What the hell were we doing there in the first place? A third world country on the other side of the planet that snuffed out over 60,000 of our future lives? Tell the mothers, wives, and families exactly why their loved ones' lives ended so early and their dreams were shattered. Why? What was it all for?
Guess what? We followed Vietnam with more of the same, but getting worse at each turn. We're still at it today on steroids after running up $37 trillion in unsustainable debt and doing so while ignoring the rot inside our own home.
We're paying the price now. And, unfortunately, it's likely to get worse in the short to immediate future.
That ole' light on a shining hill is not quite as bright as it used to be.
There you go. Smart. Real smart.
“What the hell were we doing there in the first place? A third world country on the other side of the planet that snuffed out over 60,000 of our future lives? Tell the mothers, wives, and families exactly why their loved ones’ lives ended so early and their dreams were shattered. Why? What was it all for?”
War is extremely profitable for the right corporations...
Well said.
I think maybe part of the reason ‘why’ is because Johnson wanted to push a bunch of left wing domestic policies (which he did) but didn’t want to get tagged as a Commie.
America was in the middle of the Cold War and he didn’t want to tangle with the USSR or China, and Viet Nam seemed to be just the right war for him to campaign as an ‘anti communist’.
We all know now that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964?) was a lie, but the Swamp got away with this and used it as a pretext for aggression in South East Asia.
Johnson did get both the Civil Rights Act and Medicare passed in congress in 1965.
Not that these were bad things but they were politically controversial at the time.
I was young back then but I remember that Johnson was pushing some left wing stuff pretty hard and I think he wanted a distraction for the public to focus on, not his domestic policies.
I could be wrong about this but it seems to me we got lied into a war for political reasons, which seems to be standard procedure for the US.
What the hell were we doing there in the first place? A third world country on the other side of the planet that snuffed out over 60,000 of our future lives? Tell the mothers, wives, and families exactly why their loved ones’ lives ended so early and their dreams were shattered. Why? What was it all for?
The British managed to stop the Communist insurgency in Malaysia with aggressive anti-insurgency tactics.
We stopped the onslaught in Korea, just barely.
The French tried to stop the Vietnamese communists, but failed. America, the only Western country with the means to do so, stepped in to prevent the Communist takeover of the entire Indochinese peninsula. We had quite a few allies. There were Australians, Canadians, Brits, South Koreans, and quite a few others fighting with us.
The concern was the Communists would win in Vietnam and there would be a domino effect. If we did not stop them in Vietnam, where would we stop them?
Communists had taken over Cuba and were busy pushing Communism in Central and South America.
There was (and still is) a massive fifth column of Communists in the USA. McCarthy has been proven to have been correct. There was a massive infiltration of communists into the U.S. government.
Eventually, the fifth column of leftist media in the USA were able to lie sufficiently to break the will of the American people to triumph in Vietnam. We retreated ignominiously.
But the effort was long enough, and sufficient enough, for world communism to fracture and its failures to become well known. The “domino effect” was real, but Cambodia became enough of a horrible example of the failure of Communism to help stop it elsewhere.
Eventually, we elected Reagan, and he pursued a policy of winning the Cold War, of which Korea and Vietnam were hot spots. Then we won.
What was Russia and China doing fighting in Vietnam, and that followed them fighting in Korea.
If the goal was to keep Vietnam capitalist, then looking at it today - it sure worked. But we took a much longer and harder road than necessary.