RE: Do you think American soldiers are put on too high of a pedestal
January 18, 2017 at 2:31 pm
(January 18, 2017 at 2:08 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: The Vietnam war was incredibly terrible, for everyone involved. The soldiers who came back were treated like crap, and because the leaders of our country were being super politically correct about the war (to save their own popularity), not only did we lose, but innocent people are still suffering the consequences of it.
Agent orange was used to kill off the forest so that we could better see our targets so that we could be sure to only shoot the enemies who were actually in a particular area, doing a particular thing. As a result, many little children are still being born with birth defects associated with agent orange. It's truly horrendous: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...fects.html
I don't know enough about the Vietnam war to know whether it was a just war on our part or not, whether we should have gone to war with them at all. But I do know that the "best" war is a swift one. Trying to be too politically correct during a war only ends up making it take longer and takes more innocent lives with it. Either we go to war all out, or we don't go to war at all, imho.
It was a bit before your time and it wasn't really an issue of political correctness. What it really was, simply, was a typical knee-jerk reaction by the Washington establishment of the time - and the time was back when Eisenhower was President that basically went "THERE'S COMMUNISTS ATTACKING!!! WE HAVE TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY!" Leaving aside that there was precious little "democracy" to defend. We have this annoying tendency to not want to "appear weak" and in so doing weaken ourselves terribly. At the very least one can say that it was a bi-partisan fuck up. Eisenhower began introducing "advisors" in the 50's and Kennedy continued in the early 60's. In 1965 an incident happened in the Tonkin Gulf in which a single US destroyer engaged 3 North Vietnamese torpedo boats. There were no casualties but the Defense Department played it ( and a second, seemingly imaginary) event two days later into the Second Battle of Surigao Strait. This served as the basis for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which allowed Johnson to introduce American ground troops into Vietnam.
And the rest, as the saying goes, is history.
