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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Andrew H who wrote (1746)	1/26/1998 7:48:00 PM
From: Janice Shell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

Regarding the Vietnam War, of course the government's moral turpitude involved in the loss of life over there for both Americans and Vietnamese, far surpasses any immoral acts Clinton may ever have done. Andrew, are you MAD??? Sex is the most immoral thing possible.

To: Andrew H who wrote (1746)	1/27/1998 2:39:00 AM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 20981

Let's see: dad was a major in 1957, and one of his captain pals at Staff and Command College had just returned from Viet Nam, but not much was going on then. In 1961, dad's good pal Lee Stimmel did a tour in Viet Nam, and returned to say that "They may not be calling it a war, but they are sure using ammunition like it's one." Lee was a small arms expert and worked with the ordinance supplies. In 1962 dad was part of the 15,000 man build-up that JFK ordered; this included the newly created Green Berets, a Kennedy invention for fighting unconventional wars. I recall the American body count was around 500 when dad returned. JFK's last speech on November 22, 1963 included a call to continue our support for South Viet Nam; since Kennedy's policies had managed to get President Diem assassinated the month before, he thought we were now responsible for that headless country. In 1964 LBJ ran for the Presidency telling the American people that he would never send American boys to fight in Viet Nam, unlike the warmongering Goldwater (and we think Clinton is a liar) So, then came the Gulf of Tonkin and all the good Wilsonian crusaders for global democracy gave LBJ a blank check. Soon we had 500,000 troops in SE Asia, but without a strategic plan for victory, a problem that Gen'l Harold Johnson and Admiral US Grant Sharpe warned about as early as 1964. Gen'l Johnson, head of the JCS and a survivor of Bataan, had argued against sending combat troops into the jungle, a point of view he shared with Eisenhower; Eisenhower had similarly refused to assist the French in 1955 when they asked him to bail them out. In 1970, 8 years since dad did his tour in Viet Nam, I was 1-A and the war was winding down. I never did see the clear moral distinctions that so many of you do regarding this war. In the mid '60s I met many of the junior ARVN officers who were out fighting the war. Most of them are dead, some from combat and some in the glorious "re-education" camps built by the communist heroes of the American left. I'm sorry to say that the moral posturing of Americans concerning that war leaves me cold. Some, like Norman Podhoretz and David Horowitz, realized their complicity after the "liberated" Vietnamese started feeding the sharks in their frantic effort to escape life under the progressive and stalinist government that America's left had cheered on. They wrote some books on taking a new look at the moral questions of the Viet Nam War, and they ought to be required reading for anyone who thinks the war was clearly immoral. I really feel sorrow for all the GIs who were injured or killed for this nation of selfish ingrates. They all should have taken a page from our glorious President, and when their turn came they should have run.