Free Republic

We must remember not just South Vietnam's fall, but why it fell.Fifty years ago, April 30, 1975, the world watched in horror and disbelief as the last American helicopter lifted off from the rooftop of our embassy in Saigon. South Vietnam had fallen in the manner of Ernest Hemingway, “first gradually, then suddenly”: a decades-long war, a relative peace, and then a mad dash by the North Vietnamese Army that consumed the country in less than a month. The tragedy was simply breathtaking. And horribly, horribly unnecessary.What followed was not peace, but darkness. The swift collapse of South Vietnam, Cambodia,...

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that committed the United States to fighting and then losing the Vietnam War. On Aug. 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox was attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats that wrongfully believed Maddox was part of a South Vietnamese strike group delivering a hit-and-run raid on the north. Two days later, the Maddox and USS Turner Joy were ordered back on patrol off the North Vietnamese coast. Both reported being attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats. But those attacks never took place. President Lyndon B. Johnson, however, used the...

Full edition of the New York Tribune (digitized) from April 7, 1917.

I was triggered this morning, after watching a news blurb on Kerry, standing and delivering his BS, to look into the past century and see what wars and casualties America had endured. I surprised myself, with the statistics of who was in office at the time of each major conflict, and the casualties suffered. World War I Woodrow Wilson Democrat 116,708 killed World War II FDR Democrat 408,306 killed Total Dems in charge 20th Century war deaths = 637,479 Korean Conflict Truman Democrarat 54,246 killed Viet Nam JFK / LBJ Democrats 58,219 killed Once again, pay attention to them, as...