[quote=briansd1]My dad talked quite a bit about Vietnam so I was interested growing up. And I read about the war on my own.
In hindsight, we should have supported Vietnamese independence from France and allowed a newly independent Vietnam to take over after the Japanese surrendered after WWII. At that time Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist and not aligned with either China or the USSR.
What did we get out of our involvement in Vietnam? Nothing but social divisions and huge loss of blood and treasure.
Vietnam is now 20 to 30 years behind China in terms of development. If we had done the right thing, Vietnam today would be more like Taiwan, or at least on par with Malaysia, in terms of economic development
So we screwed ourselves and screwed the Vietnamese people by siding with the French who weren’t even grateful.
[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]
We had a former Viet Cong major working with us in Jungle Warfare School. He and his family had fought the Japanese, the French and the Americans and his reward for all this was having nearly his entire family killed by the North Vietnamese in 1978, during a “purge” of “counter-revolutionaries”. He and one of his brothers escaped to Thailand and thence to the US.
Sometimes it ain’t Good and Bad, its Bad and Worse.[/quote]
The cycle of revenge and retribution takes place after people start taking sides and after the killing begins. So better not to start wars in the first place.
Here’s the novel on which the Oliver Stone movie was based upon. The author lives in San Diego.
Brian: Good post and I agree with you (yes, I know, and it scares me, too).
The more worrisome thing that emerged from Vietnam was US aptitude at waging “shadow wars”. The Phoenix Program during Vietnam is a good example of this. We’re now extremely proficient at Black Ops (think JSOC, the NSA, and similar programs and agencies) and have seen a commensurate attenuation of civil liberties during this same period.
Regardless of administration, we’re all too ready to sacrifice liberty for “security”.
It goes to the argument that perhaps we’d’ve been better off listening to Eisenhower and his warning about the Military-Industrial Complex (and it’s sister industry, the Prisoner-Industrial Complex).
