Kerry Lied
Millions Died
The dye for failure was cast during the Korean War. When American soldiers were locked in lethal combat with hordes of Chinese and their commanders were not allowed to attack their staging and supply sanctuaries in China despite the fact the US has nuclear weapons, many American soldiers died and victory was not achieved. The US never destroyed North Vietnam’s capacity to wage war by placing absurd restrictions on its military commanders. The result was many American deaths and failure. Same pattern today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Caesar and Sherman were both right. Either you wage war or you don’t.
cudda, shudda been won earlier. The Christmas bombing proved that.
A number of years back, I was watching the Christmas 1976 episode of “All in the Family”. That, of course, was when a draft dodging friend of Mike Stivic’s comes to the Bunkers for dinner without first knowing that a friend of Archie’s, who lost a son in Vietnam, was also going to be there. I can remember at one point Mike lecturing to Archie “can’t you just admit we were wrong to be there to begin with?” Knowing that at that time in 1976, there were absolutely unspeakable things going on both in Vietnam and Cambodia with the Killing Fields, reeducation camps, etc, I was completely repulsed by the program. What utter selfishness of the Left and their friends in Hollywood concerning all of this, and that TV episode captures that sort of thing.
The other thing I’d like to mention is my Dad (even though very much liberal) one time telling me he had coworkers at his former company’s headquarters in Boston who knew a few of the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. As a result, while it has never been fashionable here in Canada, my thoughts still go out to decent and brave Americans who knew they were doing the right thing there in fighting these brutal, evil people that could and should have been beaten. Instead, thanks to Hollywood and Democrats who would have never let Nixon have this success, we all know what took place instead.
Congressional creeps. Same-same today.
I remember seeing bumper stickers in the early ‘70s that said: “VietNam? When I came home we were winning.”
It is interesting to recall that there were almost 70,000 SEATO troops, including almost 50,000 Koreans, fighting with us in Vietnam at the peak of their involvement in 67-68.
Politics. Never were allowed initially to go in and take over Hanoi and its harbor bringing in in Russian arms or to attack the Chinese supply bases. It was all downhill politics from there.
The minute we entered it in a half-assed manner.
I recently did a search of newspaper archive on my unit in Viet Nam for the time I was there.
What I read surprised me. The newspapers were reporting as it happened where the units were, the size of the units what their goal was along with casualties.
How hard would it have been for the Soviets to send copies to North Viet Nam?
I have now come to the conclusion we were never suppose to “win” the war. Viet Nam was a proxy war, designed to bleed the communist nations. Our leaders were willing to spend money and the other side was willing to spend blood.
In this case, with a fifth column working in our nation, the side wiling to do a rope a dope won that war.
I will leave it to historians to decides if the strategy was the correct one, and in the end who won the ideological war since all our elite leaders as well as the main stream media appear to be socialist, I suspect we lost that war as well.
the Soviets had issued an order to the Soviet navy to provide escorts for Soviet merchant vessels in the event that Haiphong was blockaded or a Soviet vessel bombed in Haiphong harbor. This order also allegedly called for efforts to break any blockade, including steps to sweep minefields.
politicians LOST... not the military
for future wars politicians must serve on the FRONT LINES AT POINT for 6 months .....
raymond engineering
morrison knudsen (now washington group)
brown and root
j a jones
CRONY KICKBACK CAPITALISM.....
rmkbrj
vinell
rockwell
lockheed general dnamics boeing northrup grumman ge (we bring death to life)
beware of the military industrial comples.... IKE
why
because they fabricate WAR and reap the profits...
THE VOLUNTEER MILITARY IS FODER FOR THE CORRUPTOCRATS
obama empties his colon on them... same for hildebeast
WAKE UP
I saw a news story several years ago about a fellow who had been a North Vietnamese Soldier fighting in South Vietnam when South Vietnam fell. He said that at that time, there were no North Vietnamese males left in North Vietnam. The males in North Vietnam at that time were Chinese. Every able-bodied North Vietnamese male had been sent to South Vietnam.
The Chinese were quietly filling up North Vietnam and we were quietly killing those Chinese Soldiers.
We emptied the male population out of North Vietnam, but the Chinese back-filled them.
And look at what they won. A whole new crop of rich and powerful. The Chinese were moving factories to Vietnam a few years ago because they could get away with paying workers $100 a month. There’s a victory for communism. The head guys are being driven around in Mercedes limousines while the regular people are working for $5 a day.
The DEMOCRATS lost the war just as they are doing in the mid east and with the same results.
A US invasion of North Vietnam would have put American troops on China's border. This was seen as out of the question because it was calculated -- correctly -- as certain to lead to direct military intervention by China, just as happened in Korea. This would put the US in another lengthy and costly Asian war with China that would weaken NATO and undermine our position in Europe. This would in turn create a dangerous military and political opening for the Soviets to force Europe to abandon NATO and align with the USSR in return for a guarantee against military attack and a relatively free hand in domestic matters.
Our original goal in South Vietnam was to brake the progress of Communism in Asia. In the 1950s and 1960s, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, and several other countries in the region were seen as vulnerable if Communism prevailed in South Vietnam. In the 1960 campaign, Jack Kennedy took up that view and criticized the Eisenhower administration's refusal to commit to a defense of South Vietnam.
Once in office, Kennedy put US advisers and troops into South Vietnam. With our men on the ground in combat and South Vietnam's government disintegrating, we were stuck. We then discovered that as much as Kennedy and Johnson and the country did not want to lose in South Vietnam, we had no clear understanding of how to achieve victory.
Worse, the US Army lacked the institutional knowledge of how to defeat a popular insurgency. As it was, Westmoreland -- beloved of his fellow generals but vain and dense as a rock -- adopted search and destroy tactics that put the US tactically on the offensive and incurring casualties in pursuit of a strategy of attrition.
Westmoreland's approach led to absurdly inflated body counts promoted as a false metric of victory, the expansion of US ground forces in Vietnam to over half a million men, and to a collapse in public support for the war effort once the 1968 Tet offensive demonstrated a lack of clear progress toward a US victory. Fortunately, at that dark moment, Westmoreland was relieved and his replacement -- Creighton Abrams -- embraced classic counter-insurgency doctrines. It worked.
Even with US troops being rapidly withdrawn, Abrams destroyed the Viet Cong and pacified the South Vietnamese countryside. When South Vietnam fell in 1975, it was to a conventional invasion from North Vietnam that was enabled by the cutoff of war funds by a Democratic Congress with a large class of anti-war radicals elected in 1974 due to the Watergate scandal and a weak US economy.
If one is looking for alternative history scenarios, one can imagine a free South Vietnam today if Abrams was in charge of the war early on instead of Westmoreland and there was no Watergate scandal. Yeah, I too love to imagine Iowa class battleships pummeling North Vietnam, followed by a crushing conventional invasion, but that is implausible due to the near certainty of Chinese intervention and a US-China ground war.
I don’t think we could even get involved in a similar war these days. With 24 Hr News Station’s live reports of casualties our leaders would be forced to withdraw. Sad but that’s the way it is nowadays.
We won the Vietnam War.
Vietnam was lost 2 years later when the Democrats in Congress passed a bill that stated American military forces could not be employed in southeast Asia even if that meant not honoring our treaty with South Vietnam.
Ford never signed the bill but he honored it. This was the signal to the North Vietnamese to attack.