exploited that. The American left is responsible for creating that opportunity.

 

*You're constantly talking about how FREE America is and still, you'd prefer a great ammount of Americans to stop reasoning? Why Kabar? Why should Americans fight this war?

 

 

Richard Nixon tried to counter this with Ending the Draft, but it was too little, too late. Unless he was willing to fight one war in Vietnam and another war here at home, there was only one choice. Pull out. Which he did.

 

* I think he fought both, and lost both

 

 

The North Vietnamese never did anything as stupid as attacking the United States by crashing airliners into buildings. If they had, they knew that it would have awakened the sleeping tiger, and that is the last thing they wanted to do.

 

*The north vietnamese WERE NOT terrorists, their best concern was to kick out any intruders, french or americans...and they did that. Who woke the Tiger??? who the Tiger was???

 

 

All I can say is Giap was a shitload more sophisticated than Osama bin Laden. Al-Quaida has no jungle to hide beneath, either. The Middle East is near-perfect tank and air attack country. It looks like the Delta Corridor at 29 Palms National Training Center. "Bombs Away."

 

*Kabar, in this post you sound like a total fascist, preety ignorant to. I understand that everyman has a country that respects and loves but i think you're over that limit. I dont know if its your age, your experiences or your brain but seriously you cant compare different things with that ease, This aint no PC matter...it has do to with the truth

[Guest NATO]

just face it you lost.

[KaBar]

It's not ignorant to tell the truth

 

Tesseract---Every time somebody disagrees with you, you say that they are "ignorant" and "sound like a facsist." I don't buy that. I protested the war in Vietnam for YEARS. I wanted our soldiers the hell out of there. I hated LBJ, and I hated Nixon even more, but that does not change a thing about why the U.S. did not win the war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese weren't one tenth as formidable an adversary as were the Nazis, and the Allies obliterated the Nazis altogether. The American people simply did not support the war in Vietnam. But if they had supported it, we would have conquered the Vietnamese. The problem is, NOBODY WANTED VIETNAM. All those half-baked ideas about oil in the South China Sea and all that were a bunch of hooey. We got sucked into Vietnam through the efforts of the CIA during Eisenhower's administration, and then Jack Kennedy inherited that, and LBJ re-started the war that Kennedy was trying to wind down, and said that he was simply carrying on Kennedy's policies. If there had been any legitimate reason for the U.S. to be in Vietnam, the American people would have supported it. But there was an enormous widespread feeling among everybody except the ultra-left-wing political extremist do-gooders that there was not a thing in Vietnam worth a SINGLE American boy's life. THAT'S why the American people did not support the war, not because we were in the slightest bit worried that we would lose. Everybody knew we could win if we were willing to kill them all. Nobody was willing to have their son killed over a piece of shit country like Vietnam. Hell, if it had been Britain, or France, or any place that we cared about as a people, maybe we would have been WILLING to go there and fight. But frankly, the people were NOT WILLING. It may piss you off, but that doesn't matter. I did not know one single person who willingly volunteered to fight except my brother-in-law. And he only went because the Marine Corps sent him there. It doesn't make me "ignorant" because I didn't give a fuck about Vietnam. I mourn all those kids that went there and died, trying to do what the government asked them to do. It was a complete waste, in my opinion. But for you to say that the United States was "defeated" by the Vietnamese is ridiculous. We just packed up our shit and (finally) flew back to the Land of the Big P.X. Basically, it just wasn't worth it. Not to me, and not to anybody else. In the words of the times "Fuck Vietnam."

 

Want to argue about Columbia? It's "batter up" time in South America, and I've got a feeling we are soon to be hip deep in the narco-wars within five years. Not to mention the fact that Filipino forces are hunting al-Quaida terrorists in the Phillipine Islands, and before long, probably in Indonesia. There will be plenty of little wars to protest for years to come. People will make a vocation of it, like we did back in the '60s.

[Mr. Mang]

weren't we defeated if we had to airlift so many of our guys out of saigon because the enemy was closing in?

 

in my opinion (as if it matters) vietnam was stupid not because of the land issue, but the fact that we were fighting communism. who gives a fuck if somebody is communist? not our business. like if canada somehow became an anarchist system i'd say "good for you. rock on canada." why fight a war because you disagree with someone's political beliefs? was communism truly THAT bad?

 

i give respect for all of the activists who stood up. it may sound meanspirited, but it's hard to pity anyone who went over there to fight communism. maybe they should have questioned shit before they went. call me unamerican or unpatriotic, but i'm not going to fight in a war i dont agree in.

 

the gov't can suggit. better to be a live rat than a dead lion in this case.

 

please feel free to correct me on anything. i'm no professor, i just call it like i know it.

[KaBar]

Mr. Mang---The vast majority of American ground forces had been already removed from Vietnam by sometime in 1972 or '73 if memory serves. I'm not a historian, although I do enjoy history. The 1975 "evacuation of Saigon" refers to the airlifting of U.S. Embassy personnel, the Marine embassy guards and as many of the Vietnamese employees of the U.S. Government as we could get out. It was chaos--the South Vietnamese Army broke and ran. There were piles of American-supplied rifles and boots and uniforms everywhere. (In fact, a lot of these captured rifles showed up in black-market arms deals made by North Vietnamese Army officers later, in various places around the world.) The Vietnamese population of Saigon was extremely anxious, they were convinced that the NVA would execute them (this turned out to be only somewhat true) and they knew that the Americans had plans to air-lift out Vietnamese embassy workers, so they mobbed the embassy, panicked, trying to escape. The Americans tried to fly out thousands of orphans ("Operation Babylift") and I know several nurses who flew on Babylift flights, trying to keep sick and injured babies alive until they could get to Japan or Guam with them. Many of the orphans were half-American and there was a great fear that they would be murdered. I have a neighbor who was a South Vietnamese pilot. He flew until he arrived back at the base to re-load and re-fuel, and found his ground crew had fled, and the base being over-run. He took off again, flew close to an American ship, and ditched in the ocean.

War is bad. It's even worse if you get hurt or killed fighting for a cause you don't agree with. That is pretty much why the American people did not support the war there. I enlisted in the Marines in 1976. Jimmy Carter had been elected President. I didn't figure he would start any stupid wars to no reasonable purpose.

[Mr. Mang]

thanks for the info. it's funny (yet somewhat sad) i can learn more from a post like yours than i can in 7 hours in school...

 

semper fi do or die!

[KaBar]

Well, thank you. If you are interested, there are a bunch of series of video-tapes on Vietnam, one was called "The Ten-Thousand Day War." There's a book by that title, too. Newsreel, a left-wing, "Movement" film collective produced a film during Vietnam that was called "People's War" (1970.) It was an analysis of the war up to that point, and had a lot of scenes of heroic anti-aircraft gun crews, people transporting rice, medical supplies and other non-lethal looking goods down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I don't recall seeing any pictures of them transporting arms and ammunition and mines and rockets, but I'm sure they did so. The North Vietnamese were good soldiers and they fought hard. In the Regimental Headquarters of the 9th Marines, on Camp Hansen, Okinawa, there was a large display of captured weapons, Viet Cong flags, etc. Popular myth had it that the 9th Marines were headquartered in Okinawa, rather than the States, because they were the only Marine Regiment to ever be over-run by the NVA and lose the regimental colors (the Marine Corps flags) and so the regiment was not permitted to return home as a unit. I don't know if this is B.S. or not, but last time I checked, they were still there. The unit of course, not the actual Marines individually. They came home in small groups as their enlistments were up. 1/9 was known as "The Walking Dead" because they lost so many men, virtually all the officers and NCOs and Marines were brand-new, and the battalion got hurt bad every time they got into a fight. My brother-in-law was a platoon commander in 2/9. "Hell in a Helmet." The name came from WWII. My own battalion was 2/1 (2nd Battalion, 1st Marines.) They were called "The Professionals." Again, a handle from WWII or Korea.