Imagine explaining to your peers dying at such a young age in combat in south Vietnam
“Don’t worry in fifty years Macdonald’s and Hilton will be back and the NVA will be begging us to come back and build a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay to help them against the Red Chinese”
Is that victory.....sort of like the boat people validated our cause?
I’m sixty two...last year to register for that draft...I had relatives who were seniors when I was in early middle school who went and some wounded and one died
Friends too...one bragged he was gonna whup those VC commies
Came home pretty fast missing a foot from a booby trap....and started drinking
My father in law was a three war combat vet with two tours in Vietnam
He grew disgruntled badly over the prosecution of the war and especially hands tied and growing reliance on usually worthless ARVN troops
He retired disgusted an E-8
Sixty thousand lives later of young folks from our generation...and it feels like we won kind of.....but could we have done it differently without so much our own blood especially given how y’all were treated coming home
Maybe if we hadn’t decided to bolster French colonial claims
Then again Vietnam was a hot spot in an existential threat of a Cold War
I don’t have the answers...
Who does...
I just always wince a little reading the westernizing and cozying up from the north Vietnamese leadership now
That was the blood of our kids...I’ve got sons that age..
It’s heartrending
No question the media cost the war....and politics ....look at their records talking about how Nixon’s bomibing dikes and Haiphong mines were killing them or how Tet demoralized them....yet we retreated or we stopped to sue for peace
Commies then and now in ANTIFA don’t make peace
It’s simply half time
If you think Vietnam plus 50 years is tough, imagine how strange it was for our troops in Japan and Germany just a few years after those bloody wars.