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Robert McNamara was the highly controversial Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ which included the Cuban Missile Crisis and The Vietnam War...where he admits that we were wrong. He served under Curtis Lemay in WW2 and planned in the Japanese Fire bombings...which he said today would be considered war crimes. The fire bombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 civilians in one night.
It is a fascinating documentary. The entire documentary is in his own words.
WWII had more casualties, and it had a higher draft enlistment rate. In fact, Vietnam had a higher share of voluntary enlistment.
That’s not the whole story though.
If you couldn’t avoid the draft during Vietnam, you were better off voluntarily enlisting so that you could at least pick a branch of service and a job specialty. If they had to come get you, you were very likely to end up in the field in a combat arms MOS or a field medic.
We’d also had a tremendous growth in population between the two wars, so there was a large pool of young men who wanted to serve with the idealism that their fathers had in WW2.
Robert McNamara was the highly controversial Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ which included the Cuban Missile Crisis and The Vietnam War...where he admits that we were wrong. He served under Curtis Lemay in WW2 and planned in the Japanese Fire bombings...which he said today would be considered war crimes. The fire bombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 civilians in one night.
It is a fascinating documentary. The entire documentary is in his own words.
It’s one of the saddest documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s a profile of a broken man who’s haunted by bad decisions resulting from the nonsensical madness that was the Cold War. He admits that we got Vietnam wrong from start to finish.
Noteworthy is how prescient it is given our disproportionate response to 9/11. And our defense establishment is still infected by the same Cold War inanities that were so prevalent back then.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bureaucat
Woyld War II was the last major war where there were easily defined aggressors. We were also attacked and under a real threat as a nation. We weren’t threatened by Korea or Vietnam.
Vietnam was a Civil War that we involved ourselves in due to the false narrative over Soviet controlled world communism. The old Domino Theory.
What I 'd really like to hear a rational explanation of is: Given the combined land masses and populations of the USSR and China at the time, the two biggest Communist! threats the US faced in 1965, HOW would the fall of Vietnam to Communism! , or even Vietnam and its surrounding countries, have significantly increased any threat the US faced? I've been asking that since I was in high school in 1965 and have never gotten a sensible answer.
good point. OP remember that in world war two we were fighting for our very existence as a country. the japanese had intended to invade the hawaiian islands, but chose not to after the initial attacks had stirred up a hornets nest.
vietnam however was a political war. initially we took over for the french after their sound defeat at dien bien phu. after that they lost the initiative for that war. initially we were just sending over advisers and trainers to get the south vietnam military up to speed so they could handle their own affairs, both eisenhower and kennedy did this. johnson however kicked things up several notches by getting us into that war full throttle. it was then that the politics of the war came home to roost. demonstrations against the war, political micromanaging the war from washington, etc. all made the war very unpopular here at home. but it was also a very public war. the news media kept it on the forefront of the news on a nightly basis, and they pretty much only showed the negative aspects of the war.
and when kronkite said the war was lost after the tet offensive, thats when everyone here at home knew that no matter what happened afterwards, it was always going to be the war we lost. in point of fact kronkite was wrong on the tet offensive, the viet cong and the NVA lost everything they gained in the opening moves of the tet offensive, and more.
as for the korean war, yes it is the forgotten war, and thats too bad. while it also was a political war, not as much as vietnam though, it should still be remembered more than it is.
Not true, the Japanese were no threat to us and they knew it.
Our victory in WW2 guaranteed our control of the pacific.
Robert McNamara was the highly controversial Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ which included the Cuban Missile Crisis and The Vietnam War...where he admits that we were wrong. He served under Curtis Lemay in WW2 and planned in the Japanese Fire bombings...which he said today would be considered war crimes. The fire bombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 civilians in one night.
It is a fascinating documentary. The entire documentary is in his own words.
Robert McNamara was a foolish man who believed virtually any issue could be reduced to numbers and utterly failed to understand the deep emotional attachment the Vietnamese people had to their ancestral lands, that it was a fool's errand thinking we could move people around their country at our will to accommodate our own poorly made plans.
Because Americans have been brainwashed into believing it was a justified war.
Only those with the lowest intelligence quotients believe Vietnam (and Korea) was a justified war.
Since no one else has asked you why it was not justified, I will. If you have something to teach me, feel free to do so now.
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threats the US faced in 1965, HOW would the fall of Vietnam to Communism! 
