Posted on 07/09/2019 12:20:21 PM PDT by fugazi
You mean they didn’t want to pay the price to win. And what would we have won? Would the Vietnamese suddenly stop being corrupt and allowed a truly free election to take place and a new constitution with a representative republic? Would we ever have been able to extricate ourselves from there? How long would we have to prop up the Vietnamese government? Vietnam didn’t spread communism to the rest of SE Asia as we feared. HCM himself wrote letters to Eisenhower asking simply to let the people decide for themselves what type of government they wanted. They were withheld from him and he never saw them.
Every place communists took over by force started as a civil war. sometimes they won: Russia —> Soviet Union, Republic of China —> Red China; sometimes they lost: Spanish Communists.
AFTER the “civil war”, when communists won, comes murder, repression and blatant tyranny.
We should have and could have won this.
When Saigon fell, and I watched the democrats in Congress refuse South Vietnam fall, I joined the military, and spent 22 years in it.
Refusing to come to their aid was a violation of our treaty obligations to them. Thousands in re-education camps and murders, Cambodia virtually wiped out, and Soviet AND Cuban meddling in Africa, Iran and Nicaragua was the result.
We’re still paying for it.
Thank God for USAF Colonel Jack Broughton!
At least one man who had the guts to do something about it.
Of course the court martialed him for it.
Fascinating guy, Jacksel Broughton. I’m currently researching old WWII/Vietnam primary source documents about his career.
You’re welcome, sir.
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