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We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat's feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
--T.S. Elliot's The Hollow Men quoted in Apocalypse Now
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It's been 34 years since the Battle of Hamburger Hill as of this week. ABC News claims it was the turning point in the war. Huck makes many accusations here, and she raises even more questions. Just after our victory in Iraq, with the State Department coming under criticism and Israel under pressure to adhere to a new "roadmap for peace," Huck's warnings and recriminations from 1975 sound just as pertinent today. We will not preserve western civilization if we succumb to the self-imposed weaknesses the "conscienses" of American society imposed on our brave men in Vietnam so many years ago.
Never again. Never forget. Never forgive. Long may it wave.
From a Must Visit SiteVipers Vietnam Veterans Page, A Vietnam Veteran & Proud Web Site About VietnamThe Vietnam war was the longest in our nation's history. Two American advisors were killed on July 8, 1959, and the last casualties in connection with the war occurred on May 15, 1975, during the Mayaquez incident. Approximately 2.7 million Americans served in the war zone; 300,000 were wounded and approximately 75,000 permanently disabled. Officially there are still 1,991 Americans unaccounted for from SE Asia.
Vietnam was a savage, in your face war where death could and did strike from anywhere with absolutely no warning. The brave young men and women who fought that war paid an awful price of blood, pain and suffering. As it is said: "ALL GAVE SOME ... SOME GAVE ALL"
The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield. No American force in ANY other conflict fought with more determination or sheer courage than the Vietnam Veteran. For the first time in our history America sent it's young men and women into a war run by inept politicians who had no grasp of military strategies and no moral will to win. They were led by "top brass" who were concerned mainly with furthering their own careers, most neither understood the nature of the war nor had a clue about the impossible mission with which they'd tasked their soldiers. And the war was reported by a self serving Media who penned stories filled with inaccuracies, deliberate omissions, biased presentations and blatant distorted interpretations because they were more interested in a story than the truth! It can be debated that we should never have fought that war. It can also be argued that the young Americans who fought so courageously, never losing a single major battle, helped in a huge way to WIN THE COLD WAR.
No one has even been fired for the failure of 9/11. It has become such a sickness on the part of the American public to ignore not failure but criminal negligence. We have developed a guilt free culture-without honor. Be it Vietnam, Kosovo, the stock market rip off of the last decade.
We need to hang a lot of people.
...What a wondrous gift to be alive in a new Century of FREEDOM...
...as President BUSH has now promised its Return to Communist Vietnam, N. Korea and Cuba...
...as our best defense against future terrorist attacks.
Signed:..ALOHA RONNIE Guyer / Vet-U.S. 7th Cavalry's Opening Days of the Vietnam War 1965-66
http://www.lzxray.com/guyer_collection.htmResponse to “Vietnam Falls” by Susan Huck:
Huck resorts to lies, inaccuracies, exaggerations. and omission of important information.
She claims this was “a no-win war. Planned that way.” Of course this is absurd. Presidents are always obsessed with their historical legacies. Can you really imagine Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon planning to lose a war, which would ruin their historical reputations? Common sense dictates against this.
She claims that Ho Chi Minh was sprung free from a Chinese prison by Americans in about 1944. There is no evidence whatsoever to support that. According to biographical sources, Ho made a deal with his warlord captors. Americans had nothing to do with it.
Huck then claims “In March 1946 a Leftist French Government was ready to let HO have the North, but he wanted everything and made his bid with a surprise attack on Hanoi on the night of December 19, 1946.” In fact, it was the French who struck first the previous month with a naval bombardment of Haiphong that killed 6,000 people. Funny that Huck didn’t mention that.
She later writes that after the French lost the first Indochina War in 1954, that they “were at least able to over the southern flight (from north to south) of some three million refugees from ‘liberation.’” This is a huge exaggeration. The initial 250,000 refugees (typically collaborators with the French) made an unprompted decision to leave, but the number then increased to 850-900, 000 due to CIA black propaganda psy war strikes to the Catholics (according to the Pentagon Papers and other sources) that influenced vastly more to leave.
Huck also didn’t mention that there was the Geneva Agreement created in 1954 that temporarily split Vietnam in two, to be later reunited after national elections. The United States put Ngo Dinh Diem in power who refused the elections. The reason is that Ho as a national hero would have won. Diem then started a violent campaign in 1955 against all opposition including the communists. Ho’s Viet Minh in the South did not start fighting back until two years later and the North began sending Southerners home (to help out) in 1959.
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Once the war started under Johnson, Huck said that Haiphong was never hit during the early years. That is not true. In June 1966, 80 % of Haiphong’s doc facilities were destroyed, but the North Vietnamese got the supplies in anyway. And plenty of other targets were hit, but government officials who studied the potential for bombing Vietnam concluded “The idea that destroying or threatening to destroy N. Vietnam’s industry would pressure Hanoi into calling it quits, seems in retrospect, a colossal misjudgment... NVN…was an agricultural country with a rudimentary transportation system and little industry of any kind.” (Source: Pentagon Papers)
Meanwhile, Washington dumped more than 7 million tons of bombs mostly on South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and some on North Vietnam as well—though there were restrictions there, due to fear of a Soviet or Chinese reaction.
(To Be Continued)
