The American War: The US In Vietnam

FYI:

58,000 American soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen died so you could waste your life away on the internet.

If there were never an American Vietnam War, there would be no internet today.

 

That all may be somewhat true but the fact remains we did have a treaty obligation.

Our ally did request assistance from an aggressive invading enemy.

It was a winnable war but we fought it stupidly and lost. That is the tragedy not the defense of an ally from foreign aggression

 

The best resource for understanding the entire Viet Nam War is a book by The Navy League entitled "Rolling Thunder In A Gentle Land."

That war began in 1850 with a Buddhist uprising against Catholic-French missionaries.

The American phase was how it ended.

William Childs Westmoreland is the last general who nailed the final nail in the foreign coffin for it.

After Westy, then all that could be done was give it to Creighton Williams Abrams to extricate the USA out of it and turn it over to the ARVN who then ultimately capitulated to the NVA.

Had LBJ given the reins to Abrams instead of Westy to begin with, there might have been a better result for the USA.

However Vo Nguyen Giap was confident that he could defeat any American general in Viet Nam, and so he said to his dying day, a hero to his own Nation of Viet Nam (reunified).

 

Westmoreland fought it stupidly and lost.

Be specific.

 

Yes; they bought time to grind down the Soviet Union and force its collapse, and left the Communist NVA forces with a lot fewer troops with which to invade and permanently occupy their neighbors, and we kept our SEATO allies loyal and assured we honored our Treaties with blood and treasure. You Muslim commies can't understand such principles, being vermin and sub-humans.

 

So you're arguing that stupidity is a valid reason for war.
Nice.

 

It is viewed as disrespectful to be so imprecise as you are @Indofred .

So be more precise when you speak of the dead. Some of my friends are among them.

To wit:

58,315 KIA, MIA, DOW (died of wounds) Americans.

Count as of 3/29/2017 updated.

 

Not at all, the US has started a lot of wars and committed a very high number of terrorist attacks so Vietnam alone didn't spark life wasting time on the internet.
However, whilst the arguing with pathetic morons is actually pointless, the research done in order to establish the truth of any given situation is education and education is never bad (unless you're the US government and you don't want your population to realise what a set of bastards you are).

 

War is the failure of diplomacy.

War is diplomacy by other means.

 

"Whilst" is Brit or Canuck.

You should watch your mouth.

 

It would have been more productive if China and the USA could have come to a more progressive accord on how to reunite Viet Nam, as it were.

As it was, a lot of Vietnamese, Chinese, and 58,315 Americans died for nothing, sadly.

 

Whatever.
They didn't die of wounds or whatever, they didn't of American politicians' stupidity.
Breaking down the numbers into suicides or whatever is a bit pointless because your war criminals all died of the same thing.
War criminals? Surely they were following orders, just like the Nazis hanged after the WWII.

As a note, did you also get angry at the numbers of Vietnamese you lot killed by entering the war?

 

Nice photo, thanks @Dropship !!

 

War is hell.

William Tecumseh Sherman.

 

That information was not known at the time. That has come out later.
We also now know the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident was not what we were told at the time.
Hindsight can make us all geniuses.

 

I remember Nixon's double-talk.

You could not tell what he was saying.

He wanted to appease the protestors as well as the establishment.

My first read on Nixon was that he would keep his promise to scale down the war over there.

But all he did was make it look like it.

In reality he tried to win a major strategic victory over the North as well.

But he could not. So with re-election drawing near he finally pulled out and soon thereafter got the POW's back -- Nixon's finest hour.

Too bad by then Liddy had already run his raid on the Watergate and then Nixon tried to cover it all up by erasing the tape. But that's a different story.

Those are my memories of Nixon -- all mostly double-talk ending in an impeachment resignation.

 

Half-correct.
Westmoreland was given everything. We had HALF A MILLION of us there at one time (~196.
It is true we won militarily, but it was not a conventional war, and just like Iraq, we lost the occupation. To have a successful occupation you have to have the vast majority of the people for you (or at least not opposing you).
The native people will not like you if you are ignorant, dismissive, and condescending about their culture and religion - as we were both in Iraq and Vietnam.
The occupation of Japan was a success due to MacArthur stressing respect for the Japanese, and the German occupation was a success due to our having western culture in common.

 

When I was just a kid, Nixon and JFK were debating on TV and my mom and dad and I were watching it.

I asked them, "So who are you two going to vote for in this?"

They said, "Well Nixon of course."

I told them, "Nixon looks like a crook to me."

 

Exactly.

The People of Viet Nam did not want Americans in their country.

Same mistake as Iraq.

Same mistake as Afghanistan.

 

Nixon was amoral. He was a lot like Trump in that he viewed everything in how it impacted HIM, and everything else was secondary. He would promise anything, with no intention of keeping the promises.
He had a "secret plan" for peace in Vietnam - he took the secret to the grave.

 

Not stupidity.

Honoring a commitment

 

He was not alone. Many policy makers above him and commanders below him as well

 

Exactly.
I would guess that the Japanese and Germans - at least initially, didn't want us either, but they understood WHY we were there and gave it a chance, and found we weren't so bad.

 

They were not war criminals.

Many if not most of the vietnamese killed were killed by the communists

 

I've never been a member of the "Navy League" who publishes an excellent magazine and publish excellent well written and researched books. But my grandfather joined the Navy League after serving in the Navy during WW l.

Every once in awhile I'll be over at someones house who belongs to the Navy League and spend hours going through the Navy League magazines "Sea Power." Excellent magazine.

Been a member of the "U.S. Naval Institute" since 1976 and had three articles published in the USNI "Proceedings." Also been a member of the Marine Corps Association since 1976.