What the army desperately needs - another Colonel David Hackworth

US Defense Watch ^ | October 9, 2015 | Ray Starmann

[wardaddy]

He sure as hell served his country through much more combat exposure than the average blowhard like you and I

He was eccentric

Hell he saw combat and fought back in his 70s in Port au Prince while there covering the story

Not many can say that

No hero is perfect

[wardaddy]

How old are you?

Not meaning to argue that is very inaccurate

[CMSMC]

As far as I know, Misty 86 is alive and well. According to Wiki, he spent retirement serving on a few boards of directors. MG Don Shepard says is his book “Misty” that he retired to Durango, CO, and owns one of the largest porta-potty businesses in Colorado.

[CMSMC]

As I understand it was a combination of both Kobar and Flynn. And, yes, he was right in his stance. I agree with you completely on the current status of the AF.

[Fiji Hill]

How old are you?

Not meaning to argue that is very inaccurate

If you think that what I wrote is "very inaccurate," then I encourage you to read:

• A Better war : The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999)

• An American Amnesia : How the U.S. Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia by Bruce Herschensohn (New York: Beaufort, 2010)

• Peace is Not At Hand by Sir Robert Thompson (New York: McKay, 1974)

You will likely think differently when you finish.

[wardaddy]

You weren’t there or old enough to know

I’m driving

History to come

Respectfully

[wardaddy]

Best time to win INDOCHINA was inadvertently right after Tet offensive

Nobody knew the Paris Peace Talks encouragement bombing had the effect it did till much much later

Operation linebacker was late 72 early 73 when we dumped serious bombs on their dikes and infrastructure which indeed hurt them

Nobody threw away the war hell we even had a democrat sure as hell willing to fight and spend men and material

Johnson lost will to fight in light of bodybags and domestic unrest in places

Nixon came in trying to get Vietnaminization done which meant get us out as quick as possible sans a full retreat

Nobody really thought the utterly corrupt south Vietnamese would last but nobody figured it to be so quick

We could have won tactically of course

Bomb the dikes and mine the harbors

Bomb the supply ships which were mostly Soviet....dicey

Destroy their food supply

Occupy with 1-2 million WWII size army

Totally remove all but the basic rules of engagement

But it’s like Iraq

You win but then you have to hold it

In some ways ultimately we did win

Besides Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia communism stopped

Given the times that’s a bit of a victory but it now seems quite distant

Places like Vietnam and Afghanistan are quagmires for modern armies

Not sure how to judge victory

I grew up through the war and had kinfolks and friends in it

I was last year of the draft registration

Same year Saigon fell

Vietnam is complicated

[Pelham]

“If he said the Vietnam War was unwinnable in 1971, he was full of baloney. Together with the South Vietnamese, we won the war a year and a half later”

We stopped the 1972 Easter Offensive but that was not winning the war.

Nixon and Kissinger negotiated a peace treaty that left a full NVA army intact inside of South Vietnam. North Vietnam wasn’t defeated, their cities were intact, their armies were whole. They simply needed to rebuild what they had lost in 1972 and wait the chance to try again.

The 1974-75 Democrat Watergate Congress gave North Vietnam that chance by cutting off all gasoline and ammunition to South Vietnam and by prohibiting President Ford from coming to their defense. The rest is history.

If we had truly won the war at some point then North Vietnam would not have been able to sit back and wait for the opportunity to overrun the South. Hanoi would have been rubble, their army destroyed, their government our prisoners. None of that happened, and other than Goldwater in 1964 no one seemed to have ever called for anything like it.

[Fiji Hill]

I take it you’re a recent graduate of one of our publik skools.

[wardaddy]

I take it you’re not a serious poster and I was polite so you run your mouth free of charge

I’m guessing under 40 Yankee

Enjoy learning your history from books as opposed to those of us who lived it in real time son.

All you need to know about me is on my homepage

I don’t hide like most cowards here

White and raised in Missussippi.....public school....hilarious .....you are so clueless

But stick around it can’t hurt

[wardaddy]

Bingo.

[mac_truck]

Good links...thanks for posting.

[JayAr36]

Any real leader would do. I can see our army in a few years, it will be made up of LBGT’s running attacking the enemy holding up signs saying, “CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG!”

[Fiji Hill]

Enjoy learning your history from books as opposed to those of us who lived it in real time, son.

By the way, I agree with most of what you wrote in post #47, especially "Best time to win INDOCHINA was...right after Tet offensive." The North Vietnamese were knocked back on their heels after the failure of that offensive and a subsequent one in May, 1968. When the North Vietnamese launched another offensive in the spring of 1969, I hoped at the time that the new Nixon Administration would respond by resuming the bombing the North and then launching a ground attack to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but that never happened. As Norman Podhoretz later wrote, Nixon had decided to fight the was on the "strategic cheap."

Incidentally, I don't give out a lot of personal information on public forums, but yes, I am still fairly young, at least at heart. I was born in the Wine State, and on the day I was born, Lefty Frizell's song I want to Be With You Always topped some of the music charts, and the headline in our local paper screamed, "Sabres Battle MiGs over Pyongyang."

[Fiji Hill]

Enjoy learning your history from books as opposed to those of us who lived it in real time son.

Experiencing history in real time can give one a distorted view. For example, many that I have known who experienced the Great Depression insisted that FDR's New Deal restored the economy, whereas more recent historiography shows that the New Deal prolonged the hard times.

Similarly, A poster on another board who lived through WWII insists that the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent was justified because Japanese-Americans were disloyal and dismisses evidence to the contrary that has since emerged. And I have known liberals who came of age during the early 1960's who insist that JFK was God and refuse to believe any of the negative information about him that surfaced over the ensuing decades.