sfws

baldimo

You apparently have no idea of how foolish you appear to those both better educated and considerably brighter than yourself. Your claims here are not only ill-informed, they are delivered with with the awkward arrogance of someone who hasn't the intellectual courage to admit he has damned good reason to return to school.

Sticks and stones will break my bones but names and insults will never hurt me.

If you must know I am going back to school. I hope to meet your level of snootiness some day. It must be grand being able to talk down to those you don't agree with. Do you walk around telling people how smart you are?

Awww come on baldi. For crypes sake. You're young, you have a lot of experiences and schooling ahead of you. You served our country. Your stance will evolve and you'll be able to back up your convictions. Right now you can't. But one day you will.

baldimo

Knock off the silly arrogance and pretense that you have knowledge where you don't.

There's NOTHING wrong or shameful with an incomplete understanding or education on some subject or topic (we are all in that situation). There's a lot wrong with figuring you already know it all and don't need to shut up and listen now and again. I'm a teacher, and I'll tell you with certainty that the students who are successful start with the assumption that they have lots to learn.

Now, I had no idea you were going to school and I have no idea of your age or anything else about you. All I have to go on are your posts. And in those posts, I see few if any links to sources that might verify your claims, and I seldom if ever see you begin a sentence with "It's my opinion that..." or "Though I'm not cetain, I think it likely that..."

It's not weak to admit what you don't know, and it isn't a weakness to be humble. Trying to get to the truth is far more important than either appearing to be knowledgeable or right, and far more important than allegiance to some partisan membership.

baldimo,

reserve the right to change your mind. it will lower the anxiety. and as time goes by, you'll get to be the old fart that knows all, sees all. and you will know nothing. but, younger people will buy you a beer to hear it, anyway.

"yah ta hay"

I would think that the atrocoties committed after the US left S. Vietnam would have been proof of the need for us to have been there.

People are always going to protest. There will always be something that some people don't like and they will take to the streets to demonstrate their dislike.

Baldimo is right to point out ehbeths appeal to authority. Having lived through an era hardly makes one an instant expert on anything. That kind of thinking is what leads to the very revisionist history Baldimo is referring to.

Cycloptichorn... EVERYONE?

I would say so. Even those who were in support of the war got pretty sick of all the money it cost, and all the problems with patchouli stink they had to deal with back home because of it. Granted I am working off of accounts and pieces I have studied on the time period and not personal memory, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But I do believe that the historical data backs me up pretty well.

Support it or not, it divided America severely. That's never a good thing.

Cycloptichorn

sswwww
when he said hipie we all knew what meant, that is to say that the education system in the U.S. is run by liberal refugees of the love generation maybe 80-90% of the total number. Thats the truth, nobody denies that, and they have created a revisionist stance on many views, I have some extreme liberal proffesors but none who were extrovertly conservative. Thus if you protest vietnam you are emotinolay involved and there by you taint the factual history of the war. The "hippies" were like a cancer to our society, to our military to our resolve! Vietnam was winnable but johnson decided to play defense, sancturaies would never have put the Germans or Japanese out of commision, thereby he made a huge tactical mistake as our doctrine.

I'm not even gonna bother...sigh

fvsdfgs
Having read the threads here now, I can see that Bladimo is getting alot of crap, more than half the vets definately felt that they were involved in a worthy fight, plus that dosn't realy matter interms of history, who cares how many Russians enjoyed figthing the German in Stalingrad, why did they have to shoot so many of their own men retreating, what people care about, if it weren't for their post War aggression is that they killed 9 out of all 10 germans who died in WWII. THe same goes for the AMerican GI's 70% of whom were German American, we don't give a F'ing thought to anything but their actions. Vietnam was a quagmire because of the leadership( Nixon inheritated it from Johnson and Kennedy's pussy footing around, by denying war its own evolution in the sense of total surrender which so defines a conclusive war) North Vietnam could not have been allowed to exist, even if that includes tactical Nuclear weapons, or we should have never have set foot there under Kennedy(your hero) in the early 60's. Nixon inheritated a quagmire and in a democracy with radical left crippling our countrys resolve with its flamboyant protests which have since tainted the actual poplutions views as Bladino says intems of history, Nixon couldn't launch a total invasion of North Vietnam, but bet your ass we wouldn't have abondoned south vietnam when he had to resign because of watergate(yeah we all know about water gate) My point is that the hippies were a self fufilling prophecy. like a cancerous infestation that denied Nixon the ability to succesfully conduct a winnable war, not a defensive posture.

wow, is there anyone here (besides timberland and seatanta) that actually know the history of the indo-china event? the garbage erupting on this thread is quite remarkable.

Please provide proof of this so called "garbage"?

what's the opposite of bookmark?

garbage is when posters make statements that are so grossly inconsistent with facts it makes my head swim. Such as JFK got us into the Vietnam war-0h he surely had his role to play but any actual knowledge of history can easily trace US involvement to FDR and into HST and certainly Eisenhower. Before posting historical lies for the sake of some personal agenda and make statements that 'most vets think----' is crap, you don't know what most vets think and either do I and I am one, nor does it mean **** to a tree what most vets think. Vets were not paid nor trained to think. get a clue and cut the crap.

Wild Bill Donovan and his crew breezed into French Indo-China shortly after the end of the Pacific war, and began organizing a welcome home party for the French, despite promises the Brits had made to Ho Chi Mihn. Truman armed the French for a re-occupation of the country. When they couldn't hang on despite U.S. aid, Eisenhower agreed to the Geneva Accords and a division of old Indo-China into four nations with "Viet Nam" (which had never before existed in history) at the 17th parallel, and the CIA frantically armed the "democratic" regime in the south. Eisenhower wanted to send in "observers," but there were no provisions for it in the Geneva Accords, so he sent "advisors" instead. Kennedy expaned the number and role of the "advisors," and colluded in the assasination of Diem based on the CIA's dubious advice that he could not hold onto the country, but that a military cabal could. Lyndon Johnson got "war powers" on a specious basis about as founded in reality as the Shrub's contentions about WoMD's and collusion between AQ and the Ba'atists--when in fact the Pentagon knew for a fact that Maddox and C. Turner Joy had not been attacked. My oldest brother was aboard Columbus on Yankee Station in the Gult of Tonkin forty years ago (August, 1964), and as he would always point out, the naval forces there had the fire power to take out what passed for a navy in the PRC, let alone the armed sampans the North Vietnamese were using. Maddox and C. Turner Joy were part of the "chase" for Columbus, and they damned well would have known if either of them had been fired upon. It is truly pathetic to read what passes for history among right wingnuts. In my youth, i wanted to be a career professional soldier. Serving in that Army quickly disabused me of any such fantasy. The grunts commonly referred to the local population as gooks, zips (short for zipperhead), slants or slopes, and it was white and black GI's who used such language. If it got in your way, you shot it down, and it didn't matter if that meant some farmer's life savings invested in a water buffalo, or some farmer's grandmother. You people are disgusting.

dsfs
whatever i wasn't the one who tried to say what people think but in responding to someone saying that most vets thought it was a garbage war I disagreed, because obviously in my experience that sounds too high to me. thats besidthe point obviously intervention was "considered" with Einsenhower but it wasn't more intense than other interests we had abroad that didn't turn into Wars. but it was realy Kennedy who involved us interms of a serious commitment to south Vietnam, sure we were aiding the french in the 50's but it was kennedy who sent all the advisors there i believe over 20,000 by 1962. you guys are the ones not thinking about the facts here, why even try to deny Kennedy's culpability for Vietnam especialy if your agianst the Vietnam War to began with. it was his moral and intense anti-comunist stance that propelled his "domino theory" into a definite future conflict in the jungles of Vietnam.

From the history I have read support was high, until the end of the war in the 70's. A majority of the US public thought it was a good thing to help end the spread of communism into SEA.

Most vets I know and even family members I know supported the war even till the end. It was the hippies of the 60's that caused support for the war to faulter, but it was still more supported till the end.

There is plenty of evidence that Kennedy was planning to pull us out. I can't fault the man. The Cuban Missile Crisis, and the way he handled it...now that was real fortitude.

baldimo, I suggest you do a bit of research into Westmoreland's "kill-ratio" theory of winning the vietnam conflict as well as McNamaras attempted prosecution of the war. By the way McNamara, in the end, said he was sorry.

Just more horseshit. The "domino theory" was first advanced in 1947, and used to justify support for the British military effort against communists in Greece in 1947-48. Dwight Eisenhower first used the term "domino theory" to justify sending advisors to southeast Asia in 1954. Kennedy upped the ante, but he was neither better nor worse than his predecessors. Lyndon Baines Johnson and Rober MacNamara are the guilty parties here, and anyone who contends otherwise is either monumentally ignorant, playing fast and loose with the truth or both. To ascribe the "domino theory" to Kennedy displays a profound historical ignorance and a devotion to partisan idiocy which is sadly to be expected these days.

Dwight David Eisenhower articulates the domino theory at a news conference, April 7, 1954.

See Eisenhower's response to Robert Richards of the Copley Press, who asks: "Mr. President, would you mind commenting on the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world? I think there has been, across the country, some lack of understanding on just what it means to us."