posted 01-07-2002 11:22 AM            

The United States Military did not lose the war!

The N.V.A and viet cong did not beat the United States Military.

The reason was a lack of leadership by the President(s) and some what to the Military leadership.
Examples: Tet was a disaster for.... the North!

Khe-Sahn is not in the same league as Dien Bien Phu, it was never in desperate threat of being over run!!

If the President had handeled it as the Gulf War was, There would be NO N. Viet-nam! it would be one country.

Examples: NVA aircraft were not allowed to be attacked on the ground!
Pilots were given specific areas to bomb, they could pass the entire NVA army sitting in a field smoking hash, and they couldnt do a thing to them!

Politicians Lost that war!!!!

Chip

posted 01-08-2002 08:33 AM            

more to come,
Chip

posted 01-08-2002 08:57 AM            

They did, Chip, but that war went on for a long time. Where were the ex-military folks who could have clued us in to what was really going on?

When we were about a month into Afghanistan and the State Department folks were tipetoeing here and there, making a big deal about who should invade Kabul and who should share power in the post war government...John McCain (ex-military) wrote a long op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which said, basically, WIN THE WAR FIRST, DAMMIT! Everybody woke up after that and realized that we needed to make the main thing the main thing, and we did.

posted 01-08-2002 09:47 AM            

1. The fact that the politicians, with the collusion of some military men (William Westmoreland comes most readily to mind) distorted our reasons for being there and under-reported in-country American morale.

2. The fact that the enemy were much more highly motivated than we were. The bulk of the NVA, as well as a very high percentage of the VC, believed that they were in an ongoing battle for national survival, just as they had been in previous years against first the Chinese (most of the 19th century), the French (1900-1930's), the Japanese (1938-1945), and the French again (1945-1954).

Cotrast the NVA soldier who would ride his bicycle for three months over the Ho Chi Minh trail to deliver a couple of mortar rounds, deliver them, then turn around and bicycle back to Hanoi to pick up another load -- with an American draftee who hadn't a clue as to why he was fighting against people whom he had no quarrel with. The only way you can beat people like that is by overwhelming force, including NBC weapons - an approach which almost everybody agrees would have been wrong.

3. The fact that, by 1970, even middle-class Americans realized that the myth of 'monolithic Communism' was just that - a myth; and therefore we really had no sensible reason other than ego to keep sending our kids into the meat-grinder. Remember that a major reason that Nixon won in 1968 was that he had a 'secret plan' to end the war. (Of course it was so 'secret' that it took an additional three years, but what the hey....)

Nowadays, of course, things are different; the American people will probably not put up with a level of casualties unless they see a good reason for doing so. We 'won' the Kuwait war because we didn't take many casualties and had an identifiable enemy; same for Bosnia/Kosovo. (Our press did a great job of demonizing both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic -- not that they weren't demons). Somalia had no demon to exorcise and we took casualties; that's why we left.

And what about Afghanistan? We have both a demon (bin Laden) and a rationale (Homeland Security). They both seem to be effective - for now. With bin Laden the most hated man in the country and the attacks lulling the bulk of Americans into accepting Ashcroft's political police policies - and the (so far) low level of casualties -- we can probably maintain the American Home Front will to fight and sacrifice in Afghanistan.

But how about the next 'battle against terrorism' - and the one after that, and the one after that? Only time will tell.

posted 01-08-2002 05:19 PM            

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The Collected Works of Col. Fletcher Prouty

With the right hardware and web browser, readers can spend hours exploring the depths of L. Fletcher Prouty's research on and first-hand experience with the JFK assassination and the politics of conspiracy that have followed it for the past thirty years. Prouty served for nearly a decade in the Pentagon and twice that in military service with the Joints Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense and the U. S. Air Force. Donald Sutherland played Prouty in a much abbreviated version of his relationship with Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's JFK movie. His work detailing his view of secret government has come under fire because it has been published and reprinted by everything from the Liberty Lobby to the Scientologists. It has never been substantially refuted for its content. At long last an enormous amount of that writing, some of it quote obscured by its publication in alternative sources, has it has been collected here through the laudable efforts of Len Osanic. That includes the complete texts of Col. Prouty's most well-known books, The Secret Team and JFK: Vietnam, the CIA and the Assassination of President Kennedy, with new introductions, a thorough review of the pre-emptive media backlash against Stone's movie, and over six hours of audio and video interviews. Prouty's view of the power elite is shaped by no less a figure than R. Buckminster Fuller, while at the same time his no-nonsense analysis, particularly on POW/MIAs fallout of Vietnam, will appeal even to strident patriot readers.

One example from the CD-ROM's selection of articles:

"[Robert] McNamara and his closest aides were able to take over such key crafts as the iron-bound procurement processes of the military. For more than a year a new fighter plane had been a number #1 requirement of the Air Force. Its primary sponsor was Gen. Frank Everest. At the close of the Eisenhower budget period, carefully executed plans had reserved money in the 1961 budget, for Nixon, that would make more than $3 or $4 billion available for its procurement from the pre-ordained manufacturer, the Boeing Company. Nixon lost, and even after the election of Kennedy and the early arrival of McNamara, it was considered a foregone conclusion that this "Everest" fighter-plane purchase would go through, as planned. We all had much to learn.

It was Nov. 22, 1962, before the McNamara procurement system had run its politically oriented course, with the Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg's clever assistance. We learned that the "largest single military procurement program ever" for the TFX or F-111 aircraft, by then a joint Air Force-Navy project based on the concept of "commonalty", and for no less than $6.5 billion, had been awarded, by McNamara... not to Boeing, but toGeneral Dynamics-Grumman.

The shock waves in the Pentagon were about the equal of an H-bomb test in the megaton range. McNamara had made his mark, precisely one year before Kennedy died.

To those in the Pentagon, those on Capitol Hill and to others all over the country allied with the Boeing scheme of things, who had planned to help Nixon and his old team spend that $6.5 billion this was an unforgivable blow. One thing those of us in the neutral ranks noted clearly was that the Kennedy "Honeymoon" had ended. "Kennedy" was a dirty word... and this was only 1962."

This same set of circumstances was recently reported by Seymor Hersh as fallout from blackmail efforts against JFK.

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posted 01-08-2002 05:30 PM            

He has also said in his writings that JFK was murdered to a large extent because he was on the verge of dismantling the CIA and pulling out of Viet Nam in 1963 after the Dulles-directed CIA's disastrous attempts to kill Castro and their failure in The Bay of Pigs. JFK believed that the CIA was out of control, even then and that they had usurped control of the political actions and decisions totally apart from Executive, Judicial and Legislative components of the U.S. government. JFK was rocking the boat and had to be eliminated to ensure that escalation (and sales) would continue as planned in Viet Nam.

All of this doesn't address (though it may encompass) other probable mission objectives in Viet Nam;

* control of Golden Triangle (opium production in VN, Cambodia and Thailand)

* BILLION dollar contract for Brown & Root (an LBJ interest) to drill for oil in the Gulf of Tonkin.

* multiple defense contracts to produce ammunition, helicopters, jets etc. Bell helicopters had an enormous contract to sell choppers in this 'new' war.

* an illustration to the rest of the world, USSR/China, that the U.S. could and would kill an estimated 1.5-3 million Asians over a 13-year(1963-1975) period.

In some ways, to TPTB, U.S. involvement in Viet Nam could be considered a major victory in that it achieved all of the above goals. With the added 'benefit' of disruption and fracturing of Americas faith in itself that almost amounted to a civil war here in the U.S.. As far as TPTB are concerned, these added benefits may just have been the icing on the cake.

posted 01-26-2002 09:42 AM            

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The Vietnam war ended on April 30, 1975. Thousands of Americans and their Vietnamese "friends" were hastily evacuated from the roof of the U.S. embassy the previous day.

The South Vietnamese army of over a million men had disintegrated. Cam Rahn Bay, a coastal city, 150 kilometers North East of Saigon, was abandoned a day before the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese even arrived. The soldiers were being paid by the U.S. and the last U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, denied evacuation to IBM employees on the grounds they had to stay to process the Saigon government's payroll.

The South Vietnamese army was not the only one to disintegrate during the war. Seven years earlier, American ground soldiers, those soldiers who are most subjected to being killed or wounded and who often also see who they kill and injure, began refusing to fight. The U.S. army in Vietnam disintegrated and was withdrawn.

Two former Vets, staffers at the Vietnamese Veterans Against the War, Barry Romo and Pete Zastrow, in a letter to the National Guardian of June 5, 1985, a U.S. progressive paper, describe some the reasons for the disillusionment in Viet Nam...“Killing is, for most people, a hard thing to do. That's why there is the hoopla, the myths, the propaganda, the brainwashing surrounding most armies. It is necessary so that troops will not just take orders but will kill and take the chance of being killed. It was more than many Vets could comprehend or handle to discover that your friends were killed, that you were wounded -either physically or mentally- for a bad cause, and that the people you have been killing or trying to kill were in fact the good guys. That contradiction lies at the base of psychological problems of Vets....by 1979, 65,000 Vietnamese vets had committed suicide.”

Do you remember the war ? Did you know that the American armed forces dropped more bombs on Vietnam, both North and South, than in all fronts in World War II. Still visible from the air is the moonscape of craters left by U.S. B-52 bombers that dropped an estimated 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam. Do you know that 1.5 million Vietnamese died in the war as well as 57,000 Americans ? Do you remember that a the height of the American intervention in Vietnam, in 1966, 550,000 U.S. armed personnel were there? Do you remember My Lai, where Lt. William Calley and his platoon gunned down hundreds of old men, women and children 17 years ago?

Vietnam has still not recovered from the American ecocide in their country. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, based in Gland, Switzerland, just did a study on Vietnam. In its report the I.C.C.N. observes:...“United States forces destroyed dikes and other agricultural productive systems, created landslides in steep areas by bombing and spraying an unidentified acid on limestone, attacked wildlife such as elephants and oxen with guns, bombs and napalm to prevent their use for transportation and devastated large areas of land with ‘saturation bombing’ ” (New York Times, May 21 1985, T. Netter Op.Ed.)...United States statistics indicated that more than 19 million gallons of herbicides, known as agent orange, white and blue, were dropped on croplands and forests. The herbicides contained dioxins that remain at toxic levels today.

...“The colossal damage from 25 million bomb craters, which caused displacement of a billion cubic meters of earth, results in health hazards and disrupts water flow and the particles of shrapnel enbedded in living trees render their wood less valuable”... “Further damage was caused”, the report says, “by the clearing of large tracts of forest, agricultural land and ‘even villages and cemeteries’ with giant bulldozers used by American troops searching for Vietcong guerillas in the South...”

Do you remember the U.S.S. Maddox and the Tonkin Bay incident? U.S. president, at that time, Lyndon Johnson, claimed that North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked that destroyer a few miles off the North Vietnamese coast on August 4, 1964. Using this incident as a pretext, Johnson ordered squadrons of U.S. planes to bomb oil depots in North Vietnam. Later, it was revealed, the so-called North Vietnamese attack, had never even happened. It was a fabrication. Admiral James Bond Stockdale, who was there, reveals this in the Vietnamese special issue of Newsweek, April 15, 1985.

I remember the hundreds of thousands of young Americans who came to Canada to avoid participating in a war they could not accept. I remember when, in April 1971, 2000 vets, many on crutches and wheel chairs, marched on Washington and dumped the medals some had won at the Pentagon. Huge coordinated international days of protest against the hideous war were regularly held. One in Washington attracted over a million people.

The bicycle played an important role in the defeat of both the American and, previously, French occupiers of Vietnam. The Vietnamese pushed up to 500 pounds of supplies on their bicycle, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through the mountains of Vietnam Laos. Small and flexible, dollar bicycles were virtually immune from the attacks of planes costing 6 million dollars each.

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posted 01-26-2002 09:45 AM            

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According to a study by Tim A. Bullman and Han K. Yang in the Federal Practitioner 12 (3) : 9-13 (March 1995), "...no more than 20,000 Vietnam Veterans died of suicide from the time of discharge through the end of 1993". However there are others that claim that many more veterans have died of suicide since the Vietnam War.

In Chuck Deans' book, Nam Vet., printed in 1990 by Multnomah Press, Portland, Oregon, 97226, the author states that "Fifty-eight thousand plus died in the Vietnam War. Over 150,000 have committed suicide since the war ended". According to this book, Chuck Dean is a Vietnam Veteran who served in the 173rd Airborne, arriving in Vietnam in 1965. At the time the book was written, Mr. Dean was the executive director of Point Man International, a Seattle based, non-profit support organization dedicated to healing the war wounds of Vietnam Veterans.

While doing research for his novel, Suicide Wall, Alexander Paul contacted Point Man International and was given the name of a retired VA doctor, and conducted a phone interview with him. In that interview, the doctor related that his estimate of the number of Vietnam Veteran suicides was 200,000 men, and that the reason the official suicide statistics were so much lower was that in many cases the suicides were documented as accidents, primarily single-car drunk driving accidents and self inflicted gunshot wounds that were not accompanied by a suicide note or statement. According to the doctor, the under reporting of suicides was primarily an act of kindness to the surviving relatives.

If the estimate of over 150,000 veterans of the Vietnam War having committed suicide since returning home is true, the figure would be almost three times the number killed in the war. When these deaths are added to the 50,000 plus Vietnam War casualties, the number approaches the 292,000 American casualties of World War II.

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The Suicide Wall web site is an attempt to determine how many Vietnam Veterans have actually taken their own lives, as well as a place to memorialize and honor those who served their country, and finally a place which may serve to help prevent suicides in the future. The desire to commit suicide is a temporary, passing emotion, and if it can be prevented, the suicidal person can receive counseling and treatment to prevent the reoccurrence of such feelings.