Vietnam War revisionism... and Iraq.

[Bigmack]

Excellent piece about the Vietnam - Iraq comparison by a guy who was there. Check out the "Soundoff" comments and you'll find the usual freeper keyboard batallion. They just can't face the facts that the US can't force it's will around the world.

Revisionist approach to Vietnam
H.D.S. GREENWAY

Forth years ago this week, as twilight fell over the Republic of South Vietnam, I was lying on a stretcher in the rain outside a military hospital on a base near Hue. There were so many casualties that day that we had to wait our turn for overworked and overwhelmed doctors to attend to us.
snip..
Today there is a school of thought that says Tet was a terrible defeat for the Communist Vietnamese, that it should never have caused us to flinch, that the war was basically won by 1972, and that if we had only stayed the course we would have won it. Henry Kissinger has said as much, whole generations of soldiers were told that, and, it seems, that many around President Bush believe it as well.

When Iraq became the quagmire it is, I used to wonder how we could make the same mistake again so soon. But then I realized that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were in the Oval office with President Ford when Saigon fell. Perhaps they, and the worshipers of American power, felt that, this time, we would get it right.
snip...
When the end came in 1975, and my helicopter lifted away from the American Embassy in Saigon, with the ammunition dumps blowing up in the gathering dark, I felt that we had betrayed our allies -- not because we were unwilling to continue the war, but because we had gone to war there in the first place, unnecessarily and foolishly, understanding nothing, only to cause more death and destruction than could ever be justified.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/351856_vietnamonline20.html

He wrote something similar in 2005... http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1227-22.htm

[DemoTex]

1. For ARVN in "action", study Lam Son 719.

The ARVN got their asses kicked by the PAVN during Lam Son 719 (February-March 1971). The withdrawal from Laos went so badly that US helicopter crews had to literally grease the skids of their Hueys to keep the ARVN from clinging to the skids during the evacuation flights. I know. I was there.

There is a great line about an ARVN rifle in Full Metal Jacket from Cowboy during the fighting in Hue (which was, by the way, raging 40 years ago today): "It's never been fired .. and only dropped once."

Greenway has hit the nail on the head about revisionism. It will happen again re: Iraq. Hell, it's already happening. Bu$hco revises history before it even happens.