I was only 15 when the VM war ended but I was reading it virtually everyday in our Current Events Digest. Time for me to get a clearer picture of the whole thing. Will watch the docu for sure.
What I found interesting was that South Viet Nam after the Anericans left had the 5th largest army in the world
Yes Steve, about 1,500,000 while the NV and the VC combined to about 900,000. Amazing that a smaller force would defeat and conquer an enemy in enemy territory. Showing how the 'heart' of the fighters was more important that the size.
Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson's and John Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, was significantly responsible for, and presided over, the U.S. troop build-up in Vietnam. He advocated, and succeeded in implementing, a statistical policy analysis approach to the Vietnam War.
McNamara estimated what he believed to be the maximum number of fatalities the North Vietnamese would be willing to suffer before surrendering. This was his war of attrition. He miscalculated.
Unlike the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor -- which was a valid pre-text for America entering the war -- I think the weight of the evidence has long suggested that the alleged North Vietnamese attack on U.S. Navy vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin was a fabricated pretext for a dramatic escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
I’m not sure what y’all are hoping to learn from this documentary. The history and the facts have not changed. And, unfortunately, it was not really that complicated a situation.
If you believed in the “Domino Theory” that if one country succumbs to the evils of Communism then others are likely to fall as well, and if you believed in stopping the Communist menace on foreign shores, then you supported the war. McNamara believed in the Domino Theory and calculated that the war could be won by inflicting devastating losses on the North Vietnamese before American casualties would turn public opinion against the U.S. war effort. If you did not believe in this strategy for this reason then you were against the war.
What happened and why is just not very complicated.
. . . why many in the government were not held in contempt and prosecuted for war crimes.
Unlike the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor -- which was a valid pre-text for America entering the war -- I think the weight of the evidence has long suggested that the alleged North Vietnamese attack on U.S. Navy vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin was a fabricated pretext for a dramatic escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
I’m not sure what y’all are hoping to learn from this documentary. The history and the facts have not changed. And, unfortunately, it was not really that complicated a situation.
If you believed in the “Domino Theory” that if one country succumbs to the evils of Communism then others are likely to fall as well, and if you believed in stopping the Communist menace on foreign shores, then you supported the war. McNamara believed in the Domino Theory
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