Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (129910)	4/25/2004 1:10:11 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Nadine, too many of us don't understand the deeper lessons of Vietnam. We buy into the "we could have won it" words of the chickenhawks and the gung ho crowd. And then, sadly, we explore all the things we could have done to fight it harder, smarter, and more brutally. It's much ado about nothing. The real lessons of Vietnam, Sudan, and Soviet invaded Afghanistan is much more elemental and much darker for nations that intend to control the internal affairs of a sovereign nation through the use of military force. The real lesson is that, with very narrow exceptions, NO nation will peacefully tolerate an occupying force that uses military power to attempt to force internal changes in it's society. If you use Vietnam as an example, how would you have "won" the war in Vietnam? I was there and there weren't any military goals that we COULDN'T successfully complete, except for one. And that elusive goal was to KILL enough of the S. and N. Vietnamese fighters to make them quit, EVEN THOUGH THAT WAS OUR STATED OBJECTIVE. Yes, our seek and destroy missions were targeting body counts, not taking territory or "defeating" enemy units. And we killed a whole lot of them. We killed them with napalm, bullets, artillery, b-52 bomb strikes that lit up the land like welding sparks and shook the ground, gattling guns mounted on fixed aircraft that would saturate the ground with bullet and we even got a lot of help from the jungle's malaria, fevers, snake bites, malnutrition, infections and other things. But they just wouldn't quit, in fact their popular support grew among the S. Vietnamese. How do you kill a people's pride? How do you kill a people's history and culture and religious beliefs? What were you going to do, kill millions of them "for their own good?" We tried that and it didn't work. In the end that war would still be going as long as there was one man with one gun. You say it's different this time because you: "don't see that the Vietnam analogy tells us very much about what will happen in Iraq. Different times, different politics (who is the insurgents' USSR?), different culture, and different army too - our current forces are far better than the conscript army in Vietnam, and today's officer corps all went to school on Vietnam." The fact is that the Iraqis, like the Vietnamese, are a fierce people. Look at their history, their religion and the war with Iraq. These people will fight and will fight to the death. They don't need a USSR to fight an effective guerilla war against us and they don't need to put on uniforms and fight us straight up. They can fight like the VC and pick their time and place to booby trap, ambush and attack. That gives THEM a tremendous advantage and leaves our soldiers taking wounds and deaths and swatting back at thin air. Inevitably our soldiers will take out their fear and anger on someone, and when that happens, and it already has, moderate Iraqis will join the insurgency. So what would we gain? If you believe in killing millions for some benefit that escapes me, then you can win a war like the one in Vietnam and the one that's developing in Iraq, if not, don't go there. I'll respond with a separate post to your last paragraph.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (129910)	4/25/2004 1:31:34 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

He's not gonna quit beating the Vietnam horse. None of them will. Vietnam is one of those "Rashomon" events that allows all Male Answer Syndrome sufferers to "Save Face". No matter what they say, nobody can actually prove them wrong.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (129910)	4/25/2004 2:00:10 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

"- our current forces are far better than the conscript army in Vietnam.." I've heard this same type of statement from Rumsfeld and others. It implies that our failure to "win the war in Vietnam" can be attributed in part to the fact that the people fighting in Vietnam were "draftees" or, as you referred to us, "conscripts." You couldn't be more wrong. My unit was an army unit in the jungle and we fought NVA regulars with years of fighting experience. They were deadly fighters, they knew the jungle, they picked their times and places to ambush us, they were dug into bunkers that were a part of the jungle and they killed a lot of us. But they weren't better than the "conscripts" that are now negatively compared to the "all-volunteer" army. Some of us had some college education but some of us couldn't read or write. Some of us came from cities and some came from farms or mountains. Most of us in the jungle were about 20 years old. An "old man" was someone over 24. Most of us were drafted. We were southerners, northerners, easterners and westerners. We stayed in the jungle for months straight carrying what we needed for survival on our backs. Once in a while we had a 4-5 days of rest on an LZ. LZs were the "front" in most people's minds but for us that was RxR. We were supposedly "led" by a captain and three lieutenants, but the reality was that all they did was to tell us where to go. We knew a lot more about the jungle and the NVA than they did, we were up front while they were sheltered in the middle of the group and there were a lot of leaders among us. We did the how of it, and when we were in firefights one of us was usually directing the battle. All the "career" military men were in the rear because we were getting killed all the time and they knew it. As much as they would have liked to get their military records punched up with combat experience, many of them wouldn't take such extreme risks. Some units were totally wiped out. Some units like ours which were usually at a 50-60 man strength in jungle, lost 50 men DEAD over the course of a one year's tour. We were wet a lot of the time during the monsoons season. In the dry months we sometimes couldn't get scheduled resupplies and we went without water in the jungle's oppressive heat. When we found it we sometimes drank water that would make a maggot choke, and we were grateful to get it. We pulled leaches off our bodies and we were often suffering from jungle rot, ringworm, prickly heat rash, and insect bites so numerous that they would sometimes swell your face. We were hungry most of the time because we couldn't afford to carry the weight of enough food. None of us was fat. We never had a single minute in the months we spent in the jungle when the jungle might not erupt with deadly bullets from a few meters distance. We never fully slept, we never, ever relaxed, and once we went "jungle" we kept an emotional distance from each other even though we were like family in other ways. When one of us got shot up really badly, but not fatally, and was medivaced out in pain and leaking blood, we shook our heads and said, "that lucky bastard," and we meant it because he was going to LIVE. And we went up the NVA trails into certain ambushes KNOWING that there was death waiting up the trail and thinking that maybe this time the first few guys could cheat it. Some of us did, some of us didn't, but we kept cutting ahead through the jungle and going up those trails into ambushes. And we killed a whole lot more of those deadly, tough NVA than they did of us, because we were that good. We killed in a war that many of believed was a criminal waste of good men. We killed because we had to. But regardless of our belief in the war, we did it well and with courage. And some of the ones that survived the whole year were really special. Men who used their noses to sniff out ambushes, men who could listen to leaves falling through the jungle, men who never let their thoughts interfere with their instincts. Men so quick and deadly that your eyes couldn't have followed their movements in the first seconds of a firefight. Those are the "draftees and conscripts" whose abilities you, Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney gently belittle. But then none of you were there, were you? None of you saw the bravery and toughness of those draftees who were the fighting men of Vietnam. And none of you saw them do impossible tasks over and over and often die doing them. And none of you saw the hatred of many or most of the everyday S. Vietnamese we were there to "help." None of you truly understand that little brown men and swarthy Arab men are more like us than not when it comes to protecting their land and their tribe. And none of you will yet admit that the mission in cases like Vietnam and Iraq must be very modestly defined or it will be doomed to failure. Because you can talk all day about what's best for the Iraqis but your opinion doesn't mean spit to most of them. But then none of you will die there, nor will most of YOUR kids, will they? Fighting a real war. That's the kind of thing that would make a man like George W. Bush review his decisions to see whether he made a mistake. But then he likes to golf, doesn't he, and there's only so much time in the day.