Posted on 05/02/2015 11:42:13 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Most everybody is younger than me!
I left a lot of friends in Vietnam. A lot of really good people.
My brother and I almost didn’t make it back too. Seven months in the hospital for both of us.
I’ll always resent the jerks in the streets during our war.
Well, thank you for serving, and welcome home. God bless.
My parents, both products of working-class families and graduates of a tuition-free public university, marched often with other suburban families. They never carried the Vietcong flag, or saw anyone else do it. They never committed any acts of violence. They did have rocks thrown at them by construction workers, and they were spit on (unlike the humiliated, returning soldiers of right-wing legend) but they kept marching, because they thought that was the right (and American) thing to do.
While not every veteran may have been spat on, I really doubt more protesters were actually spat on either. I wouldn't call one a "right-wing legend" and assume the legitimacy of left-wing myths.
Also, it's pretty striking that we are supposed to take him at his word that his parents didn't carry or see anyone carrying the Viet Cong flag so somehow it didn't actually happen, when actually it did.
Somebody who was actually there at the time or somebody who was a little more thoughtful, could have made some of the same points without putting us through all of the emotional turmoil -- all the animosity and self-righteous arrogance -- all over again.
What is this load of horse tripe?
Welcome home and God bless to you too, buddy.
Thank you. I served six years as a fleet sailor aboard the USS South Carolina in the late seventies, closest I came to firing a shot in anger was the hostage crisis under Jimmy Carter. Does not compare to boots on the ground anywhere. Glad for all that serve and have served. Prayers for the families of our comrades who paid the ultimate price.
1967-1968 101st Airborne, 2/327, Grunt, Really been there and Done that!....
All the way !
I said the 2000 election, read the post again.
If Nixon had fought in 1960, then America would have survived and would still exist.
Supposedly, Ronald Reagan in a private letter, called him a Marxist in 1960.
Get real, America having a few Army men in Vietnam during the 1940s and 1950s, and 1960s had nothing to do with getting into war, JFK sending in 16,000 troops and killing Vietnam’s president did that.
Bkmk
“sinister betrayal by spineless bureaucrats, cowed by selfish, pampered, troop-hating radicals.”
He left out the communist sympathizers in the Democrat party.
L
I’d be disappointed if Reagan really thought that. Kennedy had plenty of faults but sympathy for Communism was never one of them. Our confrontation with the Soviets over Berlin in 1961, with the Soviets over the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, his ramping up our role in Vietnam, his wiretaps of MLK over Hunter Pitts ODell and Jack Levison all argue against it.
Kennedy blundering into the assassination of Diem in November 1963 is what I’d call the turning point as well. LBJ gets the blame for sending in combat troops the next year but as far as I can see the chaos set in motion by Diem’s death forced LBJ into choosing between a major American military role or a decision to abandon South Vietnam. Where I fault both Johnson and Nixon is in their refusal to go for the destruction of North Vietnam.
JFK was scum, and Reagan was correct to call the man dangerous.
The Russians ran all over the guy, you describe his failures and displays of incompetence and weakness, as his virtues.
The Russians built the Berlin wall, defeated our retaking of Cuba, MLK won and Vietnam was a disaster for America.
In a personal letter to vice president Nixon in 1960, Reagan described JFK this way.
“I do not include Kennedy’s acceptance speech because beneath the generalities I heard a frightening call to arms. Unfortunately he is a powerful speaker with an appeal to the emotions. He leaves little doubt that his idea of the “challenging new world” is one in which the Federal Govt. will grow bigger & do more and of course spend more. I know there must be some short sighted people in the Republican Party who will advise that the Republicans should try to “out liberal” him. In my opinion this would be fatal.”
“One last thought,— shouldn’t some one tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with it’s proper age? Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Govt. being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his “State Socialism” and way before him it was “benevolent monarchy.”
JFK sent in 16,000 troops, no JFK, then no American Vietnam war.
No JFK and America would have survived, and not had the 1960s.
“JFK sent in 16,000 troops, “
Yeah I know, my dad and his Pentagon office partner were two of them. I had the opportunity to listen to them discuss Vietnam in the years before it made the front pages.
The majority of the 16,000 were not combat troops. The combat troops who were sent by Kennedy were there to train ARVN and they weren’t ‘supposed’ to be fighting. Special Forces were there to teach the ARVN how to fight counter insurgency warfare.
The American combat role started after LBJ got the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through Congress in August 1964. The first deployment of regular ground combat troops began only after that. Gen Westmoreland began building up to a strength of 300,000 in the summer of 1965 with the first major battle occurring in Nov 1965 at Ia Drang Valley, the battle memorialized in “We Were Soldiers Once and Young”.
Do you have a link to this Reagan letter?
You are missing the point, America had kept it’s distance from Vietnam although we had a handful of men there under FDR, Truman, and two terms of Eisenhower, and the French defeat, and then suddenly BOOM, JFK sends in 16,000 troops and contributed to Diem being killed, he was starting his war, and he did.
No JFK, no Vietnam war, JFK was a boob, more like Jimmy Carter, except perhaps worse, even his war heroics was something that he should actually have faced courts martial on, instead, like everything with JFK, his failure and incompetence is flipped into the opposite.
You will have to scroll down for the Reagan letter to Nixon.
https://faculty.washington.edu/qtaylor/Courses/101_USH/101_manual_9.htm
“No JFK, no Vietnam war,”
I think that’s overstating it. The Communists had a vote in all of this. They ramped up their insurgency around the time Kennedy took office and he either had to increase our aid to Vietnam or let them get overrun. My dad’s office partner was the Army’s small arms expert and by fall 1961 he was saying “they may not call it a war but they are sure using ammunition like it’s one”. The pace of war was picking up very quickly in Kennedy’s first year.
I do put a lot of blame on Kennedy for getting Diem killed and leaving a chaotic mess behind. Ho Chi Minh couldn’t believe his good luck. Diem’s assassination played a big role in Johnson’s decision to have the US military take charge of ground combat in the war.
“JFK was a boob, more like Jimmy Carter, “
I wouldn’t put them in the same category. Carter was naive, whereas Kennedy was reckless and that’s a dangerous enough quality in an American President.
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