But many more thousands lost in the battle against Nazism and Japan. Are you OK with letting the more dangerous, murderous political extremists go untouched?

First, the whole war was an ongoing atrocity, the way it worked. A “free fire zone” is an atrocity, for example, an area where ordinary people live, and where you shoot at whatever moves.
(That’s the atrocity John Kerry said he saw & participated in, btw. The rest he heard about from eye witness testimony during the Winter Soldiers hearings.)

There was individual and company-scale nasty sadistic stuff too, as in Iraq today, and we can argue about how much– less than some would say, more than you think, I’d guess– but clean & detached aerial bombing onto areas where everybody looks like civilian farmers, that’s a war crime, with horrible results, and it was the way the war was fought.

Second, these guys turned out to be wrong about the whole thing. We knew it at the time, and told them (just like we did and do about Iraq) and they just said “LALALALA” and told us we were stupid traitors. They have never ever ever acknowledged their real central screwup, Except for McNamara, a little, and he got almost crucified for it, from both sides.

They don’t talk about it anymore, but after everybody saw that the Vietnamese didn’t want us, and that each new government we installed was composed of even more evil thugs, the sole remaining rationale for the war became “the domino theory.” And there was no arguing with it. It was taken as being as proven as the theory of gravity. If you said, “you don’t know that,” they’d look at you as if you were crazy.

Here it is. We had to keep fighting because if we stopped, the communists would have won, and then communism would spread in some mysterious plague-like way to take over all of asia, including new zealand and australia, and then barrel across the pacific to california. Oooooooooo!

Seriously, that was the rationale. “We’re fighting the communists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

That sure happened, didn’t it?

There was no reason for it. None. As soon as we got out, communism started to implode. All that death, all that torture, all that poisoning of the minds and bodies of all those people– stupid and pointless, by the hawks’ own standards.

The hawks were wrong then, they are wrong now. Get prepared: they will never admit it, It has to be somebody else’s fault. Mine, probably.

Within a few years of the end of this war, I expect a whole new wave of MIA and “they spat on us” rambo-style hysteria and urban legendry about Iraq to start sliding its way into becoming convenional wisdom, in some circles, at least.

Or, maybe not. Let’s hope. This is playing out differently.

The worst of it is, while the Vietnamese, being a Buddhist culture, have forgiven us, the Arabs are a whole other thing. We’ll be living with this particular can of worms for a long long long long time.

War brutalizes everyone who participates in it, victor and victim alike. If people want to believe that it is some kind of game, they can. Those people can also expect the moon is green cheese as well.

John Huston’s film about WWII battle fatigue “Let There Be Light” is available on googlevideo for free. It would be a good thing if more people watched it.

And why do you keep saying Kerry didn’t see the things he saw when in fact he did? WHY DO YOU GUYS KEEP PRETENDING?

Source?

Source?

It was a small portion of the forces, but in fact American troops did commit atrocities in Vietnam. I understand this is a useful club against Kerry but it’s simply a perversion of history to pretend as if every soldier in Vietnam performed admirably. In fact, civilians were tortured, intentionally killed and raped.

The problem is, John Kerry testified that he personally witnessed these atrocities, when in fact, he never did. THAT is how he dishonored the troops. By fingering people he served along side with as criminals. He shit all over those guys and then people like you get indignant when they came forward to call Kerry a liar.