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 its over, we arent 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 ...
“Then ... they lost interest (War is hard ... ) and bailed, started blaming Nixon and back-biting our troops & CICh until Congress cut funding.”
I WAS around and always heard Johnson and McNamara blamed,not Nixon.
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The South Vietnamese government was inept and corrupt.
What about Tet 69 when TuDo St. was overrun?
No doubt - but they deserved to be free, didn’t they?
All in all, I'd say LBJ and McNamara have borne the brunt of the scorn. But that could also be my personal point of view being confirmed.
Let me offer another perspective from my personal observations directly after we pulled out of Vietnam.
I served a tour there in the Army from 70-71.
After the war, in August of 1974, I went back to Vietnam as a government contractor with Lear-Siegler in an effort to teach the S. Vietnamese military how to take care of and maintain the immense amount of aircraft that we left with them, as part of Nixon’s “Vietnamization” program.
This was at Tan Son Nhut AFB, and between classroom and flightline instruction that I gave to S. Vietnamese military personnel, it was obvious to me by their ho-hum attitudes and lack of motivation to learn, that they didn’t want to have anything more to do with the war and they knew S. Vietnam was in the process of falling to the North’s southward march.
Everyday I would see numerous cargo planes landing and off-loading hundreds of dead S. Vietnamese solders, and my students saw it too.
I won’t watch the Burn’s documentary and don’t know if he’ll touch on the “Vietnamization” effort that America undertook, but from my perspective, I knew during the Summer of ‘74 that it was a losing effort, and 8 months later S. Vietnam fell to the Communists.
Vietnamese were less concerned about being free than kicking out foreigners.
They even went to war with the communist Chinese shortly after the fall of Saigon.
That said, it's currently easier to open and run a business in former Saigon than New York City...
He was on Fox and friends the other day and then went on Brian’s radio show. He seemed nice. At least nicer than idiot Jimmy Kimmel who threatened to pound Brian if they ever met after Brian was calling Kimmel an elitist.
I'm reasonably sure that Taiwan was out of range for any targets near us - but if so, it could explain why the Air Force always seemed to hit the wrong treelines - or us.
I was in direct combat on the ground and to best of my knowledge no one ever used drugs - 1. when somebody's trying to kill you and any step you take can be your last, you tend not to want to dull your senses anymore than you have to and 2. Not exactly sure where you'd get drugs, since we always in the field, never in the rear.
Of course, the left has diligently worked for 40 years to remove patriotism and pride in country from our skools, they don’t want today’s young people to be exposed to that kind of thinking now.
Which is EXACTLY why I didn't even bother to tune in to watch the show. FU Ken Burns!
Ken Burns is a typical New England Leftist...
No LIB is “nice”. They hate you, your family, your success and your freedom.
So say you - and when were you there?
The villagers I saw every day I was there didn't want a thing to do with the VC or the NVA - they just wanted to be free to live their own lives. They knew why were there, most of them - and they were worth protecting.
Burns did the same distorted versions of history re the Civil War and WWII. It is all about social justice and aggrieved minorities.
Ken Burns is a history revisionist, whose documentaries are used in the public schools to teach “history”. No wonder the last couple of generations believe the way they do. Too bad they can’t be rounded up and made to sit through REAL history lessons.
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