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Well said, TAM. Well said.

The Annoyed Man wrote:Like you, I had a high lottery number (339), did not get drafted, and did not enlist. I would like to visit the Black Wall some day, but I am also afraid that I would not be able to stand it. So many men dead from my generation. War memorials like that have always moved me profoundly, but with the Wall in particular, I even tear up when I see footage of it on TV. I know that I owe a debt of gratitude to those who gave that price, payable in part by visiting that memorial. Maybe some day.........

You should go. I did. It was extremely hard and very emotional, but it was also healing.

philip964 wrote:My Mom's dying wish was to see the wall in DC.

I had a deferment, then a high lottery number. I did not serve.

I remember starting college and seeing young men a few years older than me walking with canes.

Pro war people at the time used the domino theory as a reason to fight the war. The second domino never fell.

Not true. Both Cambodia and Laos fell to communism.

Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia all had to put down communist uprisings. The Philippines are STILL dealing with communist "revolutionaries" today, 70 years later

philip964 wrote:A friend vacationed there last week.

I remember Johnson's speech on the gulf of Tonkin incident. Apparently his speech was a lie to increase our forces in Vietnam.

Not true. Both incidents occurred, and the North Vietnamese admitted the first one after the war (by boasting about the attack in their war museum.)

philip964 wrote:Our military learned a lot from the war.

Not sure our leaders did.

Nope. Our leaders haven't learned a thing. They're still micromanaging wars, despite the abundant evidence from Vietnam that doing so is the height of stupidity. Johnson once boasted that the Air Force couldn't "bomb an outhouse without his permission". How ignorant is that? Leaders should declare wars (or not), but the professionals should fight them. Leaders should listen to the professionals and authorize (or not) the actions they request on a macro level, but they should never be involved in day to day military decisions. They don't know anything about strategy and tactics, logistics, or anything else a military leader knows.

We could have won the Vietnam War in two to three years, if the Administration had done what the military asked them to do - cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail. They never did, so the North could supply their troops in the South as much as they wanted to, creating an endless war, and the South and her allies were forced to defend a 1500 mile western border that was mountainous jungle, which was what they wanted. Our leaders were too cowardly to go into Laos and cut off the trail, because they were worried about international opinion.

The right thing to do in Vietnam was to send US troops just south of the militarized zone, from the South China Sea to eastern Laos, set up major bases and smaller FOBs in a defense line and force the North to either fight or give up while preventing them from invading the South. Let the South Vietnamese military mop up the communists that remained in the south and then build their economy while our troops prevented the North from invading.

philip964 wrote:Civil wars are bad things, stay away.

One thing I learned, you never go to war without a declaration of war. And if you do it is total war to win using everything you have. You should never have a kinda war.

Absolutely true, but the cowards in Congress will never declare war again. They don't want to be held responsible for the results.