dyslexia wrote:Hell, I'm an old crusty liberal that has been in freefall ever since Nixon ran his campaign on his "secret plan to end the war in Vietnam" well after another 125,000 US dead he gave us "peace with honor" and I can easily recall the film clips in my mind of the fall of Saigon, you remember those Lash? I'm sure Timber does. Wanna talk about it?
Never liked Nixon - 'course, wasn't real fond of Johnson, either - woulda preferred Goldwater. Saw Kennedy as the lesser evil given that Nixon was the alternative - and it was Kennedy that first committed US combat elements to Vietnam. But that's neither here nor there at the moment. What's got me curious here in your comment as quoted above is
" ... after another 125,000 US dead ... ". Total US combat deaths over the 90 month period of active hostilities in Vietnam were 47,368 with 10,799 dead of causes not combat related, for a total own-force in-theater mortality of 58,167. Where did your Nixon find "another 125,000"?
Speakin' of perspective, BTW, the average KIA-per-Month for Vietnam works out to 526, or, if all in-theater own-force deaths are counted, 646. By comparison, for Korea the monthly KIA average works out to 909, while for WWII the monthly average for combat deaths works out to 6,639. In the 22 months since the March '03 opening of hostilities with Iraq, own-force deaths from all causes have averaged a bit less than 66 per month.
While no dead is better than any dead, the monthly average for in-theater own-force dead of all causes in Iraq is the lowest the US has sustained in any war we have fought since we became a nation. For the War of 1812, the figure is 75 combat-related deaths-per-month, for the Mexican War, the figure is 87, for the Civil War, both sides combined, it is 3,846, for the Spanish-American War it is 96, and for WWI it is 2,816. Those all are combat-related deaths, mind you, not deaths from all causes. Considering just Killed In Action/Died of Wounds, the toll in Iraq is not quite 49 per month, or lower even than the 55 per month combat death figure for the American Revolution. Lower in fact than the ten-year average of murders-per-month in our 3 largest cities.
