Posted on 09/16/2017 7:45:13 PM PDT by Ennis85
Many Americans’ moral vanity is expressed nowadays in their rage to disparage. They are incapable of measured judgments about past politics — about flawed historical figures who were forced by cascading circumstances to make difficult decisions on the basis of imperfect information. So, the nation now needs an example of how to calmly assess episodes fraught with passion and sorrow. An example arrives Sunday night. For ten nights on PBS, Ken Burns’s and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, ten years in the making and 18 hours in length, tells the story of a war “begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings,” and “prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions” during five presidencies. The combat films are extraordinary; the recollections and reflections of combatants and others on both sides are even more so, featuring photos of them then and interviews with many of them now.
A 1951 photo shows a congressman named John Kennedy dining in Saigon. There is an interview with Le Quan Cong, who became a guerilla fighter in 1951, at age twelve. Viewers will meet Madame Le Minh Khue, who was 16 when she joined the “Youth Shock Brigade for National Salvation”: “I love Hemingway. I learned from For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the resourcefulness of the man who destroys the bridge. I saw how he coped with war, and I learned from that character.” As did another combatant who loves that novel, John McCain. Eleven years after his Saigon dinner, President Kennedy said, “We have not sent combat troops in the generally understood sense of the word.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
The real stories/facts come from the inside. Those who comment from the sidelines only perpetuate the falsehoods.
We could have destroyed Hanoi a dozen times over.
But instead, we sent 18 and 19 year old Americans into a pointless continuation of what the French had created.
Thanks for the links...
I’m waiting for the ‘ The Vietnam Nam war was responsible for many thousands of lives unnecessarily ‘ crowd to demand we dismantle all memory of it.
Remove all memorials, etc.
Incrementalism.
First the Civil War.
Once they finish demonizing the Southern Patriots,
they will move on to the North.
They are using Jefferson for a diversionary pause.
After the Civil War Patriots from both sides are gone,
the Founders and Framers will come next.
It is only a matter of time before they get around to
the Patriot Heroes of WWI, WWII, Korea, VietNam
and the ongoing War Against Islam.
They are waiting for two things:
First they must complete their revision of history.
This Ken Burns movie is a big part of that.
Second they are waiting for enough of *us* to die off so
that the Voices of Truthful Dissent will be scattered and weak.
What would the world have been like if it hadn't be fought?
Not by accident, the same wicked traitors and their ideological progeny still rule the Washington Swamp. Now they are trying to do to our entire country what they managed to do in Vietnam - turn it into a Communist tyranny.
I was 10 in 1968. I read 3 newspapers a day and numerous weekly and monthly magizines. My sense that the war was nuts came not from Cronkite or the Hippies or Fonda but from the comments of the politicians and generals prosecuting the war. They ALL were talking mush-brained bullshit from start to finish. When, one day, I heard President Nixon say, over the radio “Obviously we could win the war in an afternoon, but...” I knew that I wasn’t “missing something”, that these people were stupid.
This STUPID cost us 50 something thousand souls and the blighted lives of the innumerable walking wounded. Fifty thousand dead at a time, against all of history,when simply being alive, in America, represented unimaginable good fortune. The men who administered that giant, deliberate clusterfeck the Vietnam War, deserve nothing less than eternal hell.
I stopped watching any PBS lefty indoctrination/propaganda puff piece documentaries years ago. As one of the over million plus that caught the live show decades ago, I doubt what any North Viet or Viet Cong, or US anti war hippie, or politician thinks or thought about the war or its combatants. The job while there was to kill the commies trying to kill you. The Redcatchers of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade did quite well in that task and no further lefty propaganda will change that.
The truth is that the “anti-war movement” disappeared as soon as the draft ended. It was never anti-war, it was “I refuse to serve.”
Great post. Your prostate problems are more than likely the results of exposure to agent orange.
The Vietnam vet was sent home poisoned. Had a friend who fought the VA for years. He was finally awarded disability and died two weeks later.
Great poem.
Military strategists going forward should study Vietnam for how not to fight a war.
As a pretty advanced bar fighter, with the scars that go with it, you can’t do it half assed. /fight to win.
I work with A lot of Vietnamese,
Older men trained and fought with
The U.S.
They tell me story’s of the camps
They were sent to after we left.
Horrible!
Others act as if They are VC.
What a mess.
>> Was he or was he not a yes man? <<
Gen. Westmoreland ran his own NATO-style war, which was a dismal failure. LBJ couldn’t do much to change Westy’s approach. It was only when he was replaced by Gen. Abrams that we started seriously to win in VN.
Moreover, thanks to that winning strategy, and if it hadn’t been for Watergate, South Vietnam probably could have survived as an independent nation.
Yes, people forget that they were our allies. I’ll always be sorry that we abandoned them.
We have always fought wars discerning our use of power
Always
Most civilized countries do
Just because you have doesn’t mean you can use it
I agree we failed our troops in Indochina
No question
Will problem is his view on God
Everything else just falls in line from that
Another media created pseudo right winger
He also invaded Spain and Russia
Both errors
And I like Napolean
It's been almost 50 years and 3 failed attempts ago. When are they going to start?
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