Posted on 09/21/2017 9:20:30 AM PDT by oh8eleven
Most of the interviewees talk in the lugubrious tones of the defeated. We all know the story ends badly. But when it’s over, we aren’t told why we lost. The music is more memorable than the pictures, and the pictures are more compelling than the narration. We are deluged by sights and sounds but not enlightened as to cause and effect.
The film casts the antiwar movement in a moderately favorable light. Are the protesters the real heroes here? What about the valiant US soldiers, 75 percent of whom were volunteers?
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
It wasn’t just the media wanting to slant toward their bias either. Some were just sorry reporters. A guy I know that was there said Peter Arnett- and other reporters hung out in the rear in a bar and interviewed people that worked in the rear- military office personnel, support people, contractors, talked to very few actual combat military. They wrote stories as if they were right with soldiers in combat and seeing what was happening. Fake news to begin with, of course with a liberal slant to it as well because they were all liberals.
Oh my that hurt so bad...you are just pathetic in every way.
Is that cake on your keyboard?
Eeeeew don’t eat it, that’s gross....
No - I didn’t know that part.
Being in MACV, the ARVNs and other South VietNamese I came
in contact with were of a slightly more “motivated” variety.
I left in April ‘71 and at that point in time, we saw
ourselves as “winning” as did most of the ARNVs I knew.
I spent the following couple of years drunk and angry at
what I saw being portrayed on American TV, as opposed to
what I knew as a reality.
This begat an everlasting distrust/mistrust of Legacy Media
which I am only seeing recently is being shared by the
populace in general. (And this Burns film is that very
mendacious attitude persisting to this day.)
I only pray their awakening is not too late.
Thank you for your perspective.
That is just how I am picturing him. He posted a self portrait!
Ever meet a thin girl named Tammy?
Nobody has.
So many fallacies, so little time:
Ho Chi Minh had the full and unbridled support of the Soviets, the Chinese, the Warsaw Pact - and the open assistance of “allies” like the Brits and Canadians and “neutrals” like the Swedes. There were 330,000 Chinese “logistics” troops in North Vietnam and some number of Chinese advisors in the South (we killed one near Hue City - his ring fit neatly over my thumb). The Soviets had thousands as technicians and assistants in the North and they provided Billions in arms and munitions.
They knew how critical Vietnam and its “National Liberation War” was in that corner of the world and they almost had it won when we got there in ‘65. They threw everything they had and used the South Vietnamese as human shields. We were damn good and we would have still had the place safe if it hadn’t been for weak and hesitant and deceptive political leaders, an active pro-enemy Left guiding the “anti war” movement and the press and a strong streak of cowardice among our stateside men.
After I got back, I confronted a whole college football team that wearing Strike for Peace regalia and asked them “when did you decide you were against the war? When it looked like you might killed? You’re all cowards - and we could’ve used big, bulky guys like you to carry ammo boxes”
They didn’t answer me.
Almost all of the Tammys I have met were shapely - as opposed to hounds, which tend towards scrawny.
The key to real history will be that he shows that we won the war and got our prisoners back and came home. Only 5000 Americans remained when the communists broke the Paris treaty and invaded the south because the Democrat congress after the resignation of Nixon stopped funding or supplying the South with critically need military supply . This left the South helpless against the second invasion . The communist then slaughtered over a million South Vietnam civilians. What I write here is absolute historic fact. Let’s see how burns covered up what the Democrats did to the free south Vietnamese.
Absolutely. Much of the Soviet effort though was in Air Defense which didn't really have anything to do with the South's collapse in 75'. Chinese troops freed up North Vietnamese to go South. And then the North Vietnamese had to go to war in 79' to kick them out too.
In dollar values anyway, the South got more aid from the US than the North did in 73'-75'.
Here is a .PDF from the CIA about the period: http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001166499.pdf
They knew how critical Vietnam and its “National Liberation War” was in that corner of the world and they almost had it won when we got there in ‘65. They threw everything they had and used the South Vietnamese as human shields. We were damn good and we would have still had the place safe if it hadn’t been for weak and hesitant and deceptive political leaders, an active pro-enemy Left guiding the “anti war” movement and the press and a strong streak of cowardice among our stateside men.
The South would have collapsed in 65' without US assistance. 60,000 American lives bought 10 years. But the only way to prevent the North Politburo from continuing their attempts to take over the South was regime change and this was well beyond what American political leadership would undertake.
Have you noticed the media is beginning to do the same with our current veterans. Anything bad and the headline includes that they are a veteran, if it is a good story then that is in the last paragraph.
Well, well, well. They just showed the “hero” John McCain interviewed in the Hanoi Hilton. It added nothing to the documentary.
He said to tell his wife he loved her. He didn’t say he would one day divorce her so he could marry a wealthy beer distributor’s daughter so he could get elected to Congress.
Oh, how I despise him.
Am I the only one who sees this Musgrave guy as a little over dramatic?
McCain would have washed out if his daddy hadn't been an admiral (and a good one)
His grandfather was the 'air admiral' under Halsey in Task Force 38 when it was hit by Typhoon Cobra.
McCain was supposed to take the blame for that with Halsey being a war hero but dropped dead from a heart attack just after the Japanese surrender. Living on just coffee and cigarettes for weeks under the threat of kamikazes will do that.
He wasn't a popular air admiral, he was considered something of a 'johnny come lately' to aviation and was constantly coming up with bad ideas and micromanaging people who actually really knew their stuff.
He compared poorly to Pete Mitscher who was practically worshipped by his aviators and even ended up having a class of destroyers named after him.
Are you aware that ALL of the agent orange was stored in Gulfport? The Navy was ordered to spend $100,000,000 to clean it up in the 80s. Civilians were paid millions. If you have any of the maladies associated with agent orange and haven’t applied for disability you might want to check it out. Thank you for your service.
True. And during those ten years, we killed the main part of the vicious old ex-Viet Minh "Hard Core" VC and many or most of the older NVA leadership. Can you imagine how horrific things would have been in Vietnam if those original fanatics had taken control? The revenge murders and reeducation camps were bad enough ten years after the fact.
We also bought a certain measure of respect, in that the Communist credo was that American capitalists were nothing but weak, degenerate "paper tigers", nothing significant in the unstoppable path of worldwide socialist revolution.
Then we show up, hundreds of thousands of us, pale and only recently integrated, the wrong uniforms of the wrong material, boots that rotted as soon as they hit the paddies and supplied by slow ships and mostly prop planes over 9,000 miles of open ocean. We had out-of-touch leaders and primitive tactics and the only maps we had were from the French.
We adapted. We adapted to finding out that there were a lot more enemy than anyone back in Washington had guessed. We adapted to the local VC with their damnable booby traps and their life-sucking rice paddies, we adapted to the Hard Core VC with their carefully-planned and merciless ambushes and night attacks, we adapted to the "Hard Hat" NVA with their modern weapons and even artillery and tanks and their huge numbers. We learned to fight in the lowland, the rivers, the mountains with triple-canopy jungle. We learned to kill and beat them all, while the world watched and carped and second-guessed. We even learned that the Vietnamese people, whether they supported the VC or the ARVN were the whole object of our war, the people we came to protect.
We put up with the mind-numbing heat, the month-long rains, the ridiculously poor M16, the Dear John letters, the 194-lot C-Rations, and the pinheads at home who quit on us even before the war started.
So what did we end up with? Well for one, we weren't the United States who let Hungary die while offering words of comfort and nothing else, and we weren't just offering bags of rice this time - we were offering the lives of our most precious sons for another people entirely and no matter what the world thought of our war, they saw a far stronger, more resilient American than they thought still existed. Meanwhile Thailand, and Indonesia, and the Philippines, and Malaysia and Myanmar got a breather from the communist steamroller for ten good years - enough to shake the fever.
When the Cold War finally choked to death, it was the vision of all those young American men and their poor suffering families that the Soviets saw at the negotiation table. There were no more National Liberation Wars, ever again.
Well said ...
As the Brits say .... Hear Hear
Excellent Gyrene ... Excellent.
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