THE TRUTH ABOUT THE VIETNAM WAR

 

 

I feel sorry for my brothers in arms who wear a ball cap proclaiming their Vietnam service, as if that was the high point of their lives.

 

No one chose to be there.  No one was killed or wounded by choice. 58,000 died, and most of those were between the ages of 18 and 25.

 

And that 58,000 number was probably a low-ball number manipulated by the government; not an actual count; not accounting for people who later died from war wounds, injuries, toxic poisoning, and suicide…  I am sure the number would be well over 100,000.

  

Ask a Vietnam vet why he was there, and he can’t tell you.  It was politicians moving around pieces on a checker board, and vets were the expendable pieces. 

 

We weren’t there to support a democratic government in the south.  We were there to establish and support the Tan Son Nhut Air Base, giving us a nuclear threat presence on the southern border of China.   It was all about China.  It was geopolitical politics.

 

China did not want an American nuclear presence on its southern border any more than we wanted a Russian nuclear presence in Cuba, on our southern border.

 

We could have, at any time, moved into the north and taken Hanoi, but that would have brought China into the war. 

 

China did not want open war with the US any more than we wanted war with China, so we armed the south, they armed the north, and we fought to a stalemate that, for fifteen years, maintained a status quo, allowing us to maintain the geographic nuclear threat on the Chinese southern border.

 

Finally, the death toll of American forces became too much to hide, and anti-war activism threatened the politicians in office; so we retreated with our tails between our legs – we surrendered the war – we accepted our death toll as having accomplished nothing, cut our losses, and came home ignobly. 

 

A Vietnam vet wearing a hat proclaiming his service is equivalent to a rape victim wearing a hat with a picture of her rapist. 

 

WE were both violently fucked. 

 

the Ol’Buzzard