I Left My Platoon a Day Early. I Listened as the Viet Cong Killed My Replacement

[douglas9]

My platoon was about 100 miles from Pleiku City, searching for the Viet Cong within South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. The mountainous elevation offered little protection from the humid air that left us staggering as if intoxicated.

I was the platoon’s forward observer, and March 31, 1968, marked the end of my fifth scary month stationed in South Vietnam. In 48 hours, I would begin a seven-day leave in Bangkok.

The resupply chopper would bring in my replacement, Frank, and fly me out. I was excited about traveling to Bangkok after listening to stories from guys who took their leave there: days of girls, bars, and beer.

The battalion XO requested the platoon’s resupply a day earlier, so I got to leave a day ahead. When I relayed the good news to the platoon lieutenant’s aide, he gave me a typical military reply: “Lucky you, asshole.”

But first we had to march to the landing zone, a miserable nine hours of tramping up and down hills, spending a hellish part of the journey trekking through swampy areas full of mosquitos, snakes, blood-sucking leeches, and unbearable humidity.

Once there, the resupply chopper could land, pick me up and drop off Frank, and unload the supplies.

https://thewarhorse.org/army-soldier-heard-viet-cong-kill-his-replacement/

[hlthe2b]

1. The regrets from Vietnam are very personal... Tragedies compounded on a national level, but to have

one's last memory be one so directly so... that really is sad and obviously carries through his lifetime.

[snowybirdie]

2. Thank you

The world needs more heroes like you

[Turbineguy]

3. When my Son was joining the Marines in 2003

My friend who had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam came over and told him that combat is the worst experience a human being can endure.

[DENVERPOPS]

4. Purely

and solely for the enrichment of the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower had warned us about as he left office....

McNamara came into a business I was working at, and I refused to wait on him. I almost got fired for doing so.
I told the manager, and old WW11 vet, it was either not wait on him, or punch him in the face......

[IrishBubbaLiberal]

5. Robt McNamara KNEW by late 1967 the War was useless unwinable quagmire

McNamara peddled the fantasy that something happened in the Gulf of Tonkin that justified giving him a blank check for a massive war in southeast Asia. And McNamara cashed the check, flooding Vietnam with U.S. troops — 535,000 by 1968 — and bringing tens of thousands of those young soldiers home dead or horribly wounded. The Secretary of Defense had tried to fight a war with statistical theories and anti-communist, Domino-theory fantasies. And the project failed.

McNamara recognized this by late 1967 and made some effort to alter U.S. strategies. But it was too late, for him and for Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, which crashed and burned in the Mekong Delta.


——

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mcnamara-was-wrong-terribly-wrong-about-vietnam/

McNamara Was “Wrong, Terribly Wrong” About Vietnam
Robert McNamara’s actions during the Vietnam War were wrong, terribly wrong.

Such was the assessment of a knowledgable critic: McNamara himself.

The Secretary of Defense during the administrations of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who has died at age 93, was in his day portrayed as the most brilliant technocrat in an era when brilliant technocrats were worshipped by the media and political elites. Unfortunately, his own tragic trajectory confirmed that the best and the brightest were fallible — in the extreme.


JOHN NICHOLS

Robert McNamara’s actions during the Vietnam War were wrong, terribly wrong.

Such was the assessment of a knowledgable critic: McNamara himself.

The Secretary of Defense during the administrations of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who has died at age 93, was in his day portrayed as the most brilliant technocrat in an era when brilliant technocrats were worshipped by the media and political elites. Unfortunately, his own tragic trajectory confirmed that the best and the brightest were fallible — in the extreme.

A Ford Motors “whiz kid” who brought his management skills to Kennedy’s Camelot and stayed around long enough to watch the dream crumble under Johnson. When he arrived at the Department of Defense, McNamara admitted that his knowledge of military matters was scant. But he was confident enough — arguably “arrogant enough” — to believe he could master the Pentagon with a mumbo-jumbo of management platitudes — announcing his intention to apply an “active role” management philosophy that involved “providing aggressive leadership questioning, suggesting alternatives, proposing objectives and stimulating progress.”

In other words, McNamara winged it.

Badly.


More……

[Turbineguy]

10. We are always blaming ourselves but

if Ho Chi Min had not gone to the communists, the US would have helped them kick the French out and become an independent country.

The US was shutting down European colonialism.

[IrishBubbaLiberal]

11. " You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win."

“You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.”

—Viet Minh leader Ho Chi Minh in a warning to French colonialists in 1946.


https://www.cfr.org/blog/vietnam-war-forty-quotes

[IrishBubbaLiberal]

12. " All men are created equal. They are endowed by .......

“ All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness".
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the Earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and to be free.

The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights."
Those are undeniable truths.

—- Vietnamese Proclamation of Independence (2 September 1945), Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works (1960-1962), Vol. 3, pp. 17-21

[democrank]

6. Kicking for all Vietnam vets

~PEACE~

[3Hotdogs]

7. My father-in-law was D-Day + 1. (2nd wave of soldiers on Normandy Beach.)

It was a couple of months later, he was driving a Jeep with his friend, Raymond in the "shotgun" seat. An explosion went off and Raymond was blown to shreds. F.I.L. got a couple of scratches.


The reason I know Raymond's name was that my ex was going to be named Raymond if she turned out to be a boy.

I never knew my F.I.L. before the war (for obvious reasons) but it was clear that his head was never "right."

A couple of times he would begin to show photos of himself during the war. One photo was of him on the patio of Hitler's "Eagles Nest," with the mountains in the background. He would begin showing such photos and then stop.

"Nobody cares about this."

R.I.P., Herb.

[Comfortably_Numb]

8. McNamara stuck to his bullshit excuses up to the day he dies. Watch "The Fog of War." None of it was his fault,to hea

r him tell it. Justifications to his grave. I hope he and Henry Kissinger are trapped in each other’s dutch oven for eternity in hell for both of them.

[IrishBubbaLiberal]

9. My sister pissed off my father, dated draft card burner in Minnesota

My late father was part of the military industrial intelligence complex
In mainly three decades, the 1950s 1960s 1970s.

My sister in early 1970s dated a few times one of the Minnesota Eight,

Mainly just to piss him off



———-
https://www.minnpost.com/mnopedia/2020/06/the-minnesota-eights-attempts-to-destroy-draft-files-during-the-vietnam-war-were-mostly-unsuccessful/

The Minnesota Eight’s attempts to destroy draft files during the Vietnam War were mostly unsuccessful

Around midnight on July 10, 1970, four teams of two or three people each broke into Selective Service offices in Little Falls, Alexandria, Winona, and Wabasha, intending to destroy as many military draft files as possible — acts of protest against the war in Vietnam. They mostly failed. Eight of them were arrested and charged with federal crimes. They became known as the Minnesota Eight.