re: Louisiana fatal casualties of the Vietnam War

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I know, TL/DR, but my dad is 91 and having a bad time as my mother is in hospice (they have been married 65 years

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frick no man. This is kinda shite we want to read and learn about that's not in movies and books.

Too bad young people have not idea of Vietnam and its history. I was 18 when I went over a very emotional time 49 years later I still suffer from PTSD. In 2003 I had my thyroids removed due to Cancer from Agent orange.
The VA still refuses to give me disability. I hope my brothers and sisters keep the beer cold on the other side

Was what he said untrue? The Vietnam War was a quagmire with no logical end that the government ultimately just washed its hands of. I'm sure the majority of men you'd talk to would say they were fighting for the man next to them, not for some more lofty, idealistic cause.

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Too bad young people have not idea of Vietnam and its history. I was 18 when I went over a very emotional time 49 years later I still suffer from PTSD. In 2003 I had my thyroids removed due to Cancer from Agent orange.
The VA still refuses to give me disability. I hope my brothers and sisters keep the beer cold on the other side

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Thanks for your service even if it's 40 years late! I'm no history buff but I really enjoyed the Netflix show and eager to learn about the entire conflict. Not ashamed to admit I didn't know the details on the end of the war and the scope political clusterfrick that hindered EVERYTHING we did there.

I also watched a protest documentary about those people protesting Dow and the war while disrupting classes at colleges around the country. They seemed like they should have been going to class and not being whining hippies so much. My $.02 on that one.

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To give a good example of what WWII was like compared to Vietnam, I'll cite the mostly forgotten Battle of Hurtgen Forest that was fought from September through December 1944. In this one battle fought over a few month period the US suffered over 30,000 casualties and many of the infantry battalions that were engaged suffered losses over 70-80%. And this battle only wrapped up due to the German's launching their winter offensive that history knows as The Battle of the Bulge where the US suffered another roughly 100,000 casualties in a little over a month.

Now add in on top of that the fact the US was also at that same time having men fighting and dying every day in Italy and then there's the whole Pacific theater going on as well and you get a picture of just how huge of a meat grinder WWII actually was.

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I missed this post the first time, Darth - 3rd AD was in Hurtgen as well. BTW - for those who haven't seen it - great film set during this battle - When Trumpets Fade - a made for TV film in fact, starring Ron Eldard (recall he played Michael Durant in Blackhawk Down) as a soldier in the 28th ID.


The fact that WWII was warfare beyond the industrial scale of the Napoleonic Wars, American Civil War, Franco-Prussian and WWI, even, in a way lessens the emotional impact. We "only" lost about half a million. France, Germany, Russia and Japan lost multiples of millions. Although it shouldn't, it ultimately lessens the impact of the individual loss on the society as a whole.

What else changed during Vietnam? The media coverage. That's when the U.S. was somehow persuaded that the costs of war were just too high - and that casualties are the only way to "keep score" in a war, rather than securing victory and dictating terms.

And the incessant reporting of the bodycount along with the near realtime news delivery of combat footage helped shape modern American society.

There were 5 things that happened, more or less simultaneously - # television sets in the U.S. reached a critical mass, JFK (the first multimedia President), the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the space race and the Vietnam War (all with the backdrop of the Cold War with the Soviet Union) - those 5 events, somewhat intertwined, continue to shape how national events, global crises and wars are reported to the American public to this day.

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The 28th was a national guard division from Pennsylvania nicknamed the "Bloody Bucket Div",

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Yeah - I know, Darth - I was under them in Kosovo. They're the "Keystone Division" and their lineage goes back to Benjamin Franklin.

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Was what he said untrue? The Vietnam War was a quagmire with no logical end that the government ultimately just washed its hands of. I'm sure the majority of men you'd talk to would say they were fighting for the man next to them, not for some more lofty, idealistic cause.

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I can't disagree. It was a terrible loss of life for a futile, political cause. I have the utmost respect for the men (and in a lot of cases boys) who were sent over there to die by politicians. Then, those who came back were often ignored and left to rot by the government, whether they suffered from PTSD or Agent Orange effects. It was a truly sorry chapter in our modern history, and that has everything to do with the government and Washington and has no bearing on the heroic service of our veterans. I don't see what is controversial about that statement. I guess the first guy could have used a little more tact in his message.

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Yeah - I know, Darth - I was under them in Kosovo. They're the "Keystone Division" and their lineage goes back to Benjamin Franklin.

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I figured you did. I only posted that as a footnote on one of the big differences in the two wars. I know there's a lot of folks nowadays that see NG soldiers as "weekend warriors" and only wanted to give some balance to that misconception.

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I know there's a lot of folks nowadays that see NG soldiers as "weekend warriors" and only wanted to give some balance to that misconception.

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And that clearly happened during the Vietnam era - LBJ's conscious decision NOT to mobilize the country for Vietnam - to have both "guns" and "butter" - run the war as a sideshow, while amping up his "War on Poverty" and other domestic priorities. Part of that was not mobilizing the National Guard, which would have given the war more of a collective effort feel to it. While it is true that many volunteered, as the war dragged on, guys getting the draft notices started to feel like losers - even more so when the war was being sold by our own media as a lost cause.

You'll notice they've tried to do that ever since, ultimately succeeding in Somalia and, to a lesser degree, Iraq. They've almost succeeded in Afghanistan.