vygramul: Someone once observed that a lot of countries complain about our culture invading and destroying theirs. We should rely on our culture more often.

Fuggin Bizzy: Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 didn't do this for him? I thought the GOP was the pro-military party. Huh.

Goddamn liberals.

Bennie Crabtree: The first time I saw anybody say the US won the Viet Nam war was in a discussion about a movie that came out a few months after Afghanistan was invaded.

It is a lie that is very clearly part of the current two wars' propaganda devices. It is a lie that boggles my mind, too. How did such a large nation manage to ignore about 2.5 decades of media and evidence, plus the presence of millions of people who lived through it, and conclude they won a war they plainly lost?

TheRaven7: If they were legal orders then what was the General a "scapegoat" for?

Heron: ronaprhys: I'd say everyone deserves equal blame. Leaving aside the issue of massacres, which hardly did anything good for our public image and were most certainly not ordered by politicians in Washington, the military command in Vietnam just plain didn't know what the hell it was doing. Here's one example. I had two uncles in Vietnam; one was a navy gunner and the other was an army engineer. The way they described their war was this; "One day I'd build a bridge, the next he'd blow it up". This to me always perfectly pulled together everything wrong with Vietnam. Nobody knew what the heck anyone else, or the enemy, was doing, and our reactions to insurgent activity were seldom proportional. Every success we made, we unmade; and every advance won through grit and know-how was lost to incompetence and arrogance.

Having said that it's a lie to say the Viet Cong and NVA didn't put up one hell of a fight, particularly in light of what we know now about their mostly negative relationships with China and Russia. We were trying to defeat a determined enemy among a people we couldn't talk to, wouldn't take seriously, and in a terrain we never got comfortable with. Even if the U.S. public had been behind the war 100%, I doubt it would have turned out any differently; and I figure the wide support for our efforts their leading up to the LBJ years, and our inability during that time to make any headway, proves that.

TheRaven7: No, but why would doing something "politically untenable" result in losing your rank? Entire wars are politically untenable.