(03-05-2026 07:29 PM)Native Georgian Wrote: (03-05-2026 03:53 PM)TripleA Wrote: No more frickin' Vietnams.
Even after all these years, that subject is still so painful to think about. America truly did make a collective political decision to wage the war in the most incompetent manner, and then a separate decision to simply lose the war. It did not have to be that way.
For someone born in 1970, who is my oldest daughter's age, and did not cognitively live through the era, what I would say was it was much more complex than you make it out to be. While China supplied the bulk of material for the North, Russia was never out of the picture, nor was another potential threat via Russia's closeness with Cuba.
Our Nato partners were not as supportive as many may think and Royal Dutch Shell Oil provided our adversaries with fuel during the war. And the were appropriately named shell because that's what kind of company they were so that the company founded in Houston in 1949 could conduct business with both sides during the war.
Between Maoist backed organizations like the Black Panthers and the assassinations of M.L. King and Malcom X for refusing to play up racial division, and the actions of the Weather Underground blowing up government facilities and Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn never being prosecuted for them and benefitting from clemency given to draft dodgers who fled to Canada, and the campus protests which were for both sides, and a war policy that everyone in the military knew was not going to lead to a successful conclusion, let alone a productive prosecution of the war by taking the war North of the DMZ, and the fear in the 60's of nuclear war, which the communists played up as a reason for our European allies to fear the continued pursuit of the war, right down to the Paris Peace talks where Kissinger left behind any P.O.W's whose whereabouts were unknown (jungle camps) and their capture unconfirmed in order to get out and the final but subsequent 55 days were horrendous for those allied with U.S. forces and left behind. And the role of the United Nations for which we carried the bulk of funding was a pain in the ass constantly due to the nature and make up of its security council.
To call it all a total Charlie Foxtrot is fair. But to lay it out so simply is to misunderstand the climate, the profit motive of the American Military Industrial Complex which was best profited by expended ordinance and destroyed equipment in need of replacement, the sale of Oil/Petrol at a time when gas wars were ongoing in the U.S. with gasoline in the late 60's well under 30 cents a gallon in some places, and all of it a continuation of the profit engine created and stoked during WWII, sustained during Korea, and fearing recession in the mid 60's and you've only begun to scratch the surface of what it all meant.
Marry the desires of our adversaries to the profit motives of our corporations, and the national debt growing disproportionately for the war effort with every dollar borrowed assisting the growth of the Federal Reserves' power, complete to the point of the draining of the U.S. Treasury of Silver Coins to be melted and sold at a profit overseas leading to the Federal Coinage act of 1965 which took silver out of dimes and quarters and reduced it to 40% of the composition of the half dollar, and then add the hatred for the draft to fight a war which everyone knew was unwinnable with a repeat of a DMZ as we learned from Korea, and polished off with Hanoi Jane handing a communist POW commandant a list of names of POW known to be retained in jungle camps preventing the negotiations of Kissinger from bringing them home and ruminate on that for a decade and a half and having soldiers return to the vile response of the ignorant young who were their age roughly and then you have then you have only begun to comment on that War, its complexities, its pain, and the complete waste of lives, money, and bleeding of power we did not begin to reassemble until the Soviets got their ass handed to them in Afghanistan.
Our military is still too damned political at the top. But it seems to be improving if only a bit.
Grasp all of that and only then can you begin to comprehend that war. The crap they teach you in school about it has been redacted by left leaning professors, to suit their narratives, and not as reality.
And that sir is the reality!
Well, it is the reality except for one annoyingly ironic but sad detail. Ho Chi Minh approached us for help before turning to the Chinese. We turned him down out of loyalty to our WWII French allies who were the former power over their colonial holdings in SE Asia.
