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.
Well, like the chart said, the war goals were 80% to fight communism, 20% for the Vietnamese people and establishing a new government. I agree with much of what hellion has said, and I'm glad he cleared up the confusion a poster had about Nixon and the fall of Saigon a few pages back, he explained that well. He also mentions an important point, Russia and China was able to devote a certain percentage of their economic output to produce arms and send advisers like we did to fight the cold war. That effort/output would have turned up somewhere else, had it not been Vietnam. And we had to counter it or some other country would have fallen, and it might have been a lot bigger prize for the communists than Vietnam. Taking Cuba was dream come true for them, I think driving the communists out of Cuba would have done us a lot more good in the long term and been much easier than Vietnam, but Kennedy screwed up the Bay of Pigs invasion and made it a zillion times harder for Johnson to pass on Vietnam after losing Cuba.
Yes, most Vietnam movies do not really portray our soldiers in a favorable light. Some of those movies make for good entertainment but were not the norm of how our troops conducted themselves. I thank all you guys that fought over there, the communists had to devote a vast amount of their limited resources fighting you, and gained territory of no great significance. What you did counted, and you deserve the same respect the WW2 and Korean vets do, and Iraq vets that fought to preserve the petrodollar system that we have been living off of via the great Richard Nixon.
As for the leftist bent to this doc, hate to admit it, but I kinda expect it since Vietnam is the war the liberals put to an end with politics and demonstrations. It needed to end at some point, since we were not willing to go in 100% to begin with. 10 years of that blood bath was enough. Also I hate to admit, movies and TV in general have fallen into the realm of the left, because conservatives have not really been all that interested in making movies going way back. Media sort of falls in the category of the arts and entertainment, it requires a certain amount of creativity and fruit juice that conservatives are not naturally good at. This is partially because you have to wallow in filth sometimes to entertain people and it goes against the religious values of their peers.
Often the subject matter which entertains people, is material a conservative would not touch with a 10 foot pole, it may go against social norms and contain sexual content they don't feel comfortable with. Even today, the conservatives cannot even put out a condensed nightly news program to compete with the liberal networks. They are just not interested in crafting good media, be it TV programs or movies. For the most part all they have are talk radio and Fox news, historically, they have not been behind the cameras in Hollywood for a long long time. Wrong skill set, and making movies and TV shows can be a financially risky venture, conservative prefer a sure thing.
The next episode about the Tet offensive is coming up tomorrow night. Walter Cronkite pronounced the war unwinnable at that point, but in recent years, I have seen lots of commentary that Tet was a win for us? I would like to know more about this phase of the war, and will be watching intently.
Here's an example of the selective reporting engaged in by Burns and Novick in the production of their propaganda documentary on Vietnam.
They are eager to show the public execution of a VC prisoner by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan during the Tet offensive in 1968 as a brutal war crime. We all know the photo, right?
What Burns and Novick do NOT provide, however, is the true background of that act. Here is the truth, via Wikipedia, and the result of a five minute Google search by a 71 year-old Vietnam veteran -- something that Burns and Novick purposely failed to do:
The photo won Adams the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography, though he later regretted its effect. The image became an anti-war icon. Concerning Loan and his famous photograph, Adams wrote in Time:
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?"[10]
Adams later apologized in person to General Nguyễn and his family for the damage it did to his reputation. When Loan died of cancer in Virginia, Adams praised him: "The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him."
Not a word of this is provided by Burns and Novick. Of course their decision to show half-truths and engage in a repetition of the mendacious sensationalism of the American media during the Vietnam war is not surprising, given their political beliefs. But it is near-criminal that so little attention is paid to their cynical lies and distortions. This series will provide the only information about the war to generations of American students. Let that sink in....
Last edited by Ibginnie; 09-24-2017 at 02:52 PM..
Reason: hot linking
Ho Chi Minh wasn't a communist at first. He pleaded with the US for help but was turned away. Out of desperation, he turned to the Soviet Union and China for help to fight for independence. The North won and Vietnam became a communist country, but they didn't export communism to any country. US invasion of Vietnam didn't solve anything or stop communism from spreading. How do I know this? Because after the North won, they spread didn't spread communism to Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc.
I get a chuckle when some folks project what's in their head as real.
you are clueless about HO Chi Minh,,,,,he was always a communist and a murderer and by the way, his real name was Nguyen Sinh Cung. He got his communist/Marxist ideas while in France from 1919 to 1923 and then he went to the Soviet Union in 1923. He was employed by the Comintern (International Communist Organization that advocated world communism) studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (also called Stalin School).....press forward, during the power struggle in 1945 after WW 2, the Viet Minh killed members of rival groups, such as the leader of the Constitutional Party, Bui Quang Chieu, the head of the Party for Independence, and NGO Dinh Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Khoi. Ho, when asked by a reporter about the murder of Ta Thu Thau, a leading Trotskyist and personal friend, answered matter-of-factly, "Anyone who does not follow the line determined by me will be smashed."........he learned that and many other things at the Stalin University ( Communist University of the Toilers of the East) he was an honor student there.
In 1946, Nguyen Sinh Cung, err I meant Ho and his subordinates imprisoned 2,500 non-communist nationalists and forced 6,000 others to flee. Hundreds of political opponents were jailed or exiled in July 1946, notable members of the National Party of Vietnam and the Dai Viet National Party. All rival political parties were hereafter banned and local governments were purged to minimize opposition later on.
His sheet of murders, crimes and human rights violations against his own people is long to type it in here. You just have to read his whole biography not just what the communist government of Vietnam puts out.
and this Vietnamese trash is who are you defending? what about the millions of people in North and South Vietnam that he screwed over and ruined their lives that its felt today?
Yeledaf had to remind me "Except for Laos and Cambodia."......try again..lol
Last edited by Ibginnie; 09-24-2017 at 02:53 PM..
Reason: hot linking
yeah I forgot about them ......Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese attempt to overrun Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.
Now we all know about the killing fields in Cambodia....but shhhh DON'T tell that to the left in this country, it wasn't worth it, to save their own skins they are willing to make a deal with the slave masters and seal the fate of millions of people.
Communism is as evil as Nazism, its just the left in our country will NEVER admit to it.
Give me an F-4. I'll go back. I am sick and tired of seeing the North Vietnamese proudly in their uniforms telling how they killed Americans. Ken Burns is just another anti American liberal/progressive. Let him live under the yoke of Communist OPPRESSION. I stopped watching this crap.
How embarrassing it must be for the most powerful military power to lose the war to some rice eating little hut people!
The Vietnamese knew what they were fighting for -- independence from foreign invaders. What was the US fighting for in a tiny foreign country thousands of miles away again? Oh, oh yeah to stop communism, protect democracy, etc. so that Americans can sleep at night.
Yes, they went into Cambodia, but there's more to that story. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces had installed the most villainous brand of communism, they were aligned with the Maoist "Great Leap Backwards" style of governing, similar to Stalin/North Korea style of governing, it included the genocide of millions. Cambodia was allied with China and this inflated their egos, they decided to get cute and do a little invading across the border into Vietnam. Within a very short time, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and kicked their asses. They installed a new government with their own brand of communism which was considerably softer than that of Mao, and he was pretty uptight about it.
So in 1979 China sent 300K troops across the border into northern Vietnam. They suffered heavy losses and Vietnam ran the same guerrilla warfare tactics they used on us, with almost no help from Russia this time around. China lasted about 3 weeks and got their asses handed to them. Vietnam stayed put in Cambodia until 1989, lol. China never made it more than 15 miles into Vietnam before they were turned back. I don't know much about Laos, but I find the Laotian character Khan Souphanousinphone and his family from the animated TV show King of the Hill, to be very entertaining. I feel that King of the Hill has given me great insight to the Laotian people and feel much more knowledgeable about them now because of that show.
How embarrassing it must be for the most powerful military power to lose the war to some rice eating little hut people!
The Vietnamese knew what they were fighting for -- independence from foreign invaders. What was the US fighting for in a tiny foreign country thousands of miles away again? Oh, oh yeah to stop communism, protect democracy, etc. so that Americans can sleep at night.
^^^^^ the expert in Vietnam that paints Ho as a real humanitarian, the POS that murdered and tortured and jailed his own people
actually, those rice eating little hut people were being supplied and aided by 2 nuclear Super Powers in China and the Soviet Union and we were fighting in their terrain with 1 hand tied behind our backs. They never overran South Vietnam until we left. That tells you all about the best military in the world. Now without China and the Soviet Union to prevent a global nuclear war, North Vietnam would be a parking lot today.
Do you call communism real independence?
Vietnam is the real loser....they traded a master for another master in communism......just like the Who song goes: "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
About agent orange... we were at the VA office last year, DH was just getting registered. Some places give discounts just for having the current VA card. We talked about a lot of things. The VA officer told DH that they consider everybody who ever served in Viet Nam exposed to Agent Orange. He made no special references to areas, he said everybody.
DH served on a base, worked on all the big trucks and equipment. He said they kept the areas all around the base cleared of all vegetation so they could see who was trying to come in to the base.
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.
