Things I Thought I'd Never See

Read this oped piece on the Vietnam war from today's Times, look me in the eye (uh, metaphorically) and tell me you ever thought you'd see something like it published in the New York Times.

Damn.

Comments

[Walter E. Wallis]

Celebrating the day democrats sold more people into slavery than Lincoln freed.

[George]

Who knew?

Actually, lots of us who served there knew - and have always known. We've been ignored.

I'd disagree with the author on one point: the Vietcong were defeated by early 1970 (at latest), not 1972. When I returned for my second tour of duty in late 1970, the war in the South was essentially over. It was safer in the Central Highlands than in Washington, DC.

[Personal Opinion]

The article provides nothing more than opinion, but of course that is what retroactively trying to predict the future has to be by its very nature.

Instead of looking backward to predict what 'could have been', why not look even further back in time?

The vietnamese had fought their chinese occupiers every day for 1,000 years, and the french occupiers for the more recent few hundred years before the americans came. There's no doubt we couldn't have kept the attacks from the north at bay by a sustained military presence. The attacks would have continued forever, and we would have repelled them forever.

That was the whole point of getting out of Vietnam. We would have had to stay there forever, and the vietnamese would have viewed us as occupiers forever, and would have fought us forever.

Didn't you read the recent article about vietnam on CNN?

http://www.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/04/29/vietnam.economy.reut/

Rather than argue that we should have stayed involved in vietnam longer, shouldn't we also be just as willing to ask whether we should have EVER been involved in vietnam the way we were.

We were asked for aid by Ho Chi Mihn in the late 50's. As a western-educated individual, he could have been a powerful ally whether or not he got an "A" in marxism at Oxford. The reason we never held full-country open elections in Vietnam is that Ho Chi Mihn would have won. Now how undemocratic is THAT?