Barbara Tuchman on the U.S. military's first involvement in Vietnam

A week after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, a Viet-Minh congress in Hanoi proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and after taking control in Saigon declared its independence, quoting the opening phrases of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776.  In a message to the UN transmitted by the OSS, Ho Chi Minh warned that if the UN failed to fulfill the promise of its charter and failed to grant independence to Indochina, "we will keep on fighting until we get it."

[...]

Self-declared independence lasted less than a month.  Ferried from Ceylon [Sri Lanka] by American C-47s, a British general and British troops with a scattering of French units entered Saigon on 12 September, supplemented by 1500 French troops who arrived on French warships two days later.  Meanwhile, the bulk of two French divisions had sailed from Marseilles and Madasgar on board two American troopships in the first significant act of American aid...  Afterward, the State Department, closing the stable door, advised the War Department that it was contrary to United States policy "to employ American flag vessels or aircraft to transport troops of any nationality to or from the Netherlands East Indies or French Indochina, or to permit the use of such craft to carry arms, ammunition or military equipment to those areas."

~ Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly, pp. 240-241

Fred Reed compares the evacuation of Afghanistan to that of Saigon in 1975

And now we have done it all over again in Kabul, complete with helicopters over the embassy and a panicked evacuation undertaken way too late and sudden concern for turncoat Afghans who made the mistake of working for the US.  There is talk of importing 20,000 Afghan refugees to America.  I find it amusing that many conservatives, who thought the war was peaches because it was about democracy and niceness and American values, now object to importing people their dimwitted enthusiasms put in line to be killed.  Use and discard.  Countries and people.

~ Fred Reed, "Despair in the Empire of Graveyards," LewRockwell.com, August 22, 2021

Clay Travis on the risks of Covid-19 for college students

What we have in this country is a huge collection of pussy willows: people who don't understand how to assess risk.  Here's an easy assessment: College kids are more likely to die of the seasonal flu than they are of the coronavirus.  Yet we never shut down college campuses for the flu.  They are more likely to die driving in cars to their campuses.  They are more likely to be murdered.  They are more likely to die of a drug overdose.  They are more likely to die from drinking too much alcohol.  They are more likely to die from suicide.  All of those are bigger risk factors for college kids than the coronavirus is.

This represents a monumental failure of American society.  I believe, ultimately, this is going to be looked back on by people with functional brains as the worst decision of American policy since the Vietnam War.

~ Clay Travis, "Mark Cuban is ANGRY about NBA ratings, spring football IDIOCY, MLS booing, MLB silence," YouTube, 5:45 mark, August 13, 2020

Murray Rothbard on the early career of Henry Kissinger

In 1954, the 31-year-old Kissinger, a Harvard political scientist and admirer of Metternich, was plucked out of his academic obscurity to become lifelong foreign policy advisor to New York Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. Doctor K continued in that august role until he assumed the mastery of foreign policy throughout the Nixon and Ford administrations. In that role, Kissinger played a major part in prolonging and extending the Vietnam War, and in the mass murder of civilians entailed by the terror bombings of Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the invasion of Laos.

Since leaving office in 1977, Dr. Kissinger has continued to play a highly influential role in U.S. politics, in the U.S. media, and in the Rockefeller world empire. It was Kissinger, along with David Rockefeller, who was decisive in the disastrous decision of President Carter to admit the recently toppled Shah of Iran, old friend and ally of the Rockefellers, into the United States, a decision that led directly to the Iranian hostage crisis and to Carter’s downfall.

~ Murray Rothbard, "Why the War? The Kuwait Connection," The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, May 1991

Ted Rall: Is John McCain a war hero?

Why is the McCain-as-war-hero myth so hard to unravel? By most accounts, John McCain demonstrated courage as a P.O.W., most notably by refusing his captors' offer of early release. But that doesn't make him a hero.

Hell, McCain isn't even a victim.

At a time when more than a fourth of all combat troops in Vietnam were forcibly drafted (the actual victims), McCain volunteered to drop napalm on "gooks" (his term, not mine). He could have waited to see if his number came up in the draft lottery. Like Bush, he could have used family connections to weasel out of it. Finally, he could have joined the 100,000 draft-eligible males--true heroes, to a man--who went to Canada rather than kill people in a war that was plainly wrong.

When McCain was shot down during his 23rd bombing sortie, he was happily shooting up a civilian neighborhood in the middle of a major city. Vietnamese locals beat him when they pulled him out of a local lake; yeah, that must have sucked. But I can't help think of what would have happened to Mohammed Atta had he somehow wound up alive on a lower Manhattan street on 9/11. How long would he have lasted?

Maybe he would have made it. I don't know. But I do know this: no one would ever have considered him a war hero.

~ Ted Rall, "War Zero," July 17, 2008

LBJ on entry into the Vietnam War

We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

~ Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1964

Huey Lewis & The News on the Vietnam War

Sometimes in my bed at night
I curse the dark and a pray for light
And sometimes, the light's no consolation
Blinded by a memory
Afraid of what it might do to me
And the tears and the sweat only mock my desperation

Don't you know me I'm the boy next door
The one you find so easy to ignore
Is that what I was fighting for?
Walking on a thin line
Straight off the front line
Labeled as freaks loose on the streets of the city
Walking on a thin line
Straight off the front line
Take a look at my face, see what it's doing to me

Taught me how to shoot to kill
A specialist with a deadly skill
A skill I needed to have to be a survivor
It's over now or so they say
Well, sometimes, it don't turn out that way
Cause your never the same when you've been under fire

Don't you know me I'm the boy next door
The one you find so easy to ignore
Is that what I was fighting for?
Walking on a thin line
Straight off the front line
Labeled as freaks loose on the streets of the city
Walking on a thin lineStraight off the front line
Take a look at my face, see what it's doing to me

~ Huey Lewis & The News, "Walking on a Thin Line," from the "Sports" album, released October 1983