"Roger Gt" wrote:

(snip) The Anti war movement attacked the
Veterans when they returned and ridiculed
them. (snip)


That's a myth, Roger. Soldiers heading for Vietnam flew out on military
aircraft departing from military bases and returned from Vietnam on military
aircraft landing at military bases. The soldiers returning from Vietnam were
very rarely close enough to civilian demonstrators to even be attacked or
ridiculed. I joined the military in 1970 and traveled, in uniform,
throughout the country to various training facilities that year. I was never
attacked or ridiculed. Instead, the vast majority, in all age groups, were
friendly to me and respectful of the job our military was doing. Americans
had doubts about that war, but it was not directed towards the soldiers.


(snip) Politicians should never be allowed
near a battle field unless in Chains!


And that sentence shows your lack of understanding of the wider
implications of that war. We had just ended a major conflict with the
Chinese in Korea just a few years earlier - a conflict we didn't win. That
same China now had nuclear weapons, an even larger military, and was not
exactly thrilled that we attacking another of it's neighbors. A major
escalation of the Vietnam war, which would have been necessary to win it,
would have certainly caused China to openly join the conflict, with
potentially devastating results for this country. Our government did the
best it could do, within the constraints of the realities of the times.

As for the soldiers, many of the things they were complaining about (the
operation tempo, shortages of food and supplies, and so on) were the result
of faults within the military, not the civilian government. And, since the
civilian government rarely selected the daily targets for patrols or
missions (the civilian government set the wider strategic goals, leaving the
daily activities to the military leaders there), many of the screw-ups in
those daily activities were the result of military leaders also. In the end,
the military just used the civilian government as a convenient scapegoat to
hide their own screw-ups and failures whenever possible.


Dwight Stewart (W5NET)

http://www.qsl.net/w5net/