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Name: steadyrollinwalkman
E-Mail: steadyrollinwalkman@yahoo.com
Subject: More NSC
Date: Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Time: 5:08:44 PM
Remote Address: 98.30.114.225
Message ID: 253868
Parent ID: 253772
Thread ID: 253600
>Again, why did we have to waste the lives of our teenage kids to do that?
Ok, politics aside. Forget Johnson, Nixon, Dominoe Theory, etc. Do you seriously think that if people are being masacred, we should ignore it when they ask for our help? The South Vietnamese Government ASKED for our help. Should we have just said "Sorry, but even though your enemy is being supplied by Soviet and Eastern block countries, and have Chinese and Soviet military advisors and troops/aviators to help them, we still view this as a Civil War. Good luck, hope you make it out alright. Oh, by the way, I hope your civilians who only have enough rice production for their family and maybe a little to sell, and who are unwilling to give their much needed crops to the local Viet Cong cadre will no longer be assasinated."
Hell Keno, I still think we need to be in Africa, along with the UN. When people are being slaughtered who can't defend themselves, the people of the world capable of defending them should step in. We should not allow the slaughter of civilian people, whether they are African, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Korean, or Jewish.
>You want a pat on the back? I hate to tell you, but your knowledge isn't first hand, and you are lacking on some counts. You know some stories, yes, but what have you learned? Your reasoning sucks, and to me, that tells me you didn't learn correctly the lessons that most others learned as the years went by.
Did I ask for a friggin' pat on the back? I was saying most were suprised that someone my age actually takes an intrest, or wasn't satisfied with the 3 pages on the Vietnam War in the School History text book. And yea, my reasoning sucks, because I think the South Vietnamese should have been protected, you got me there.
What I've learned is that the Vietnam War was not for a waste, how it was managed was wasteful. The French lost in Vietnam because it's forces were tied to static defense posts. Just like ours were in Vietnam. The French lost because they underestimated the Vietnamese, just like us. The French didn't think the Vietnamese were capable of hauling field artillery up the hills that surrounded Dien Bien Phu, but they did (with captured US Howitzers supplied to them by North Korea). The United States underestimated the Viet Cong's infrastructure, despite the intel that they were planning a countrywide offensive for the Tet holiday, we viewed them as too unorganized. Like I said, it was managed wastefully, but our intentions were honorable.
>Where do you think? I didn't have to read history books like you had to, or listen to a pro war hawk at my Jr high school like you did. I was alive back then and saw the shit that was going on firsthand.
Unless you were in Vietnam, your knowledge is also second-hand. You weren't there, you saw it on television, you read it in the paper, you talked about it in class, but you weren't there.
Maybe you should pick up a few books. I wouldn't doubt that you thought Tet was a military victory for the VC because Cronkite said it was. You relied on the media, which never ever tells the whole story. Tet was a failure for the VC. They never held any ground they were able to overrun for more than 24 hours (Hue doesn't count, because it was overrun by NVA). After Tet, the Viet Cong no longer existed as an independent fighting force, it was decimated durring Tet. Though VC still operated after Tet, it was in very small numbers, and most served as guides for NVA troops infiltraiting into their local area. After the war, many VC were jailed because of differenting views with the NVA. Tet was also a failure because the South Vietnamese people did not rise up against the government afterwards, as was the #2 goal. The US and ARVN's were the victors of Tet.
Tet was only a VC success in the United States, when the protestors and Cronkite said that there was no way to win, it was a stalemate. I can understand how they felt that way, the US embassy was attacked, hell it was the greatest publicity stunt of the whole war for the VC/NVA. The media broadcasted that, but they didn't tell the other side.
And as I said earlier, my Jr High School librarian at Kent State was A WAR PROTESTOR, not a hawk. She didn't fill my head with pro-war ideas. We were having a conversation about the Kent State shootings and she told me (once again, I'll put it in writing SHE WAS A WAR PROTESTOR) that she remembered her friends and some outsiders throwing rocks and bottles at the Guardsmen. She told me that when I said I knew about protestors being gunned down with no reason. She brought the other side of the story to me. Though she didn't care to admit that that's what triggered it, she views herself as a historian and wanted me to have all the facts.
>Nobody figured those stupid Guardsman would fire on them!
I hate to sound redundant, but if you threw a rock or a bottle at someone with a gun, do you think that's a good idea? No. I have a guy at work that I pray gets fired because I can't stand him, and even though he's unarmed, I wouldn't throw a rock at him. That's just senseless violence. The kind of violence those protestors viewed they were protesting.
You think they had forgotten the chants of "the whole world's watching" when protestors were being flogged quite brutily and unnecessarily by policemen at the Chicago Democratic Convention? Sure, it was 2 years before but it was still fresh in their minds. They either forgot, or they didn't learn from history. You're right though, innocent students were killed durring the shootings and that's sad. There were a lot of people provoking the Guardsmen though, and hard to tell who's doing what. It wasn't a peacefull protest.
My point is there is always two sides of a story. People think the Vietnam War was a waste, remember signs like "we're not against the soldiers, we're against the war" and remember the Guardsmen gunning down protestors at Kent. The movie cinema has been guilty too. It still bewilders me that people think Apocalypse Now is a Vietnam War movie (which it isn't, the Vietnam War was only a setting for the novel Heart of Darkness) And if that's the only side we're projecting back then or now, it's a one-sided perspective, and that isn't history. If that is what's being taught, no one is learning what needs to be taught. I should know, because that is what I was taught. I believed the war was a waste, was injust, and imorale. But the more I started researching, the more I started forming my current opinions, as unique as they may be. When you only tell one side of the story (hawk side only, or dove side only), no one learns the whole truth.
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