Did you read post 20?
Did you know that more than 10% of the dead from Vietnam were Reserves and Guard?
Did you know that while the under 30 year olds were the strongest supporters of the Vietnam war in America, that by the time you were in college the public was pretty aware that the greatest generation leaders were not doing anything constructive in Vietnam or trying to win, the war was unpopular and support had dried up.
Personally I found the conduct of American leaders baffling, and was mystified by the incompetence they displayed both in civilian and military leadership, it wasn’t surprising that those jokers were not finding universal support from young men.
There was no one making any explanations or coherent defense of our strategy or goals there, the only thing driving enlistments was those of us who just felt the traditional patriotic drive to serve a hitch, or to have a military career, most of us had to find a way to overcome our revulsion at the leaders we would be serving, before we could enlist. I believed that every man should attempt to serve in uniform, but I understood that Vietnam became difficult to explain once we realized that the leaders weren’t interested in doing the work they needed to do to make the battlefield fighting pay off, they didn’t care, and people came to feel that and recognize it.
Agree with all you said. I do question your source (not you) about the 10%. Based upon my unscientific observation (I was there 65/66) there were nowhere close to enough Guard and Reserve troops over there to achieve that kind of KIA number. But hey, that was just my experience. Can you kindly point me to your source?
” that the greatest generation leaders were not doing anything constructive in Vietnam or trying to win,”
Lyndon Johnson and his administration were a generation older than the greatest generation. The soldiers of WWII were mid level officers, they were not the politicians setting policy during Vietnam.
“There was no one making any explanations or coherent defense of our strategy or goals there,”
It’s what happens when politicians blunder their way into a war and then let mission creep take over.
1955-60, President Eisenhower warned against sending American combat troops into an an Asian land war and sent only materiel and advisors.
1960-63 President Kennedy ramped up our military presence to 16,000 advisors. But he found South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem difficult and Kennedy managed to get Diem assassinated on November 2, 1963. Twenty days later President Kennedy himself was assassinated and a leaderless Vietnam became Lyndon Johnson’s problem.
1963-68 President Johnson committed American combat troops to Vietnam, ignoring wiser heads. He also ignored the uniformed military and let civilians like Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford run the war from the White House.
Not wanting to endanger the funding for his Great Society welfare state Johnson employed a half-assed defensive strategy that allowed the Communist North to set the tempo of the war. The title of Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp’s 1986 book said it all: ‘Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect’. Admiral Grant commanded the air war over North Vietnam from 1964-68 and no one was in a better position to see how bad the LBJ strategy was.
Nixon had the opportunity to change all that when he won the Presidency in 1968. But he waited 4 years to implement Operation Linebacker, the B-52 campaign, and he never advocated the invasion of North Vietnam and the destruction of its government.