Somali pirates

I agree. Vietnam was a mistake. Eisenhour refusing to see Castro when he first achieved victory was a mistake. Giving away Panama canal was a mistake. Need I go on...and on...and on....and on...infinitum?

 

These aren't my photos.
But it's what I did.
Weapon of choice, Browning .50 cal air-cooled Twins.

 

You may be right, but I doubt Kerry was actually that cynical and manipulative. I think he was saying what he believed. And if you look back, I'd say being specifically anti-Vietnam War or generally anti-military killed a lot more political careers than it created -- especially since a lot of voters didn't understand the difference.

If you listen to some folks on the internet today, you'd think joining the military -- and even getting involuntarily drafted -- automatically turned young men back then into lepers, outcasts and pariahs. I've had guys on forums tell me they learned to hide the fact that they were veterans so they wouldn't get shot down for a job to begin with, or get fired as soon as the truth came out.

Maybe I grew up in some alternate dimension. No one ever spat on me (and if they had, they'd have been missing some teeth). Nor did anyone ever call me a baby killer. As a matter of fact, in the 38 years since I became a civilian I can't remember a single person who ever dumped on me for being a veteran... even when I spent several years building sets in Hollywood.

 

When I rotated back, they booed us in Frisco when we climbed off the mac flight. i had a years worth of undeveloped film with me, about a dozen rolls. When I wanted them developed, all were ruined. So I don't have any photos mine own. Always wondered if the film was actually ruined before or after I gave it for developement.
I'm proud to be a vet. I enlisted. Wasn't drafted. My reasons were stupid. I didn't want to hear war stories in my matured years and not have any. Dumb, dumb, dumb, nearly died.

 

One of the kids I work with did a couple of tours as a Navy helicopter door gunner in Afghanistan, lighting up the locals with an M134 Minigun -- a six-barreled, .30 cal (7.62mm) Gatling gun, theoretically capable of 3,000-6,000 rounds per minute.

 

We'd be in a fire fight at night. Red tracers going out, green tracers coming in. Call for air support, choppers show up with a solid red column under them. They'd fly over enemy location awhile and..dada!...no more green tracers.

 

Well, keep in mind that you were in San Francisco.

Those people in SanFran weren't necessarily representative of the country as a whole. If you had been walking down the street in Grand Rapids, Michigan with duffel bag or sea bag on your shoulder, do you think you'd have heard anyone booing?

 

Had miniguns back then, too! The solid red columns, only every 5th round was a tracer....called em "puff the magic dragon"

 

Nope, no booing in my redneck florida either. But wasn't Kerry with the UCLA crowd?

 

Damn. It's been almost forty years since I heard someone using "Puff the Magic Dragon' in that context. The old C-47 Skytrains (military version of Douglas DC-3's) used to show up with three miniguns, and light up the countryside. If I remember right all three were mounted on one side, for maximum firepower while circling.

 

Life is just one big circle. What goes around, comes around...again.

 

If the Vietnam War was about oil, it's odd that no one knew it at the time; I'm sure the anti-war protesters would have loved to use the fact. You know... "no blood for oil," and all that. And it's even odder that Vietnam didn't start producing oil until 1986 -- from a field discovered by Mobile in 1974. Before that, they relied heavily on imports from the Soviet Union.

Judging by recent finds, Vietnam may have the potential to become the world's 30th largest producer. Right now it's number 35, and its daily production is somewhere just north of 300,000 barrels a day.

We use 18.8 million barrels a day. Seems to me that if we were going to go to war for oil, we could have found a bigger and better supply to fight for....

http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=vn&product=oil&graph=production
http://www.hanoisourcing.com/index.php?module=news&task=viewNewsdetail&nid=100&t=6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/02/28/surprising-facts-about-us-and-oil/

As the article makes clear, there's absolutely no record of that supposed quote from Giap before 2004 -- because Giap never said it, and it isn't in his book. It was invented out of whole cloth and used against John Kerry during his run for President.

We didn't really get our butts handed to us in Korea. We were overrun at first by an overwhelming number of Red Chinese, but managed to push them back after a while. We definitely whipped them on the field of battle.

 

i stand corrected

 

Troy- the 'to do list' is killing me on this one....

All I have stored upstairs is a really decent summary documentary on the conflict. It ran over the disastrous rout down that peninsula. The action was attributed at the time to overwhelming force but the facts showed no great disparity on forces deployed.

Again- I don't really have the issue sorted out & fact checking would take what 5 minutes?

I do use the conflict as a meter on my musings over the nature of time and place as it effects the outcome of military campaigns.
It always has struck me as odd the a WWII seasoned force (not necessarily troops but the whole establishment) as I assume was deployed, stumbled so soon after acquiring the requisite field tactics, equipment and institutional knowledge to prevail in the many theaters of the prior war.

I roughly put the issue into the box of 'reason for going to war' being not adequate to support total commitment.

 

No great disparity? The US never had more than about 300,000 troops in Korea even during the peak of the war, and when it started we had only a few thousand there. The South Koreans had less than 65,00 combat troops to face the initial invasion of 231,000 North Koreans.

After we intervened, pushed the North Koreans back and crossed over into their territory, the Chinese entered the war in overwhelming numbers. They committed almost a million men to the war, outnumbering the American and UN forces three to one -- without even counting the quarter of a million North Korean soldiers, or the 26,000 Soviet air and artillery support forces. Add their short supply lines, and it isn't surprising we were driven back almost to square one. I'd say it's damned impressive that our forces recovered from that, and in their turn pushed the Chinese all the way back to the 38th Parallel.