Posted on 08/23/2007 7:38:04 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
On the question of ground forces, on April 17, 1965, the PLA Central Military Command ordered preparations to send troops to North Vietnam. Discussions with General Giap a few days later set the schedule. In late May the Chinese government adopted its policy for troops in the DRV, creating a seven-member committee to oversee the effort. One 20,000-man PLA unit deployed very quickly, in June, to build coast defenses and help in the defense of the northeast quadrant of the DRV coast. That unit contained an artillery regiment and another of antiaircraft troops alongside its engineer regiments. Even the engineer units had attached artillery, antiaircraft, and mortar elements. Two more composite divisions of railroad, engineer, and antiaircraft units followed.
The North Vietnamese asked for a pair of antiaircraft artillery divisions to bolster their air defenses in the Red River Delta and around Hanoi, but Beijing confined itself to the original program. As a result of appeals from Ho Chi Minh to Mao, the Chinese approved a second group of construction forces to help build roads in northern Tonkin, on the understanding that Hanoi would use its own labor and engineer assets to increase the pace of construction efforts in the southern DRV and on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The groups of PLA forces included nine divisions and numbered some 170,000 troops.
Zhang notes another account that in March 1969 there were parts of 16 PLA divisions (63 regiments), totaling 150,000 troops, serving on six-to-eight-month rotations. Chinese accounts record that some 320,000 PLA soldiers served in North Vietnam, of whom 1,100 were killed and 4,300 wounded.
Well, they certainly paid in blood of their own...
Yeah...I read it here earlier today. The Search I understand doesn’t always work great.
Yes he is.
I knew a guy who spent 12 days alone on the South China Sea in a small open boat, avoiding pirates and trying to drink his own piss.
After spending eight years in prison (he was a former officer in the RVN Navy) he escaped from his jungle prison made his way to the coast and stole a boat.
As he told me this, he got a very odd look in his eyes, looked at me and said “It seems like a dream, the things I went through. What I went through. I cannot believe it happened sometimes.”
Define “worked”
Jugheads who regurgitate revisionist “history” for their DNC masters make me want to hurl. This bozo Hirsh hasn’t got a clue.
I saw this same article earlier today on FR. That is all. I am not trying to be mean.
Hear,hear!
7 million dead is ok? What can you expect from snoozeweek?
The author's attempt to come off as centrist (or perhaps center-left--but certainly nothing more radical than that) is exposed for the fraud it is with the above observation.
Whereas the "war on terror" would be better renamed "the war on Islamist radicalism" or "the war on Islamofascism"--after all, terror is a mere tactic, not an accurate description of the enemy--the underlying concept is certainly sound. Those who would denigrate it as a mere sham, "ginned up to justify [President Bush's] invasion of Iraq," reveal themselves for the shallow thinkers that they are.
Especially when they speak of a "handful of Afghanistan-based bad guys," as though this were the full extent of our Islamist enemies.
Not with this title, since I searched this one...
FMCDH(BITS)
Hirsh's childish jabs at Bush with the "missing Politics 101 while at Yale" are always the sure sign of the avoidance of facts, replaced by a plethora of revisionist imagery.
There was so much in this piece that was sheer dishonest bravado but I have to agree that the above quote is the most patently dishonest paragraph of all for the very reasons you laid out.
While I know that Newsweek is pretty leftist, when I saw the headline I thought for sure it would be Kos or MoveOn, or DU. Expect Newsweek to only veer further left for the next election cycle and beyond.
One other thing. This guy writes a whole column to criticize Bush’s recent speech and yet there are no quotes from it that I saw except for the word “harsh.” Therefore this whole article is a refutation of Bush’s term “harsh” as being out of synch with history while avoiding the term “boat people” or “killing fields” or even Cambodia or Laos.
This is by far one of the most dishonest pieces of opinion that I have ever seen.
bfl
review
Don’t look now but DakotaRed posted it again on 08/24/2007 1:24:55 AM. Sometimes though freepers may have missed the earlier thread and do see the new one.
Great story.
Those hundreds of thousands of dead are irrelevant. It was long ago, and they weren’t even white folks. Our leftists couldn’t care less. What they do care about is how welcome we are nor -”Yankee Come Back (and bring your investment dollars).”
There is no more value in attempting to communicate or debate with folk who hold the views of the author than there would be to discussing dinner menus with dedicated a fecal phage.
They are lost. Non recoverable.
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