TAPS
RIP Gen Westmoreland
Posted on 07/18/2005 7:57:49 PM PDT by Dont Mention the War
breaking, more to come
I'm a 'Nam vet and for each one of my 56,000 fallen brothers I say f*ck you.
Thank you for saying that for me and my late Viet Vet husband.
Yes, but Westmoreland should have resigned rather than accept suicidally stupid orders.
SO9
"Yes, but Westmoreland should have resigned rather than accept suicidally stupid orders."
If that premise is to be accepted, then Generals Harold K. Johnson and Earle Wheeler and their service counterparts in the other three branches should also have done so.
Link?
I was at a meeting in Dallas a few years ago and one of Westmoreland's inner circle was the guest speaker and he said that Westmoreland was furious with Washington over orders to continually forward to the UN future battle plans.....didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that those plans were quickly made available to Communist contacts within the UN and forwarded to NV.
There are theories out there that suggest that we got involved with Vietnam as an atonement for not aiding the French when they were attacked by the Germans in WWII....politics make for strange bedfellows and your remarks on this thread have been ignorant......
I would suggest that policy makers at the time were woefully ignorant of Vietnamese history.
War plan Orange called for immediate help to be sent to the Philippines after a Japanese attack. FDR instead chose to muster troops for a war in Africa. MacArthur did not quit, resign or publicly complain. His men were left to die or be captured.
Any general worth his salt knows full well he is at the whim of politicians in Washington.
Vietnam had been fighting for independence since before World War II. They sustained the war throughout the French empire, and the Jap empire. After 54 and Dien Bien Phu Ho Chi Minh decided matters on the battlefield. Eisenhower himself said that Ho would have won an all Vietnamese election. There was no reason for us to assist in partitioning the country. The war was lost.
For Christ sake Ho was our ally against the Japs.
Get your history straight....Vietnam was a ridiculous, and unessessary war.
It was a wasteful, unessessary war littered with the broken bodies of men who, IMHO, died in vain.
RIP Gen Westmoreland
Hmmm....I get my history from the same place as you...just because you tend to believe one view point from another doesn't mean you are right...and yet you have no comment on my remark about making amends with the French for not helping them against the Germans....you have to ask yourself...."what is the purpose of the American military???...to kill, maim, and destroy America's enemies".......so go blame the civilian leaders of your military at the time of Vietnam for not allowing the military to do it's job...
Thanks for the info, Calpernia.
May he rest in peace.
I disagree. We learned a vital and bloody lesson there and it was a time of recent history that can be pointed to when folks want to know what it's like to have a Democrat President in charge of a war effort. More can look to Somalia and Bosnia. But most important of all, the folks who were Second Lieutenants then are the Generals now and their solemn vow of NEVER AGAIN was well and truly manifested in Grenada, Panama, and both Gulf Wars. The fact that Gulf War #2 is going slowly reinforces the drawback to fighting insurgents and terrorists with conventional troops. That's one reason we've got to get the Iraqi troops trained up and on the job so we can get out. Vietnamization took waaaaay too long to accomplish. We can do better.
In Afghanistan right after 911, we sent in 100 Operators from the various SpecOps groups. in just 100 days they'd killed over 30,000 Taliban and AQ with the help of hi-tech artillery and close air support. THAT'S how you fight a war where the enemy is unconventional.
I think you've said enough to all the VN veterans here with your disparaging posts.
If we had won the war in Vietnam, not only might Indo-China be free, but the Soviet empire probably would have collapsed ten years sooner.
We signed a peace, then lost. Congress refused aid to the South Vietnamese, and they succumbed to a full-scale blitzkrieg.
We lost because we insisted on fighting a purely defensive war. It would have been very easy to win, but the liberal politicians (who started the war in the first place!) would not go for victory.
Goldwater was right: you either go for victory, or you shouldn't be there.
I will never forgive the media, the "anti war" (really pro-communist) demonstrators, and the congressional traitors who lost Vietnam. I will remember, and so will my children and grandchildren. Recriminations? Hell yes!
John? John Kerry? Is that you?
Your Dad died an honorable death in noble cause and don't let any naysayer tell you otherwise. Hand salute to you!
They better keep that traitor's gravesite a secret because many of us are planning on 'watering' it. Lotta blood on that sucker's soul.
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