MikeK
Gold Member
Those who served during World War Two defended us against two powerful military forces either of which was capable of invading and occupying this Nation, one of which had attacked us. What our troops did in that honorable war was necessary and in a single word, glorious. They deserve the gratitude of their generation and of every succeeding generation of Americans. Because, again, they defended the U.S. against two menacingly capable enemies.I was stationed in San Francisco '68-'69 and got to know the anti-war movement well. Mostly they were young people looking for a party and some were sincere in what they believed. However (as proved by Congressional investigation) many of your "...highly decorated (and some badly disabled) Vietnam veterans..." were simply lying scum with vivid imaginations
The North Vietnamese did nothing to provoke our military aggression. They did not attack us. They did not threaten us. And they were absolutely incapable of harming the U.S. in any way. Yet our government saw fit to engage in a military adventure in that nation which cost the lives of 58,000+ Americans and caused the maiming and scarring of tens of thousands more.
Are you capable of understanding the fundamental and critically important difference between those two scenarios? If you were drafted to serve in Vietnam, or if you were naive enough to enlist believing you were serving your country rather than the interests of a corrupt and/or incompetent government, then you have my sincere sympathy for being misused by demagogic political opportunists like Robert MacNamara. But if you think there is some reason why I or any other American should be grateful for the suffering you endured in that unnecessary and utterly immoral debacle, please enlighten me as to that reason. I would like to know how your service in Vietnam served my interests or the interests of the United States. The simple fact of the matter is you were badly misused, wasted, and there is absolutely nothing glorious about that, and that's the message you should be sending to Americans who are too naive or too stupid to know it.
I joined the Marine Corps in 1956 for no reason other than a sense of pride and patriotic obligation. Fortunately my active service occurred during peacetime but I remained ready for combat deployment if the need arose. At that time I did not believe my government would deploy us because of circumstances other than defensive necessity. So we'll call that my time of innocence, which has long since passed.
I joined the protest movement when my cousin, Thomas, who was as close as a brother to me, was drafted and killed just five weeks after arriving in Vietnam. The shock of that loss is what caused me to question the need for it. Can you blame me for being pissed off because there was absolutely no good reason for it? Should I be grateful to Tommy for dying in Vietnam? Should I be grateful to you for whatever miseries you endured there? If so, why? You have my sincere sympathy but certainly not my gratitude. And if you had any sense you'd be as pissed off and disgusted about that outrageous waste of life and limb as I am rather than trying to assign some glory to it.
Face it, Vietnam was a sow's ear. Trying to make it into a silver purse will serve only to obscure the reality of a sad and disgraceful debacle that deserves to be reviled. And your attempt to portray the entire protest movement as "young people looking for a party" is as unfairly inaccurate as would be an attempt to portray every trooper in Vietnam as being as degenerate as those who engaged in the My Lai massacre and the like. While it's certainly true there were some tie-dyed long-hairs whose bizarre and melodramatic behavior attracted attention of the Press, the main body of the movement engaged in the kind of political activity that eventually brought an end to that outrage.