Sorry. The Vietnam War did not start in 1965. The anti-communist Vietnamese were fighting it constantly since they lost N Vietnam. Eisenhower had a few “advisors” there who fought but were sworn to never admit it. Kennedy sent 50,000 in 1961. By 1964 election there were double that number of Americans in Vietnam.
If you want to see early photos of the war, see the photos of people like Griebenow and Rexcillius and other like them. I mention those two because I saw their photos in the 50s and early 60s.
Actually,Truman had us there. OSS officer Lt. Col. A. Peter Dewey KIA, 9/26/45
The U.S. picked their side when Ho Chi Minh asked us to help rid them of the French after WWII. We wouldn’t.
War in Vietnam never really ended when the Japs were beaten. I had a friend who was there in 1959 or 1960 with a UDT team up the Mekong River, men who wore no insignia and whose presence there would have been denied by the Navy if they were killed or taken prisoner.
Politicians and stupid ROEs kept us from winning. Take a hill, leave it, come back a week later and take it all over again. Senseless squandering of American lives. I’m proud of my service there but I have nothing good to say about how Washington D.C. conducted the war.
This same attitude from D.C. is still sacrificing our troops in the Middle East today.
You’re spot on. In the early to mid-1960s Eisenhower stated in interview that US involvement (such as it was) began right after Dien Bien Phu. As a Senator, JFK held or participated in hearings about US involvement in Vietnam, “Lay OS”, etc, keeping up a drumbeat that stopped when he decided to run for President. In his campaign persona, he portrayed Eisenhower as being soft on defense, talked about “brushfire wars”, missile gap, bomber gap, communist takeovers, etc.
We need to learn from history, and from current events. I’m listening to CNN right now. CNN says:
Nobody knew ISIS was capable of this. Nobody thought ISIS would attack in Europe.
The MSM ignores half of the -experts-, the ones who don’t say what they want to hear. Then, after the ignored experts are proven correct, the MSM says “nobody knew”.
But it isn’t just the MSM, a week after Katrina, Bush said “nobody knew Katrina would hit N.O.” Of course, 8 days before Katrina hit N.O. it was over southern FL and the National Weather Service gave a 100% prediction that Katrina would hit New Orleans, breach the levees and flood half the city.
Cheney-Wolfowitz-Kristol did a similar thing in Iraq. They won the first move in what Bush said would be a long, protracted chess game. But the neo-cons had no idea what the second move in the chess game should be. They had no plan for what to do with the Iraqi army. They had no idea how to build a new government in Iraq.
The neo-cons in Iraq were exactly like the McNamara best and brightest who ran the Vietnam war for LBJ.
The problem is not limited to “the other guys”. Look at the Carson, Cruz and Trump campaigns. They seem to have no clue how delegates are selected for the GOP Convention. They allow the media to distract them with polls rather than identify delegates who can win against the Bush delegates.
When they lose, are they going to say “Nobody knew how delegates were selected.”