Letter from a Veteran Army Ranger

[Plane]

  Dominos turned out to be Laos and Cambodia.

    If there had been less resistance there very well could have been more .

     There really was a Communist conspiracy to envelop the entire planet in communism, would it really have been better to have resisted this less?

[Xavier_Onassis]

WoW! we sure miss having Laos and Cambodia on our side.

The bombing of Cambodia, not the Vietnamese, removed Sihanouk and replaced him with Lon Nol, and more bombing replaced Lon Nol with Pol Pot.

Had the US just walked away, as it should have done in 1963, Pol Pot would never have come to power. The Vietnam War was worse than useless . It ruined the entire area, and did a lot of harm to the US as well.

Plus, we lost. Any fool could see that it was both a bad idea and unwinnable.  I was pretty sure of this in 1962.
One more stupid thing that John Foster Dullkes and his nasty brother Allen have the blame for. They even named an airport for one of them.

[Plane]

If Vietnam had fallen with little resistance , what would have stopped the communists from rolling up the entirety of  South Asia?

You can't say the Communists didn't want this ?

[Xavier_Onassis]

That is ridiculous.  There was an agreement to hold elections to decide the fate of Vietnam. The US told the Diem government that it need not hold the elections (which it thought it would lose) and THAT was the cause of the damned war. Our side did not play fair.  Dulles fucked up, over a million Viewtnamese and 50,000 Ameirfans died for no reason.

Read some history.

Jeez!

[Plane]

That is ridiculous.  There was an agreement to hold elections to decide the fate of Vietnam. The US told the Diem government that it need not hold the elections (which it thought it would lose) and THAT was the cause of the damned war. Our side did not play fair.  Dulles fucked up, over a million Viewtnamese and 50,000 Ameirfans died for no reason.

Read some history.

Jeez!

With half of the country already under communism?
Were we to expect anything like a fair election?

[Xavier_Onassis]

It does not matter.

Vietnam was a FRENCH colony. The US had NO BUSINESS AT ALL taking over the failure of a French colony.

The US should have supported Ho Chi Minh after WWII, but the Dulles Brothers were invested in  French colonial companies.

A million Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans died to defend the fucking mess that the Dulles Brothers made for their own personal gain.

The US had no reason to get involved in another Asian Land War, as Eisenhower warned us against.


Would YOU die to preserve the fortunes of the thieving colonialist Dulles Brothers??

[Plane]

  I did sign up for my turn at fighting communism.

   But I am a little young so when I signed up Vietnam was over.

     I got to stare at Iranians staring back instead.

       Seems as though just as soon as the contest with communism started to run down, the violence wing of Islam stepped up to take its turn.

[Xavier_Onassis]

The Cold War was largely a fiasco to sell weapons after Stalin died.

The War against Islam is a much more insignificant threat, but it has the same purpose.

After all, they could only get us to tremble in fear about the threat of Nicaraguan, Salvadorean, Panamanian and Grenadian invasions for only so long.

The oligarchy that runs this country will ALWAYS have some enemy to piss away money on.

I suppose the Chinese, who have never been expansionists, will become the Yellow Peril when they finish off the hadjis.

[Plane]

  So if we ignored them they would never hurt us?

[Xavier_Onassis]

It is pretty clear from all the released Soviet documents that the US would not have been threatened in any way just to have allowed the agreed-upon elections to have been held.

Supporting not holding elections, because they might be lost is never a good idea.  Even the Republican'ts have not tried to cancel elections they know they cannot win.

My observation is that everyone who enlisted in the military gets a HUGE dose of incorrect propaganda as part of their gung-ho training. We had an AF Colonel on the faculty of my university that believed reams of propaganda crap that he believed. He did not believe in Jeezus, but he believed everything they told him about Saddam's weaponized anthrax and smallpox, poison gas, nukes and weapons so secret that he refused to even tell us what they were.

Expecting accurate information from such people is like expecting A TV preacher to divulge his finances, or Big Coal to admit that there is no such thing as "clean coal".

[Plane]

It is pretty clear from all the released Soviet documents that the US would not have been threatened in any way just to have allowed the agreed-upon elections to have been held.

I would be interested in those.

Supporting not holding elections, because they might be lost is never a good idea.  Even the Republican'ts have not tried to cancel elections they know they cannot win.

It was a Democrat, named John Kennedy that didn't believe an election in which half of the voters were already under the dictatorship would be democratic. That it might be lost was not the point , that it would not really be an election was.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Kennedy knew very little about foreign policy and even less about the Far East. I recall there was a big debate between Kennedy and Nixon over the need to defend a couple of puny indefensible and strategically worthless islands, Quemoy and Matsu, which are a very short distance from the mainland. This was in response to the dumb remark that we must not lose even one square foot of land to the evil Commies.  The Mainlanders did bombard both islands time after time, but never tried an invasion, because Quemoy and Matsu were worthless. 

JFK was very highly overrated. The press loved him, because Nixon hated everyone so much. As I have said, the good thing about JFK was that he was not Nixon.  As I recall, Eisenhower was regarded as a stodgy old bore with a frumpy wife by 1960, and Kennedy looked young and virile and Jackie was some sort of fashion plate, so there was a major difference in image between JFK and Eisenhower.  It was all about looking modern and stylish.

The US was not a major player in the retreat of the French from Indochina. There was no reason for the US to become involved.  But a war was needed to sell weapons and provide an excuse for a draft.  The Russians had a draft, so they felt that the US must have one as well. 

Another issue was an ostensible "missile gap" that the Russians supposedly had more and better missiles than we did.  JFK made this claim, and Nixon, who as a member of the Eisenhower Administration, knew this was a bloody lie but did not dare reveal this, because it was a "secret". The Soviets knew they were outgunned, and the American government also knew this. But it was just terrifying for the US government to reveal the truth, because perhaps the Russians did not know that we knew that they knew.  The Soviets put up Sputnick, a huge propaganda ploy, in 1958, and then they shot down Gary Powers in his U2. Eisenhower lied about the existence of the U2 and violating Soviet airspace and forced poor Adlai Stevenson to make a fool of himself in the UN claiming that it was a "weather balloon" . Then the Soviets revealed that they had captured Powers alive and proved that Eisenhower had lied. So enough of the public was convinced that Ike was a lair and that Nixon was a far more incompetent apprentice liar, and JFK won by a hair.

[Plane]

  It was President Eisenhower that warned us to beware of the military industrial complex.

    The full picture would be the military , industry, IRS and congress complex political considerations keep bases open that the Pentagon would rather close and buys weapons that the military just parks .

   As far as equipment and personnel are concerned more is always better , up to the point that accomplishment of missions becomes easy and safe, unless the cost is so high that other important things get shortchanged. So like many other things there is a balance to be struck.

     There really isn't any motive at that time for selling military equipment , Vietnam was well underway before the government stopped selling surplus equipment left from WWII. At the end of WWII PT boats were burned , binoculars were crushed with trucks and rifles were thrown into the sea , just to keep the manufacturers from having to compete with their past production.

      If the Soviets had been smarter, they might have avoided looking threatening , rather than maximizing their bluster, they had read our national mood backwards, their apparent build up interrupted our traditional build down and conversion to a small military.

      But the Soviets were genuinely leading a conspiracy to convert all the world to communism , Nikita Kruchev argued the merits in a model kitchen with Richard Nixon. Leonoid Brezhnev formed a doctrine that no land would ever be lost to communism, the path to the future was always to be more communism never less.

      Containment worked , but there was a lot of work involved, and a lot of heartache and millions of deaths .   But consider the alternative, Communism that would succeed in covering the Earth and never loosing power forever.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Americans also had the idea that not one scrap of land be allowed to go to the Communists.

And millions of people died in the postcolonial wars, as in the Congo, Namibia, Mozambique, Angola/Cabinda. The result of a totalitarian regime buddy buddy with Big Oil, like Equatorial Guinea and a leftist dictatorship as in Guinea-Bissau was exactly the same so far as the people of those countries was concerned.

It is hard to imagine a bigger mess than what happened in the Democratic Republic of Congo, alias Zaire, as a result of the CIA having the elected president, Patrice Lumumba, assassinated. The people of that sad country are even worse off than those of North Korea. 

The results of  choosing Communism or Capitalism made very little difference in subsaharan Africa. In both cases, the struggle ended up in tribal warlords continuously slugging it out and supported by corruption outside the region.

Kruschchev  advocating for his view of the world vs Nixon advocating his was as simplistic as Coke and Pepsi arguing about taste. There was nothing profound in that debate. 

[Plane]

Americans also had the idea that not one scrap of land be allowed to go to the Communists.

We should have gotten busy about this earlier than Communism took control of half the worlds population.

Don't worry about the simplistic nature of Kruchev's argument with Nixon, there were some simple things that Kruchev did not know.