Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Two years in SE Asia in the Marine Corps. Back home years later and watching those helicopters leaving Saigon. All our people who went through that. Emotions running high. I still remember and always will.
When I saw those choppers being pushed over the side of that carrier was when it hit me. I took it as a deliberate, personal insult. They could have shipped those birds home.
The Vietnam War was conceived in American arrogance, was perpetrated by American politicians and some military leaders. It accomplished little but psychological devastation and national disgrace.
The fault lies with people Like McNamara, Westmoreland, LBJ, and others in leadership positions. The people that served there were not to be blamed and they should be honored for their sacrifices.
The war was to draw a line against communist expansion. That was not arrogance, it was self-protection, and protection for the South Vietnamese into the bargain.
Losing any war is hard to take, but losing one needlessly, because our leaders refused to take the measures necessary for victory, is what produces "psychological devastation".
As for "national disgrace", that should read "Democratic Party disgrace", for it was the Democrats' desire to destroy Nixon that led them to cut the legs out from under the gallantly resisting South Vietnamese by shutting off the supply of aid. The Democrats, who did the most to get the war rolling, in the end saw the opportunity to pin a defeat on their political arch-enemy as more important than cleaning up their mess, and more important than the freedom of the millions of South Vietnamese who had trusted us.
When the French ultimately failed, we laughed it off as the French being weak and it couldn’t possibly happen to us. But just like the west supplying Ukraine
...
You can't be comparing allowing the French imperialists back to VN with helping the Ukrainians fight off the neo-imperialist Russians, can you? Using your terms, what we're doing for Ukraine now would be closer to "giving Viet Nam back to the Vietnamese", except that the Ukrainians are the rightful owners of their entire country, with the support of a majority of Ukrainians, including Russian speakers, as Ho and his clique in the North never were vis a vis the rest of Vietnam.
Quote:
But anyway, getting back to how Truman botched the decision to help the French in Vietnam after WWII. I believe his advisors outright lied to him in order to get him to commit to this idea.
It's almost inconceivable that an administration riddled with commies wouldn't have gladly handed over VN to a known communist.
Quote:
But can you imagine how useful of an ally Vietnam would be to us right now in keeping China in check? They would be our strongest ally in the region, and they would never have forgotten how we had given them their country back.
This depends on the very shaky assumption that Ho would have played ball with us. And again, it wasn't "his" country to be given possession of. Millions of Southerners would have "never forgotten" how we handed them over to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese communists. Whereas today, in any Vietnamese-American neighborhood, American veterans of the war are honored and thanked for their efforts.
Vietnam was a mess and most countries that had anything to do with Post WW2 knew this, which is why the British couldn't wait to hand the place back to the French.
Britain had some success in terms of fighting the communist and other forces, however any progress was limited due to a lack of reinforcements.
As for the French they just made things worse and left an even bigger mess.
Whilst the US campaign, became a giant waste of decent young American lives, and as a consequence lacked the support of the American public back home.
Vietnam was a mess and most countries that had anything to do with Post WW2 knew this, which is why the British couldn't wait to hand the place back to the French.
Britain had some success in terms of fighting the communist and other forces, however any progress was limited due to a lack of reinforcements.
As for the French they just made things worse and left an even bigger mess.
Whilst the US campaign, became a giant waste of decent young American lives, and as a consequence lacked the support of the American public back home.
There is hardly any mention of the over 250,000 south Vietnamese soldiers who died fighting against the north…….it was not just the “imperialist Americans”
There is hardly any mention of the over 250,000 south Vietnamese soldiers who died fighting against the north…….it was not just the “imperialist Americans”
The video just highlighted the early post WW2 problems in Vietnam , rather than going in to the Civil War that would later emerge.
The whole thing was a mess, and no country that had ever had anything to do with Vietnam wanted to get involve in the US led war.
As for the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh he lived in NYC (Harlem), Boston, London and Paris, and worked various jobs in mainly in Hotels Kitchens, and he even trained as a pastry chef at the Carlton Hotel in London and it was only later in Paris that he became politicised as joined the French Socialist Party before travelling to Moscow in the Soviet Union in order to complete his communist indoctrination.
Last edited by Brave New World; 01-26-2023 at 09:23 AM..
The US should never have been in Vietnam. That war ripped our country apart and I don't think we've ever gotten over it. Younger people today don't realize there was a different direction this country could have gone in. They only know the US after Vietnam. They don't understand how the US timeline got changed by the war or how much better off we could have been if it weren't for the Vietnam war.
When I saw those choppers being pushed over the side of that carrier was when it hit me. I took it as a deliberate, personal insult. They could have shipped those birds home.
After a certain point, there just was no room left on the carriers, IIRC. So many desperate escapees.
I graduated in 87. At that time I believed Nixon started the Vietnam war based upon how my teachers talked about him and the war.
It is amazing how the Left does that to the actual history, all the time.
Some fascinating history: In Nixon's White House, there were younger advisors, among them a then younger Ben Stein (a lawyer, White House policy analyst, and law professor, before he became the small time actor who bored the students into comas in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off") who urged Dick and Spiro to "Just withdraw, get out, and blame Vietnam on the Democrats," because it just was not winnable given political constraints. Even if that meant a humiliating communist victory on their watch.
Nixon chose not to do that, partly because he hoped he could get the Republic of (South) Vietnam to stand on its own as long as the US aid and air strikes kept going (a.k.a. "Vietnamization"), but even more importantly because of the surprising strength of the "Bombs Away With Wallace And LeMay" campaign. Forget Ross Perot's Cult of Personality, 1968 was the last election that actually had a real 3rd party. It not only won 5 states electorally, but even had high popular vote percentages - outside of its Deep South core area. The History that gives the 1960s a romantic hagiography forgets that fact. A sizeable percentage of the American electorate still wanted to go in, and harder core at that. And even more strikingly, that support apparently came from the working class most likely to fight the war, rather than the upper and middle classes using connections to buy their way out or going deeper into colleges as a draft deferment.
And even more importantly, the polling data among Americans, if you look at it closely, was increasingly anti-war, but not in the way many would think and sadly still do think. Few saw the view of the Far Left that the war was a crime and a moral outrage. The overwhelming polls of the anti-war people saw it rather as a mistake, and that the USA strategy was failing to win. At best/worst (depending upon whose point of view), they shared the view of Ben Stein and the other younger staffers in the Nixon White House that the war was just not winnable.
Even after the My Lai Massacre came to light, the polling sentiment, if you dig into it, was not mostly that "American troops are baby-killers", but rather mostly that "War is hell and we can't tell friend from foe and that's why tragedies like that happen."
Last edited by NickB1967; 04-21-2023 at 02:18 PM..
The video just highlighted the early post WW2 problems in Vietnam , rather than going in to the Civil War that would later emerge.
The whole thing was a mess, and no country that had ever had anything to do with Vietnam wanted to get involve in the US led war.
As for the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh he lived in NYC (Harlem), Boston, London and Paris, and worked various jobs in mainly in Hotels Kitchens, and he even trained as a pastry chef at the Carlton Hotel in London and it was only later in Paris that he became politicised as joined the French Socialist Party before travelling to Moscow in the Soviet Union in order to complete his communist indoctrination.
Yes, but by then, he was in fact a committed communist and would have sided with the Soviet Union in the upcoming Cold War.
Honestly? Ike Eisenhower probably dropped the ball when he ruled out using Strategic Air Command to saturation bomb the Vietminh artillery and other base positions around Dien Bien Phu. Believe it or not, the French leadership were NOT as dumb as we have been led to think and they actually DID have the right idea - lure the Vietminh army into a set piece battle and wipe it out. They just underestimated the enemy firepower, and overestimated their own, and thus who would wipe out whom.
Colonialism would still have ended anyway - look at the rest of the world - but it could have been with a West friendly Vietnam rather than a divided and later Communist one.
Last edited by NickB1967; 04-21-2023 at 02:20 PM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
