Posted on 01/30/2018 7:30:33 AM PST by SeekAndFind
America has dealt with undesirables many times if they determined it was in their best interests to do so. Still does. E.g. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Libya, various Latin American dictators, etc. Of course Ho was a communist but all the Vietnamese people saw was his nationalism. The Vietnamese people are fiercely patriotic to their country in spite of its flaws. Backing a flawed French regime was not the answer, keeping in mind that at the same time Indian nationalists were pushing for their independence from Britain.
And it’s worth mentioning that any good feeling Vietnamese may harbor towards Ho Chi Minh today, has more to do with what he did against the French, and not against the US.
My dad was an “Old China Hand,” having flown for China National Airline Corporation (owned by American Airlines at the time,) and then C-46s over the Hump. His opinion’s of those days mirror yours.
He passed in 1966 at age 60.
according to John Kerry (He was in Vietnam, in case you didn’t know)
lBJ’s war was good.
Nixon’s war was bad.
RE: And it’s worth mentioning that any good feeling Vietnamese may harbor towards Ho Chi Minh today, has more to do with what he did against the French, and not against the US
Did Ho Chi Minh have anything to do with Pol Pot and his regime in Cambodia? Or was he hands off?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk
5 min vid by Bruce Herschenson explaining what happened and the role of the 94th Congress (’Rats) in the betrayal of the peace agreement/Paris Accords and the South Vietnamese people...
“The VC entered Saigon thinking the locals would rise up and join them to gain control of the city. What the VC encountered were women pouring the hot oil from cooking breakfast on the VC as they walked down narrow streets and alleyways.
The NVA was defeated during Tet, but they were decimated on the HCM Trial returning to the north. The Trail always had spotter teams for air strikes, when the military saw NVA retreat in progress, they dropped and boated in even more teams.”
Now, I happened to live in Saigon from ‘66 - ‘70. Civilian intel contractor. This is the first I heard of the hot breakfast oil. Got a source?
As far as the HCM Trail - consider this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Igloo_White
and
http://thefutureofthings.com/3902-igloo-white-the-automated-battlefield/
That I can't say, but it was Vietnam that did put an end to Pol Pot's regime.
First paragraph is about Iraq war situation in early 2004, but the rest is about Vietnam.
The turning point in LBJ's and the public-at-large's view of the war came when Cronkite donned a flak helmet to report from the swanky high-rise Saigon rooftop bar where US "journalists" hung out. At that moment, the last desperate Vietcong were being wiped out in the nearby city of Cholon, and the gunfire could be faintly heard from the bar's patio.
The flak helmet would have been laughable to anyone actually present, but 200 million Americans watching TV from home only saw the fraudulent story the MSM wanted them to see, that of a deadly desperate situation where US & S. Vietnamese troops were supposedly getting shellacked so badly, that poor Uncle Walter's life itself was in danger of being rubbed out. If our military and the ARVN couldn't do the job and he was forced to save himself, the war was obviously lost.
What's surprising is that even after 50 more years of this crap, America still was not talking about "Fake News". It took one man and his Twitter-powered Bully Pulpit to make that phrase, and the reality behind it, widely known.
Read “Hue 1968” and one will have a very good handle on the Tet Offensive and the main target. God bless Major Thompson from Corinth, Mississippi.
bkmk
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.