MAROON said:

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RedAgs01 said:

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Doesn't anyone Rosen find John Musgrave a fascinating interview? Sometimes I'm watching the show while also messing around with my phone but when he comes on I always put it down.

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yes, he's one of the best. Have not watched all the episodes but his comments about how scared he still was of the dark and his reaction talking about how we never mistreated prisoners of war (once they go to the rear and become POW's ) were amazing.

EVERYONE they have had on this show is amazing though. Burns has outdone himself with this one.

Karl Marlantes saying that the Marines don't turn kids into killing machines.... "its just a finishing school" is a great observation. Also if you have never read his book Matterhorn, then immediately stop what you are doing and order it on Amazon. You cannot be interested in Vietnam and not read that book.

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Without a legitimate south Vietnamese govt we had no hope of winning or keeping the south intact.

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Squadron7 said:

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Without a legitimate south Vietnamese govt we had no hope of winning or keeping the south intact.

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Had we, in Vietnam, been able to at least achieve what was achieved in Korea would that have been been considered a victory?

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bufrilla said:

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The above article is right on.
Multiple tours '68-73
Infantry PltCmdr with 3/3 Marines
FO/Naval Gunfire team w/3rdMarines
100 plus combat missions in F4 Phantom
Operations Officer, Task Force Delta, Nam Phong

Semper Fi

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kdm_01 said:

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Glad I DVR'd them. Great series, just finished #3.
The narrator pronounced Refugio correctly!

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aTmAg said:

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I just finished episode #3. I agree with the article above. Popular sentiment was against the war because LBJ was a blatant liar and ran the war with astounding ineptitude. People don't want to send their sons to die for that. If instead, we had been up front about what we were doing and had been kicking their asses from the get go, then the only people left to protest would been hippie losers who nobody listens to.

What evidence do you have for this? There was not a lot of support for constant wars against small nations that we were not directly involved with. I think people misunderstand the delicate political position that existed after WWII and after Korea.

Even before I read that article, my theory on how I would have handled Vietnam was similar to how Rome defeated Carthage. Take the fight to Carthage and make Hannibal withdraw his army to protect their homeland. The author used Sherman and Georgia but the principle is the same. Rather than fight among the South Vietnamese civilian population (and pissing them off by burning their homes down and crap like that), we should have taken the fight to the North and let the Southern Vietnamese handle the South (with the help of our artillery and air cover). The Southern troops knew their terrain, their people, etc. better than we ever could. If we weren't even there, there would be no reason for civilians in the South to rise against us.

The Viet Cong weren't going away just because the US wasn't there. They didn't view the South Vietnamese government as legitimate. And the South Vietnamese military had serious issues for many years.

So instead we should have done a Sherman-esq march from the sea to Hanoi and beyond using the full force of our tanks and infantry supported by air cover, artillery, etc. On their territory we can make it a more of a conventional war which we clearly are damn good at. I'm not saying kill civilians indiscriminately, but take territory, kill combatants, and treat the civilian population the same as we did in WW2. Force the Northern Vietnamese regulars fighting in the South be withdrawn to fight in the North (or never deployed to the South in the first place). If the Chinese want to send troops, then good. It's about time that they personally pay the price themselves rather than send 100s of thousands of Vietnamese to die in their stead. Let them learn that there is a price they will pay for trying to inflict their neighbors with communism. Make it cost them enough that they will think twice about doing it again. I think within short order (a few years) the North would have asked for terms for a divided Vietnam. At that point we could decide to accept the terms or continue.

You want to get China involved? Okay. That happened before in Korea. It didn't go well. You want to invade North Vietnam? Now you have alienated your allies, played into the hands of the communists, and isolated your military into a campaign that they cannot win. Invading North Vietnam doesn't transform everything into a conventional war. They beat the French by fighting a guerrilla war and they were willing and able to do it again when they needed to. Sending troops into North Vietnam creates huge new problems without solving your existing problems. And the Sherman comparison doesn't work. Sherman's march didn't do much damage to the Confederate infrastructure. It was 60 miles wide at most by several hundred miles long. The damage was more mental than physical. The most destructive aspect of his campaign was taking and neutralizing Atlanta, which was done completely conventionally.


The Vietnam war, while run extremely poorly, was a worthy cause. Just because we lost does not change that fact. If we would have known that the Soviet system would collapse in 1989 then we wouldn't have done anything in Vietnam at all, but we didn't know that. All we knew was that communism had already spread to 30 or so countries already. The dominoes were indeed falling. And if the commies had their way, they would have converted the entire world until they could force the "People's republic of Canada" (and Mexico) to invade us too. The sooner we could stop them the less painful it would be. In fact, after 1975 how many nations went commie? Grenada? So perhaps the war, despite the costs, did slow down the advancement of Communism after all. Those men did not die in vain. No American should have ever turned their back on them.

The "Domino Theory" was never valid. It was based on the idea of a monolithic version of communism that grew from Moscow and infected the rest of the world. The Soviets certainly supported and supplied proclaimed communist movements, but none of the third-world nations that adopted communism did so simply because of growing power in Moscow. Nor did they adopt Marxist-Leninism (perhaps in name, but not in application). In fact, many did so because communist theory was anti-colonial. The spread of power of the United States made communism an attractive theory. The application of the theory varied dramatically, to the point that Cambodia and Vietnam went to war against each other in 1978. The Vietnam War did not slow down communism. Multiple nations in Africa became communist around the time the war ended and the instability in Cambodia and Laos caused by the Vietnam War allowed communist groups to seize power there. Communism stopped spreading because it wasn't a monolithic group. It was fractured and nationalistic. The west was actually more unified.

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The tilt toward the antiwar movement's views can also be seen in the documentary's overemphasis on the activities of the protesters. The coverage is so disproportionate they are given time in almost every episode as a kind of counterpoint to the war footage and the veterans' accounts that the viewer is left with an inflated sense of the protesters' importance. In fact they had a minimal effect on public opinion, and what effect they did have mostly worked against their cause in the eyes of the American people (though they did unnerve Presidents Johnson and Nixon). The antiwar movement's one concrete accomplishment came only after American forces were already withdrawn from Vietnam, when the movement lobbied Congress to cut off aid to South Vietnam, resulting in a massive cutback. But this aspect of the antiwar movement's activities is not even covered in the documentary.

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bufrilla said:

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TV gave the anti-war movement its front row seat. Check today and who is getting all the POSITIVE PRESS, sure not the President. Social media is the biggest pack of lie's being generate for $$ for fake stories. All created for a the click and make a buck.

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Hey Nav said:

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I was a bit disappointed that the senior USAF person they interviewed was Merrill McPeak. Ugh.

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Hey Nav said:

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I was a bit disappointed that the senior USAF person they interviewed was Merrill McPeak. Ugh.

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Did he have a v-neck t-shirt on to please his wife?

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