That was my experience in Vietnam where I lived on an 82 ft. long boat in country for a year. Big brown rats occasionally got aboard and the crew had a heck of a time catching them. One time they caught one and threw him over the fantail and we watched him swimming in the wake behind us. And the air conditioning? Well, it was tempermental but our engineman was able to keep it going most of the time.
CedarDave, you'd probably find it no surprise the reaction I get from the left when I challenge their long held beliefs of Vietnam being a worthless mistake. While in and of itself the goal of propping up the South Vietnam government wasn't realized, now the officials of the former USSR gov't are writing their memoirs and telling all. We knew the Soviets were assisting the NVA but I doubt we had any idea the billions of dollars of resources that funnelled in through 1979. For instance 6,000 SAM batteries with full training and support in 1965 alone-that's a lot of rubles! The Soviets pretty much fed the whole country with grain transported down the Ho Chi Minh trail throughout the conflict. Given the USSR collapsed about a decade later largely because of a lack of the exact resources they poured into Vietnam, I think Vietnam was merely a campaign of the cold war-and who in their right mind thinks you can remove events like that from history, merely because it wasn't as pretty as we'd like, without altering the outcome?
They deny the domino effect yet forget we were grabbing swaths of dominoes from around the planet to stop their fall. The effect of Vietnam on the cold war therefore wasn't just symbolic, or idealism, it was vital and tangible. I refuse to accept we have to have 1.5 million Americans told their sacrifice amounts to nothing merely to protect the reputations of the Fondas and Kerrys and their cohorts, and their stubborn insistence they were right because American policy was flawed.
Sorry for diverging off the topic but I get the impression the author of the Post article is clueless about the role of the mind and spirit in healing the body. Those vets need moral support as much as anything yet a vocal minority has spent 4 years advancing their perverted message that the war is IMMORAL! It's not for concern for the Iraqis but pure partisan politics. Now it's accepted fact amongst the ignorant the Iraq war is based on lies, not one of which they've proven- the same people will tell you atrocities in 'Nam were widespread and as good as written policy. When does the insanity end?