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The rest of you poor bastards that, like me, earned our memories: Welcome back to the world. Someday it might be home. I ain't quite there yet. Some tales are best never told. No no one will believe you anyway.
Memorial Day and the 4th leave me very bummed out. Thanks for listening.
I think you are still a patriot, Stillkit. Cynical? Sure, but a true patriot sticks by our country, in good and bad times alike. Questioning government is no more important that accepting our mistakes. Both are equally patriotic.
I trust patriots but never trust True Believers.
The rest of you poor bastards that, like me, earned our memories: Welcome back to the world. Someday it might be home. I ain't quite there yet. Some tales are best never told. No no one will believe you anyway.
Memorial Day and the 4th leave me very bummed out. Thanks for listening.
I feel much the same, Greg, even though I was as lucky after coming home as I was in service. I'm an Idahoan. Our National Guard was one of only 2 units that went to Nam and a group and came out as a group, so there was a big homecoming for the Idaho kids. We largely escaped the feelings of isolation due to it. But I had friends who were killed and crippled, and a vet is a vet, no matter what your politics are. I don't think any of us came back the same as when we left.
But all those yellow ribbon magnets I saw plastered on cars during the first years of Iraq sickened me. As if a magnet with "Support Your Troops" meant a damn thing. Nothing but political chest thumping and a dog-whistle slogan.
Supporting the troops means sending a letter, sending some TP or face wipes, or something- just a gesture from home. It means going over and talking to the young wife down the block, letting her vent out her fears.I do that stuff, because that's what vets do.
All the talk these days rings very hollow. The country never paid the full sacrificial price for Viet Nam, and it hasn't even come close in the wars we are in now. If it had, I doubt very seriously we would have ever seen all the divisions our society has now. Nothing since World War II has hit the entire nation to the bone.
I don't participate in superficials these days, but I still fly my flag. It has 48 stars- my Grandfather left it for me. He was a WWI vet.
I'm sorry Diogenes, but I simply don't see things as cut and dried as you.
We certainly were a party to the division of Viet Nam, but all the rest was a policy of lumpage.
We were bamboozeled by our fear after the Soviets got an A-bomb of their own. Forever afterward, any Communist was a bad Communist. And at the same time, we somehow believed that Communism had an allure that would suck any country that was not in our fold to it like a magnet.
Russian paranoia of the west propelled them into keeping the E. European countries they took back from the Germans as a buffer between them and Western Europe, and our paranoia on the Soviet Bloc created NATO, which equalized the paranoia on both sides.
SEATO- the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization- was an American concoction created from lumpage- Asian Communists must be just like European Communists. SEATO only worked to relieve our paranoia. It never worked in practice, and we spent 50,000 lives before we finally accepted that fact.
It doesn't matter at all what the N. Vietnamese were called, or who supported them, or the spurious reasons we went in and stayed in until the bitter end.
Our hubris and paranoia propped up a puppet government from the first, and the North wanted a nation free of Western dominance. So did the South. Historically, those are the only valid explanation as to the war. Everything else is just historical detail.
If we had not intervened, it's impossible to say who would have prevailed after the Diem family bit the dirt.
The proof is in the pudding...
Viet Nam has healed itself and put away it's old divisions. Those divisions were lethal and bloody, brother against brother, just like our Civil War. They reconciled and got on with rebuilding and life.
And we are still oozing infection from our unhealed wounds nearly 50 years later.
Just a quick comment on this part alone. I think the actual assertion was "we never lost a major engagement", which IS true. The problem was, Mister Victor Charlie avoided major engagements whenever possible. We lost a LOT of smaller engagements, and skirmishes, and ambushes, and...
On the other hand, to the WIA/KIA and their families that's a distinction without a difference.
Research the battle at Kham Duc and you'll see it differently. Or, LZ Mary Ann or Lang Vei or LZ Ripcord, just for starters.
But, I suppose it all depends upon what we consider a "major" battle.
Here's how I have applied the Vietnam Experience in today's environment. On Memorial Day, I have done this each and every year since 2004 (in other words, both Bush AND Obama). The pics are from 2007, so the figures on the last pic are significantly out of date. The pics are from left to right, and the sequence is ab-so-damn-lutely intentional.
BTW, the numbers are the official count of those Killed In Action (KIA's).
So, do y'all think I made my point?
-- Nighteyes
Last edited by Nighteyes; 07-07-2011 at 12:03 PM..
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