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“.. This made sense, since much of the rural American south still like indoor plumbing and other amenities in the 1960s, and hardly anyone had air-conditioning.”

The combined action platoon program: “since living conditions in the typical Vietnamese rural hamlet were pretty primitive, most Marines were in for some serious culture shock when they joined their assigned platoons. Interestingly, black Marines from the rural South had the fewest problems adjusting to life in the Vietnamese bush, followed by poor white country boys from the same region...”

“The M 14 mine was the favorite tool for slowing pursuers down.” They say that it was designed to disable, so that people injured by it would be a drag on the unit pursuing US troops. Takes a lot of balls to argue that maiming soldiers, even communist soldiers, is the Way to go, after all the world literature about named trips that I’ve come across here in the the States.

Here, the authors claim that the fact that The ratio of one medal of honor award given to every 150 killed in LRRP’s in Vietnam testifies to the intense nature of the combat they faced. This sort of flies in the face of the earlier contention that awards were given out much more liberally during the Vietnam war.

The contempt over FNG’s (fucking new guys) is palpable. Like, these new guys are going to get us all killed, so stay away from them. Hardly the we’re all in this together approach cultivated by feel good dramatizations.

They report that 20 percent of the soldiers deployed to Vietnam were “playing grab ass” with Mister Charlie. WTF.

Their argument against taking the war to the north gives me pause. If I read them correctly, they are arguing that “the Vietnamese, especially those in the north, had been long known as ferocious fighters,” so we can’t fight them because they’re too good, so we’ll keep the fighting in the south, where we can win, and where, coincidentally, the bad guys aren’t.

The authors make a comment that “the majority, South Vietnamese officers didn’t know what was at stake, and were honest (at least by Vietnamese standards)”. What does that mean, exactly?

This is really aggravating. They characterize American fire power and something that just happened, and when massive amounts of civilians are killed by American weapons, they’re actually just “caught in the middle. “

The authors go out of their way to excuse American intervention through use of the passive voice and phrases like judicious use of force, as opposed to anything so-called bad guys do. Like in the banana wars, or in the Philippines. There, the US was on the side of the angels, and although a lot of people died in these battles, that’s OK, because they were doing good work.

The authors pointed out that after the war, Vietnam’s economy was “a basket base,” or some such phrase. The implication being, “Look at those Vietnamese Communists—they got what they wanted.”

The US trade embargo on Vietnam? Nope.

The fact that the embargo forced the Vietnamese to consume poisoned fish? Nope. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/op...

Ok, first chapter vacillates between observations about combat and military bureaucracy, which I’m not qualified to comment on and defer to them on, and claims about why we fought and what we should think about the war, which I most certainly am. This ends my livestream reading for the day. Really hoping it either gets better, or, if not, I come to my senses and chuck the book.

Hell of an argument to make when you say “Yeah, Vietnam veterans experienced PTS after the war, but war is hell and a lot of soldiers do.”

Hell of a thing to decry “anecdotal” evidence being heavily used in discussing vets, then argue that “a lot of” people lie about being veterans. And then use Michael Douglas’s movie “Falling Down” as...evidence.

Two pages ago, they said there was no front line in Vietnam. Here, they’re saying “Yes, there most certainly was a ‘frontline soldier’ in Vietnam.”

Well, which is it?

Is that the same thing as “I didn’t lose this fight; I just didn’t win it”?

Authors keep tripping over their own arguments. We didn’t lose the war; we just withdrew. “It was actually the first war the United States refused to win.” So a refusal to win is not a loss, just like me getting up and walking away from the boxer in the ring means “I decline to win,” right?

Not sure I can take 390 more pages of this.

Ok, this is some bullshit. Now they’re blaming the media—the NV “knew” that massive firepower would hit a lot of civilians, and they played to that advantage in their nationalistic propaganda.

So the ones using the “massive firepower” are exempt? So we didn’t use “nationalistic propaganda” about those oh-so-vile Communists while ignoring the predictable consequences of our own terrorism?

Guys.

Now they’re saying if we’d left Vietnam in the early 60s there “might have been problems with Communist insurgents in Thailand” and if North Vietnamese Communists had “taken over South Vietnam earlier” and if Russia dug in, “the Chinese might have gotten even more agitated. We’ll never know.” Oh, and 20 years after the Communists took over, the economy was “a basket case.” #posthocergopropterhoc

On a whim, I skipped to the Index and looked up a few things:



Noam Chomsky appears in a list of antiwar activists the authors do not find credible because he, according to them, denied the genocide in Cambodia during the terror of Pol Pot. This is false. Frederick Christie debunks this lie, with sources, in a lengthy Quora post here (https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Noam-Ch...).

At the very beginning of the book, the authors write that “American troops were not defeated in combat, but the American people refused to pay the price of victory.” I am so tired of this line. The American people saw the Vietnam war, rightly, as a war of aggression, of imperialism. The “price of victory” means going along with a doctrine that involved destroying a nation and fomenting discord abroad & home.

Great original interpretations and intelligent analysis.