RE: Do you think American soldiers are put on too high of a pedestal
January 18, 2017 at 3:57 pm
(This post was last modified: January 18, 2017 at 4:00 pm by Catholic_Lady.)
(January 18, 2017 at 3:05 pm)FatAndFaithless Wrote: So..yes, you're advocating letting the military do whatever it takes to end it quickly?
What kind of oversight do you think the military needs, if any? I mean, if you do a flyover and see enemy combatants in a city, do you just bomb the shit out of the city, collateral damage be damned? I mean..that puts a shockingly low value on the lives of any civilians or non-coms in the area. Shit, why not just nuke Baghdad if it would've killed Saddam?
When I say the military wasn't "allowed to do what it needed to do to get the job done quickly" in the context of the Vietnam war, I wasn't imagining the US military to be made up of sadistic monsters.
The goal should be to get the job done quickly while effecting the least amount of innocent lives possible in the long run. Obviously things need to be done within reason. The Vietnam war was not within reason, which as I said, only ended up hurting more innocent lives in the long run. And that's what I'm referring to here.
(January 18, 2017 at 3:24 pm)abaris Wrote:(January 18, 2017 at 2:35 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: We were trying too hard to fight a nice, clean, polite war so that our government leaders wouldn't "look bad".
Scratch the surface just a bit, will you? The people in Vietnam wouldn't agree with nice and clean in any case. Especially those in Hanoi that got the shit bombed out of them. All in all the US dropped more bombs than in WWII on that small a territory.
I'm just repeating what my husband, who is in the military and has studied these things extensively, has explained to me in regards to the way the Vietnam war was fought. I trust his judgement on this.
"Of course, everyone will claim they respect someone who tries to speak the truth, but in reality, this is a rare quality. Most respect those who speak truths they agree with, and their respect for the speaking only extends as far as their realm of personal agreement. It is less common, almost to the point of becoming a saintly virtue, that someone truly respects and loves the truth seeker, even when their conclusions differ wildly."
-walsh
-walsh
