re: Vietnam Era Boomers: Question for you.

quote:

---

When I arrived at Parris Island MCRB in 1968 I was 100% sure that it was the right thing to do. Eight months later I started having doubts after being involved in many different engagements with Charlie and the NVA.
When I returned back to the States and had access to American media reports, those doubts deeped.

Looking back today, I believe what prolonged the war was U.S. Politics and the military war complex, not the enemy. We would have ended that war a whole lot earlier and so many lives saved if we would have been allowed to engage the enemy and fight the way we were taught. It was about the money. Politicians and the war industries got rich...I got despised and spit on.

---

You Sir, are a hero and the definition of an extraordinary American. Thank you for your service.

quote:

---

There is nothing good that came out of that "war".

---

I disagree...saddling the military with a conscripted force to perform what amounts to a police action is a horrible idea....you want highly trained, motivated professionals to do what we ask of the military 99% of the time....including what we were doing in Vietnam. The military had been on board with this for a long time before Vietnam....but politicians weren't having it because it made them look dovish...so the military was stuck with a bunch of disgruntled conscripts....they made the best out of lemonade but a professional military is FAR favorable from a military POV. From a social POV it does allow for us going into combat much easier because very few have any skin in the game.

It also is more difficult for us to convince people its a good idea to go to war....at least this was true until W was president....between that and the mid 1970's it would have been difficult to convince the American people that our sending troops into combat was good idea....which means we found ways to settle disputes that did not require young men, some barely more than boys, to die. Had we triumphed in Vietnam there is no telling what shennanigans we'd have got up to between 1975 and 2002....we probably would have had to try Russia on for size, for instance, and it was much better to learn a lesson from Vietnam than the lesson we'd have learned from Russia.....69K Americans lost their lives in Vietnam and many suffered unimaginable problems who weren't killed....that would be a drop in the bucket to the lesson we'd have learned with Russia. The path to Americanizing the world aint at the point of a gun, it is at the point of incredible opportunity and freedom...folks will emulate us if we are in an enviable position, they will hate us if we kill their kids. We have the ability to do both....

quote:

---

So, I'm wondering whether it was quite this obvious back in the day

---

See Jane Fonda

far more obvious today that the democrats party is not interested in the wellbeing of the United States. back then Louisiana was a dem state to the point where there were no local republicans candidates

in addition Viet nam was a horrible place to do a grunt style army infantry war. on any good day you could view the horizon from where ever you stood. you could also reach out and touch the horizon consisting of jungle overgrowth without stretching your arm out. why do you think the moss berg 12 gauge pump was such an effective weapon. with an effective range of 20-40 yards everything was close and personnel
first rule of warfare should be to avoid jungle engagements

This has been a valuable thread for me. It helped me realize that the "Radical Left" movement during the Vietnam War was organized by a few hard-core members of some of the Leftist fringe groups of the day but had the unknowing support of the "Hippie Movement" which was not the same thing as the Radical Left movement.

The "Hippies" protested the war out of a personal desire to avoid service in that very tough war. Vietnam was no kind of war for a conscript army. I don't know whether we can fairly describe the US ground forces in Vietnam as a "conscript army" but our ground forces there DID have some of the characteristics of such an army. Our military system IMHO has not repeated this mistake since Vietnam.

I won't go into whether our military system can manage to avoid dreadful "Grand Strategic" mistakes or not. That's an entirely different topic.

I've posted a focused question on the OT about US indirect fire support in Vietnam.