April 30th Marks the End of the Vietnam
War—and the Beginning of Its Myths
Red State,
by
Jim Thompson
Original Article
Posted By: Dreadnought,
4/30/2022 10:47:43 AM
April 30th marks the Fall of Saigon, and the end of the war in Vietnam.
But April 30th demarcates more than just the end of the first war America lost; that date could be used as the beginning of the end of many “myths” about the war — the first being, that America’s military “lost.” In reality, the men who fought in Vietnam weren’t allowed to win. The politicians in Washington, particularly Robert McNamara as the Secretary of Defense, hamstrung our fighting men with absurd rules of engagement (ROE) that made it impossible to win.
Robert McNamara, a man with no experience in fighting wars or any understanding how they are fought, was tapped
Reply 1 - Posted by:
MickTurn 4/30/2022 11:17:20 AM (No. 1142528)
After more than 50,000 of our young died and more maimed our fine government turned tail and ran...seems like a pattern...Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanastan...and the Scum Neocons that ran the wars got rich and our troops were cannon fodder. I was in Viet Nam,I can tell you it was a fiasco. Leadership spent more time watching the enemy then killing them and grossly inflating body counts, I was there I saw it first hand! Then the VA denied a variety of disabilities for many years and further screwed us...Now I ask: SO WHERE are OUR REPARATIONS?
20 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
columba 4/30/2022 11:54:23 AM (No. 1142584)
America won EVERY battle of the war - EVERY ONE.
But then the Media lied to us.
12 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Italiano 4/30/2022 12:03:41 PM (No. 1142597)
FTA: "The politicians in Washington, particularly Robert McNamara as the Secretary of Defense, hamstrung our fighting men with absurd rules of engagement (ROE) that made it impossible to win."
A lesson sadly not learned by Bush 43/Cheney/Rumsfeld, et.al. Same result.
11 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
joew9 4/30/2022 12:04:48 PM (No. 1142599)
We lost because many of the leaders favored communist North Vietnam winning.
I have always believed that most of the anti-war leaders in this country were against the war because they favored communism.
11 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
DVC 4/30/2022 12:19:14 PM (No. 1142618)
The biggest lie was the huge lie put forth by the leftist liar Walter Cronkite that the Tet Offensive had been a great loss for the US and a win for the North Vietnamese. Nothing could be further from the facts.
The facts are that the NVA troops were slaughtered, entirely destroyed and they expended huge numbers of men and weapons, including tanks used for the first time, and gained nothing at all, and had almost all their troops killed, and pushed back out.
Cronkite was a really rotten leftist liar, and we didn't know it at the time. Now we know that they are the Enemedia - and they were the Enemedia then, too.
20 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
Christopher L 4/30/2022 12:27:41 PM (No. 1142625)
Good article, but it doesn’t go far enough. It should have pointed out that after the Tet Offensive
the Viet Cong was basically wiped out and the NVA was badly crippled. Walter Cronkite came on national TV and outright lied about it. After the US Army withdrew the ARVN was starting to actually win the war on the field of battle.
That is until the Democrats in Congress voted to cut off all aid, military and humanitarian, to South Viet Nam, guaranteeing a communist victory.
17 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
BarryNo 4/30/2022 1:49:20 PM (No. 1142687)
McNamara was tied to the Military Industrial Complex, as Eusenhower named it. One story i recall, is that our early air to air missiles were 80% ineffective, but our planes had no other means of defending themselves. Launch 4, m.a.y.b.e hit one, and then try to outrun enemy planes unarmed .
Some Marines intercepted a shipment of cobra attack helicopters and mounted the gatling guns in a pod under their F4 Phantom's nose. It became a very popular configuration. McNamara tried to have them tried for treason.
The MIC had been using Vietnam as a test bed for their weapons design, and the nose-gats screwed their sample. 50,000 Americans died for two reasons:
1.test weapons and take government contracts to line Elite pockets.
2. Kill off excess popularion. Democrats liked to pretend they're for working people, but there weren't enough jobs. Kill two birds with one stone...
2 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
LadyVet 4/30/2022 1:57:07 PM (No. 1142692)
Joe Biden is a big reason for the false perception that our military was "defeated." He was elected to the US Senate in 1972. He joined with the cowardly Ted Kennedy to withdraw funds just as the South Vietnam Army was winning following the North's losses in Tet offensive. So Biden is responsible for not one, but TWO humiliating military fiascos. The man is so stupid that he repeated his mistake in Afghanistan. You can bet that he is fully capable of doing it a THIRD time in Ukraine.
10 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
BarryNo 4/30/2022 2:16:21 PM (No. 1142709)
One of the reasons I find the "misinformation" about the Covid vaccines believeable, is becsuse almost all Liberal phantasies of future Utopias begin with killing off 90% of Earth's human population. Their other drama revolves around running out of resources or starving to death because there are too many people to feed. Either way, 9 out of 10 of us, got to go if "Earth is to survive" (for the benefit of the Elites, of course).
3 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Vaquero45 4/30/2022 2:35:34 PM (No. 1142724)
I remember hearing about, and reading about, the antiwar demonstrations on college campuses while I was serving in Vietnam as a Marine. Most of the furor was about the draft. I got out in '71 and went back to college, and the demonstrations were still there. In 1972, the draft ended; the antiwar protestors..... evaporated! It turns out all these high-minded "antiwar" pukes were just afraid of getting their own arses shot off, or having to spend a couple of years away from home.
As I told my wife and a few other people who asked: between the guys who went and the guys who didn't, there's a wall. It's a mile high and a mile wide - and it's never coming down.
4 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
doctorfixit 4/30/2022 3:01:23 PM (No. 1142756)
LBJ, the 2nd most evil President, after Obama. Robert McNamara, most evil DoD Sec. ever, Viet Nam was when I leaned that the government lies about everything.
7 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
snakeoil 4/30/2022 3:50:44 PM (No. 1142796)
Nobody ever said it better than General Douglas MacArthur: "War's very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory.”
4 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
Talk2 5/1/2022 11:20:45 AM (No. 1143346)
I hadn't been back from Vietnam long enough to relax a bit when Walter Cronkite came on TV lying like a rug about the Viet Cong battling their way through Cam Rahm Bay base to attack a hospital and kill our troops. He lied, lied, lied, lied and I knew that because I had recently been at the "hospital" that wasn't a hospital. It was a small compound on the water where the wounded (physically and mentally) could recuperate. The wooden barracks were lit at night with flood lights shining on Red Crosses. The place was protected by barbed wire and a few troops mostly new in-country since the place was clearly not a military target. That didn't stop the Viet Cong from sneaking under the wire and attacking the defenseless wounded. They ran through the barracks shooting the wounded in their beds and throwing grenades into barracks. To say it was a tragic loss of life that may have been prevented is the easy charge. Walter Cronkite lied and twisted the facts to make his point that "farmers in black pajamas" were defeating the U.S. Army so badly they could cross a base so huge and well defended that as he described it would have been an impossibility. While I was in Vietnam I told my wife to not believe anything she saw on TV or read in the papers. It was that bad after TET 68 and the mainstream media was not to be trusted.
0 people like this.
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