Gee,and I didn't even know I had lost it. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to all the VN vets out there for losing the VN war.
Read Hackworth's book, or the book on John Paul Vann, to discover how counter-productive terrorising the population was, as a tactic.
I don't need to read anything Hackworth wrote. I was in VN at the same time he was. I read John Paul Vann during the early 60's,before I went to VN. There was another famous book about VN that was almost required reading at Bragg too,but I can't remember what it was now. None of that applied to me or the operations I ran. We took the enemies warfare methods right back to them in what they thought were safe havens.
BTW,PLEASE point out to me anywhere that I stated we should be terrorizing the "population". I stated that the way to win a war against terrorism is to terrorize the terrorists. Unless YOU are now claiming that all Muslims are terrorists?
BTW-2,are you a Muslim?
Well, not you personally. There were other people and other countries involved.
But yeah, our side lost it. We failed. The Reds had a win and Vietnam ended up suffering decades of Communist terror. The question (which I am not going to get into here, except for how it relates to this thread) is, 'why?', in terms of whether terrorising the population and throwing the infantryman's rulebook out the window is a factor. I think it is, and those books I mentioned, written by or about people with far more Vietnam experience than me (or you), agree.
Lt. Calley could say exactly the same thing about My Lai, mate.
And all it does is, give a morale boost to the enemy, and a fresh issue for the antiwars back home.
Yes, you do.
He's a thinking soldier, who's not afraid to ask the tough questions after something goes wrong. With all due respect for your service, you need to learn as much as you can from someone like that.
It doesn't work, because people like yourself, and Perry, and Calley, end up making on-the-spot decisions about who is a 'terrorist.'