TheGreenHornet
Platinum Member
- Nov 21, 2017
- 6,241
- 4,107
MacArthur warned them not to get involved in a land war in Asia, yet the morons paid no attention to him. Remember the so called whiz kids? They had no idea how to fight a war....we were trying to fight a bunch of guerrilas with conventional methods.....very stupid.
McNamara was the architect of our defeat....oh he was just so smart....how pathetic.
JFK supposedly planned to end our involvement there.
I suppose they all forgot about how we screwed up the Korean conflict, allowing sanctuary in China and then when the Chinese boldly sent their troops in--we still refused to attack China Why? Truman feared Russia would get involved and we would have a nuclear war on our hands. Truman drank too much whiskey.
Anyhow...the same scenario again in Vietnam....letting our fear of war with China and Russia restrict our strategy in Vietnam.
They should have foreseen all that...and thus if they were going to kowtow to China and Russia we should never have gotten involved.
Oh yes....hindsight is 20/20 but MacArthur did not need hindsight to understand all that. LBJ listened to the wrong folks and he was desperately in need of a diversion as attention was being paid to his and bobby bakers corruption not even to mention his involvement in the JFK assassination.
I think Ho Chi Minh could have been reasoned with if we had sent over a qualified diplomat prior to the shooting war. Or maybe not ---- we under-estimated the enemy which was a big mistake. LBJ and his b.s. of bringing the coonskin home. His mindset like too many of his generals was stuck in the WWII mode. No idea how to prosecute a guerrilla conflict.
Yes, there was a political problem but also and even more importantly our military was just not up to par...poor training, poor equipment, rifles that jammed easily and troops that came from the bottom of the barrel in too many cases. We did have some good troops in the elite Airborne units and the marines, but the average G.I. was lacking....though with the proper leadership that would not have mattered so much.
Not even to mention all the drugs, loss of morale, insubordination, fragging and the racial problem.
The first rule of war is to know your enemy...the vietcong knew us very,very well. We had little knowledge of them or their capabilities and especially their determination.
