Gregg > Status Update

“.. 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.

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...