Free Republic

This brutal spring, the U.S. faces two great crises. Over the past 14 weeks, 84,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. That’s 28 times the death toll of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more than the U.S. combat deaths in the Vietnam War, and one-quarter of the total global casualties from the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the national lockdown designed to halt the spread of the disease has pushed 33 million Americans out of work, forced hundreds of thousands of small-business owners to board up their shops and left 1 in 5 children uncertain where they’ll find their next meal....

Well here we are in the Year of our Lord Anthony Fauci.....OK......well a set of songs ending with Noel Paul Stookey "wherever two or more are gathered...there is love" and we need "love" right now that reaches out to help others be free..... In Iowa yesterday a Republican photo op with VP Pence and GOP Governor Kim Reynolds, the GOP Senators Grassley and Ernst. They were with religious leaders and Iowa will allow regulated worship services that comply with social distancing and sanitary rules. The government regulating churches. That is so like China... And it was so like the USSR...the...

Vietnam War Topical information: VHS Video tape: Television's Vietnam, narrated by Charlton Heston, Sony Vietnam Video Collection, produced by Accuracy In Media. Note: PBS was legally forced to show this, but only once, as a response to their own completely false representation of the war history. Their response to my inquiry was quite negative, deceptive and misleading. I got my copy, years ago, from an 800 number for the AIM organization, but do not see it on their current website. Amazon no longer carries it, and I can't find it anywhere. It shows how the Mainstream Media, with Cronkite in...

So I'm watching Platoon on demand for about the 15th time. I saw it the first time in a theater when it first came out with a former army grunt. The fact that I was a snot nosed, 24 year-old white boy who'd never been in the service and he was a 50 year-old black engineer had nothing to do with it. He told me he used to go out on patrol with no food or water so he could carry more guns and ammo. He wasn't going down without a fight. Walking out, he told me "that's EXACTLY what...

Vietnam war Veteran KIA finally comes home for proper Burial.

This continues my attempt to bring noteworthy books to the attention of Freepers. Vanity? Not really, but it is a way for me to organize in a short review the main points of relevant books to our current economic, military, or political issues. "Armies of Sand" is an analysis by former CIA analyst and AEI scholar Kenneth Pollack. Although this was in part his doctoral dissertation, he has gone on to write many books about the military and especially the Middle East. He begins by looking at the Six-Day War and Arab/Egyptian military ineffectiveness, noting the AE military superiority of...

New Book Demolishes Arab Armies of Sand “Arab armed forces consistently underperformed, and underperformed in the same ways time and again, regardless of who they fought or where, the state of their politics, or the relative state of economic development between them and their foe.” So concludes scholar Kenneth M. Pollack in his magisterial book on the cultural roots of disastrous post-1945 Arab military performance, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness. Pollack presents an encyclopedic, withering critique of Arab militaries across decades in numerous varied conflicts, to substantiate the conclusion that: Arab militaries were...

Inducting Jane Fonda into the National Women's Hall of Fame could cost the organization its partnership with Seneca Falls, New York, its host town and the site of America's first-ever women's right's convention in 1848. Earlier this month, the Hall of Fame announced the actress would be among its class of 2019. Citing Fonda's actions during the Vietnam War, Seneca Falls Supervisor Greg Lazzaro released a resolution Thursday morning that would pull the town's support out of respect for veterans in the community. The resolution, which is expected to be proposed at next week's town board meeting, was released to...

This is becoming embarrassing. First, the liberal media had a banner week last week peddling two fake news stories. One story came from BuzzFeed, which alleged that President Donald Trump directed his ex-personal lawyer Michael Cohen to lie about a real estate deal in Russia. The Mueller investigation refuted that claim. Then, we have this Covington Catholic High School students wearing MAGA hats hounded a Native American story, which was refuted by video evidence. The students weren’t chanting, “build the wall” either.  They were doing sports chants to drown out the obscenities hurled at them by a bunch of Black...

Since World War II, America’s elite forces have used quiet firearms for missions where it pays to be silent. Sound suppressors—commonly referred known as silencers—remain in service today. What many don’t know is that U.S. commandos once carried revolvers with special cartridges designed to muffle gunshots. In the early 1960s, Army weapon designers looked at alternatives that would completely eliminate the sound of the propellant exploding. They came up with the so-called "piston cartridges". By 1962, the Army had piston rounds available for .30-caliber rifles and .38-caliber revolvers. The ground combat branch's Special Forces sections also planned to develop a...

"After word spread about a renewed push by the Department of Homeland Security to get Vietnam to accept more deportees, some people saw it as a mistake by the Trump administration given the GOP’s fading strength in Orange County and the historical support that the Republican Party has gotten from Vietnamese Americans. But in a community where many older residents oppose undocumented immigration and younger ones tend to lean left politically, the controversy is just the latest to underscore the generational divide among those of Vietnamese descent." "More than 8,000 Vietnamese residents in the U.S. who escaped their homeland but...

Fifty-one years ago this month, the 173rd Airborne Brigade (Separate) fought in close quarters and uphill through deep foliage to take Hill 875 in what became known as the Battle of Dak To. The 173rd Airborne Brigade had already seen action before moving inland to South Vietnam’s Central Highlands in early November of 1967. This support included a role in Operation Junction City in the spring, as well as a search-and destroy (S&D) mission in the vicinity of Tuy Ho on the south-central coast. The 173rd was assigned to Dak To after intelligence reports indicated that North Vietnamese Army (NVA)...

Fifty years separate us today from 1968 and the two momentous legacies of the then failed presidency of Lyndon Johnson: The declaring of war on America's supposed domestic ills in the form of the "Great Society" programs, and the aggressive military intervention in a real war in Vietnam. Both of these "wars" reflected the arrogance and hubris of the social engineer who believes that he has the power and ability to remake and direct society in his own preferred image.... A part of the Vietnam War tragedy was due to the fact that it was managed by "the best and...

(Warning: You May Find Some Of This Offensive And Or Disturbing) "...We have been here now for twelve and one half hours by my reckoning and we still don't know who the next President of the United States is...." NBC Anchorman Chet Huntley At 7 AM Eastern Time Wednesday November 6, 1968- I was watching Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on the morning of Wednesday November 6th, 1968 as I awoke around 7 am from a short nights sleep for an eight year old, probably not much more than four and a half hours. We still didn't know who the...

Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group An Open Letter to My Teenage Son · Victor Lundberg Lost Hits Of The 60's ℗ 1967 Capitol Records, LLC

Adrian Cronauer, a disc jockey, actor and Pentagon adviser whose story as a radio host during the Vietnam War inspired the 1987 film “Good Morning, Vietnam,” helping make its star Robin Williams a household name, died Wednesday in Troutville. He was 79. His death was confirmed by Jeff Hunt, a longtime Roanoke radio announcer who hired Cronauer at Roanoke FM station WPVR. He said Cronauer had been in a nursing home. “Goooooooood morning Vietnam,” was the signature sign-on Cronauer used hosting “Dawn Buster” from 1965-6 in Saigon. Williams’ portrayal of the fictional Cronauer cemented the line in American culture, associating...

Sergeant First Class Arno J. Voigt was killed by friendly fire near Khe Sanh, Republic of Vietnam on June 4, 1970, and like all friendly fire accidents it was one of those things that shouldn’t have happened but did. A Pink Team consisting of an OH-6 Cayuse Light Observation Helicopter (Loach) and three AH-1G Cobra Gun Ships from the 2d Squadron 17th Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division mistook Arno Voigt and a company of ARVN Airborne Rangers for a company of NVA and fired on them, killing Arno Voigt along with two Rangers and wounding an additional twenty Rangers. This is...

In contemplating bombing Syria, we are looking at a limited military action and the possibility of a considered accidental all-out war with Russia – or as we are prone to say, World War Three. Even as we initially ponder bombing a Russian client state, we are once again considering limitations on military strategy. As a consequence of a political choice not to bomb Russian assets and Russian personnel, we would unnecessarily be putting American lives in danger. These considerations are eerily similar to those that the U.S. government imposed during the Vietnam conflict, which led to a protracted politically managed...

It was a cold, solemn day on the Texas ranch. A biting, prairie wind was staved off with a thick, fur coat wrapped around an American music icon. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson had said before he died that at his burial he wanted the Rev. Billy Graham to pray and Anita Bryant to sing. Bryant, once Miss Oklahoma and a Miss America second runner-up, was known in 1973 as the vivacious spokeswoman for Florida orange juice and the Sunshine State. She nervously tried to get her voice ready to sing for a worldwide satellite television audience at the president’s...

".....To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest that we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic if unsatifactory conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that...