This is one of my favorite clips…montages…of the war!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN4Ie8yvGhs
Please post yours.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7TXBuVUQJw
Need sound.
If you want a translation from Aussie terms, let me know.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmyEv4n8ERI&mode=related&search=
Need sound.
Lyrics are worthwhile, not vision.
Sound not so good. Lyrics here.
http://www.coldchisel.com.au/l1_khesahn.html
And tell me anyone who remembers that era can watch these clips without being at least a bit choked.
Me, a lot choked.
Like all wars, a terrible, terrible waste. Not just during it, but the endless years of suffering after it, for all concerned in different ways.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIva5JW5uqQ
Vietnam was a disaster for America. Pure and simple. A catastrophe on a much larger scale than Iraq. It was a war of colonial succession that should never have happened.
As a young man, growing up, Ho Chi Minh read about Abraham Lincoln and made him into a personal hero. Lincoln took a divided land and made it whole again. We did everything in our power to disabuse him of that notion.
In world war 2, Vichy was still in power in French Indo China, but it was a toothless power before the ascendant Japanese who berthed their warships in Camranh Bay and took rubber and supplies from the countryside and traversed it with their troops. When the Japanese left, the French, like the British and the Dutch attempted to re-assert themselves in their soon to be former colony. The man who opposed them, Ho Chi Minh still believed in Abraham Lincoln then.
In 1953, I think that was the year, the French made desperate appeals to John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower to sortie carrier battle groups offshore and launch air strikes in the mountains surrounding Dien Bien Phu. Dulles and Eisenhower turned the French down, and the 10,000-day war was already well along to being lost by the French to be continued a bit later by naive Americans. The country was eventually partitioned a la Korea with the hope that it would stabilize.
We came in one toe at a time. Kennedy sent advisers and a few troops. After Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Johnson took over and sent in more troops. The North Vietnamese Navy attacked the US Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin and Johnson used that as a pretext for sending in thousands upon thousands of troops to “nail the coonskin to the wall”. There was only one thing wrong with this. It didn’t happen. It never happened. There was no attack by the North Vietnamese Navy. It was a lie, and the whole catastrophe it became was based on that lie. There have been other lies, more recently in other wars. We know. We have been lied to before.
The protests in the streets in America became so large and so menacing to the administration that Lyndon Johnson, who might have been a great president otherwise, quit. Resigned, or, rather, chose not to run again… Busted. The Democratic Convention in Chicago became a police riot, with the “liberal” mayor Richard Daley’s police force beating unarmed students senseless in front of the convention’s door.
A lot of Americans were killed for nothing in that war. Yes, that’s right. They died for nothing. The predicted domino effect of what would happen throughout all of Asia never occurred. Maybe somebody can provide the answer as to why we were there. I can’t. I watched the whole drama unfold with a growing sense of horror at the senselessness of it all, and watched, with an equal sense of foreboding as the propaganda machine in Washington swung into action again about WMD that also didn’t exist, and a ‘gathering threat’ that was not there, and a “mushroom cloud” that was laughably unrealizable in Iraq.
And yet, here we are once more, repeating history like a herd of mindless sheep. I was not a soldier during Vietnam; yet Vietnam has been seared into my memory.
An image I saw in another youtube link I just posted http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?p=113441#post113441 reminded me I’d seen it before, in the above video.
As nobody’s bothered answering my deep and meaningful question after many months of thinking time, I might as well answer it myself, thus creating the illusion that someone was actually interested in my question.
Most of the pictures of troops in the field are Australians, despite it being sung by American Eva Cassidy, covering Sting’s original version.
I served with the US 7th fleet over there. yeah im a former sailor. ok. we provided gunfire support for the Marines and Army. and waged war against the north. I was over there from 1966-1970. heres a list of all the Navy hardware that served. blue and brown water: