Anyone else watching the Ken Burns documentary about the war? It's excellent as usual but I'm noticing a few things. It's both long and short. It's 18 hours in total and yet moves along, at times, too fast to make sense. (I know, little about Vietnam makes sense.) It seems like the actual history and facts are just used to stitch together the vignettes about the human stories.

That's a minor quibble over a fantastic piece of work. I lived through that time but I feel like I'm learning for the first time a lot about what really happened.

I think we have more than our share of veterans here. I'm not a polling kind of guy but please go ahead and sound off if you want.

 

It might be good but I'm not watching it because I'm not a glutton for punishment for lost causes from French stupidity. I never set foot in Vietnam but saw the shockwaves the war caused in the region when I was there on patrol off the coast headed to Thailand. The blowback of our failures helped to enable the death of millions from the heart of Cambodia to the tip of the Mekong delta from Communism gone mad with untold others from region who died trying to escape hell on earth after the war. Vietnam is now a western tourist trap so time moves on.

I have seen this entire series. Excellent!
The Ten Thousand Day War

 

Vietnam is now a western tourist trap so time moves on.

I was surprised to learn this. We had a business meeting in Hanoi and as an American that lived through the war time, I had mixed emotions about visiting Hanoi. It didn't take long to realize that for most of the people you see there, it's ancient history. Most people are too young to care and I felt no sense of tension whatsoever between the locals and those of us from the west.

The height difference was comical! We could see each other for blocks because we all stood a head above the local crowds. It made it easy for us to keep tabs on each other as we strolled around town sightseeing.

The only moment of terror I had was in the open air market. It was crowded with tourists and vendors but suddenly all the vendors and many of the other locals vanished. It was eerie and obvious. Then the soldiers came around the corner carrying rifles. I froze and just about had to buy fresh underwear. But it turns out that much of the vibrant economy in the street is black market, and they scatter when the authorities come around. The vendors that have paid for their stalls obviously don't care for the freeloaders.

 

The only moment of terror I had was in the open air market. It was crowded with tourists and vendors but suddenly all the vendors and many of the other locals vanished. It was eerie and obvious.

I had managed to avoid Vietnam right up till... During February / March 1972 I was assigned to Marine Air Group 15 in Iwa Kuni, Japan. Life was good for a then 22 year old sergeant in the Marine corps. My unit deployed to DaNang and we were the first Marines back in country. We moved into the old French bunkers adjacent to the Dog Patch area of DaNang. During the evenings you could see and hear the kids playing in the Dog Patch shanties. Then there would be dead silence and no activity. They knew and we knew either rockets or mortars would soon be with us. I rotated out in May 1972 as the unit moved on to Thailand to build what became known as "The Rose Garden". What was amazing and on target was how the locals always knew when we were going to be hit, be it rockets, mortars or those damn sappers hitting the fence. The sudden silence is something I have never forgotten. Hard to believe that was over 45 years ago. I will say the French built a hell of a bunker.

Ron

 

I was in the Army from 1970 through 1973. They didn't send me to Vietnam. They sent me to... New Jersey.

 

Re-run on tonight at 10 PM. I will be there.

 

You can see 10 episodes online at pbs.org

 

Pity the politicians didn't learn from Vietnam.Repeated the same mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Are they now going to do the same in North Korea?

 

Even WWII didn't have an "exit strategy" that everyone wants before the fighting is over. The Marshall Plan was conceived after VJ day.

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the little wars in between, didn't seem to have the whole country behind them. I fear the precedence has been set. Attack the U.S. and you can outlast the political willpower with the americans rising against their political leaders.

 

Attack the U.S. and you can outlast the political willpower with the americans rising against their political leaders.

I'm sure you can list the attacks and where they happened.

 

I'm sure you can list the attacks and where they happened.

Not without a little research. Embassy attacks, the marine barracks in Beruit, the attack at the hotel in Saudi Arabia, the Twin Towers, when the terrorists killed that american in a wheelchair on that cruise boat in the late 1970s, the PAN AM flight over Scotland, and the disco in Germany. We considered a lot of them as a police matter and not an act of war. Death to America has been a battle cry for a long time. Non-consignatories wanting Geneva Convention protections from us and disregarding the same towards us.

No, I didn't provide the dates and locations as I don't have total recall of all of them.

 

So, all but one attack not in the U.S.
That's what I thought.

 

#12, you must consider that "the Americans" have had a pretty good run now for quite some time, and easy times makes lazy, foolish, near-sighted people. Our politicians are actually representative, and that's how we got both GW Bush and 'rump; we're crawling in idiots, including those that don't bother to vote.

I think Burns has done a very good job with this series, and has enough people and emotion to get good enough ratings to sell it. (Lots of Americans need lots of entertainment, so your great documentary may be simply a DVD or YouTube piece if you don't supply some popcorn to the crowd.). Our Iraq involvement has lasted longer than Vietnam, and certainly cost us far more $, but fewer lives, so it will drag on. Afghanistan is a bit more like our Vietnam mistake in some respects (than Iraq), but less so in crucial ways. Had there not been "the draft" Vietnam might have gone on much longer, and it's absence undoubtedly has produced our current perpetual industro-military ecosystem.

The craziest thing is that we continue to say one thing and do another, spot flaws and repeat them, repeat our actions and expect different results.

 

Vietnam wasn't a terrorist attack and should not IMO be used to analyze our present day mainly Islamic terror strategy for good or bad. It was just one of many anti-communist proxy wars fought and mostly forgotten about during the sometimes hot cold-war. North Korea is a crazy present day example of an old-school communist nation that has degenerated into a death cult threatening to annihilate us.

There have been plenty of domestic terror events going all the way back to the Wall Street and Los Angeles Times bombing.

 

North Korea is a crazy present day example of another totalitarian regime which English speaking people call "communist", referring to a political label used in the past to describe North Korea's allies. It is barely a threat of any sort to the United States, and cannot even completely annihilate it's own people. The threat faced by the citizens of the United States is having their president attempt to involve them in a military action with North Korea's current leadership.

 

I think Carlos Mencia (Mind of Mencia) summed this up well. The joke goes like this:
(Arab) "We bombed two of your buildings (ha ha).
(Mencia) "We bombed two of your countries!"

Right now I don't know how many countries the U.S. has bombed back to the stone age, but I think leveling country is a bit much for bombing a building.
Can you say, "Baby with the bath water"?