Congratulations Piggs !

[Allan from Fallbrook]

[quote=walterwhite]Ted nugent just said he’d be dead or on jail if Obama gets reelected.[/quote]

Scaredy: Question the man’s politics all you want, but you gotta admit, “Stranglehold” is a rock classic. Right up there with Foghat’s “Slow Ride” (as pot-fueled air guitar classics go).

I’m not sure of Foghat’s political leanings, but I’d guess British Labor Party, circa 1979.

[scaredyclassic]

I agree. Sometimes cat scratch fever just plays spontaneously on my head.

[scaredyclassic]

Ho chi minh comes off seeming like a nice guy in the documentary at least thru 1967 where I’m up to.

[Allan from Fallbrook]

[quote=walterwhite]Ho chi minh comes off seeming like a nice guy in the documentary at least thru 1967 where I’m up to.[/quote]

Scaredy: What’s truly fucked up is that Uncle Ho was a big fan of the US (especially due to US support against the Japanese during WWII), until we threw our weight behind de Gaulle and France’s campaign in Indochina (to ensure French backing of NATO as a counterweight to the USSR).

So, billions of dollars and 58,000 American KIA later…

[scaredyclassic]

that was what made me very sympathetic toward uncle ho in the documentary. he asked for our help, we said no, then there was a promise to have free elections but when it was clear that uncle ho would win, we said no elections. I guess we only like elections when someone we like wins. and then we have come to kill everyone to promote democracy.

it’s difficult to feel like the US was in the right in Vietnam after watching the documentary. I guess the rationale was communism is so evil that if everyone in Vietnam has to die to send a message to china and the USSR, then that’s ok.

i had no particular preconception because I didn’t know Dien Bien Phu from Egg Foo Young or to be honest why the heck we were over there in the first place at all. Maybe someone tried to tell me in HS but I was probably thinking about girls.

Uncle Ho seemed like a very patient and thoughtful fellow.

[Allan from Fallbrook]

Scaredy: I worked with an NCO who had done 3 tours in Vietnam with Special Forces. He had a great expression relative to going to war for peace: “Killing for Peace is like fucking for chastity”.

There is a very strong counterpoint to the argument that we were in the wrong in Vietnam, and that is the actions undertaken by the North following the fall of Saigon in 1975. The North Vietnamese effectively liquidated all of their enemies, including those who had fought alongside them during the war.

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.

[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.

[Allan from Fallbrook]

[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).

[Author]

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