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

To: GST who wrote (161380)	5/4/2005 12:35:36 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<Possibly five million people died> That is the view shared by the North Vietnamese and Robert Macnamara And it is among the highest estimates, much higher then most others which range from 1.2 million to 3.1 million. And yes, Vietnam is free of foreign domination It is indeed but it is not free, and was even less so in the aftermath of the war. Tim

To: GST who wrote (161380)	5/4/2005 12:57:38 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (9) \| Respond to of 281500

Tim and GST, re "<Possibly five million people died> That is the view shared by the North Vietnamese and Robert Macnamara - and the latter had no motivation to accept a number higher than he thought realistic and was a highly numbers-oriented Secretary of Defense -- it is not unreasonable to assume his assessment would be as accurate as one could expect under the circumstances." Any numbers compiled by the U.S. concerning enemy KIAs in Vietnam, or based on statistics kept by the U.S., are surely unreliable. The "war of attrition," so called plan, used body count as the measure of "success." Those field officers who submitted a high body count were awarded medals for valor, given great reviews and placed on the fast track for success, as were their brigade and battalion commanders. There were almost no checks on their counts because lies benefitted everyone who had the power to control the lies. As in all cases, the cheaters raised the bar and the others followed. The counts were skewed in two ways. There were many instances of outright lies claiming enemy kia when no kias existed. Even worse, any woman, child or man who had been killed, either negligently, intentionally or inadvertently, could be labeled a "VC" and claimed as an enemy dead. After all, who wants to call in and report that their unit had killed "civilians." So the numbers were bad both in their totals and in the number of enemy vs civilian casualties. In fact, my recollection is that the Mai Lai massacreds were "officially" reported as enemy KIA and that claim was allowed to stand, even though it was known to be false, until the investigation finally began months later. As a side note, my first Captain in Vietnam was named Jones. He was the biggest personal coward I ever saw. He constantly lied about the body counts and was as poor an excuse for an officer as you could find. After his 5 months in the jungle he was awarded a silver star and given the most coveted assignment as a general's orderly, based on his "war record" of having so effectively "killed" the enemy. My next Captain was a decent officer and we killed a lot more NVA and reported a lot less because he reported accurate numbers. He went nowhere. Typical military. By the way, do you think it's different in Iraq? Are officers there still judged by their "kill ratio" effectiveness? Are Iraqi civilians who were killed still reported as enemy combatants? And why do they continually speed into our checkpoints knowing that we will kill them, like the Italians did, or try to attack armed officers like they did the guy on trial for murder? And why not have Tillman be a hero charging the enemy when he was really signalling his buddies that they were friendlies right before he got killed? Oh, that's right, the army wasn't mistaken, they just lied as long as they could and only told the truth when it became apparent that the soldiers involved would soon rotate home and the ugly truth would come out. Human nature and the workings of the military bureaucracy are, sadly, consistent. Ed