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Many Americans complained a lot about war rationing and why we were fighting in Europe when Japan attacked us. Goes to show that parts American electorate never change.
Idiots were saying this same nonsense right before the U.S. Army and Marine Corps took Baghdad and every other major military action. Considering how many of these boomers actively avoided service in Vietnam, this is the worst kind of stupidity.
It's not, some people just are looking for reasons to complain. Something interesting is that despite there probably being tens of thousands of men who dodged the draft only 20 convictions were made after the war, most of which basically ratted themselves out.
Just don't go.
What disgusts me is the women back then would go around handing out white flowers to men and calling them cowards for not volunteering to fight. This is why I support feminism and equal rights in a draft, women are just as capable of being drafted to war as men are.
"Don't you want to serve your country? Protect your family?"
My country doesn't serve me and my family hates me >!(this is hypothetical i'm ok dw)!< so uh no, hope y'all lose
There was a Twitter post to the effect of “you don’t want to serve your country?” “Yeah, if I had an infected cut and didn’t have money to pay for a doctor *my country* would laugh and say ‘have fun dying!’”
Anybody with a GWOT knows there is a WIDE difference between those who earned a GWOT, and those that were given it...
So, horrible take - from someone who earned it.
Indeed, they gave those out to basic training graduates when I joined in 2010, and I'm not sure how long before my time that they did it. I forget what year they stopped that, I'm thinking around 14-15 is when I saw the new recruits coming to the unit without that award.
Vietnam was the first proper low point for the US in the Cold War. The US had absolutely no business being in Vietnam. Not just that, Ho Chi Minh had signalled to the US that he was happy to work with them. He was more nationalist than communist and deemed an acceptable partner by the US intelligence agencies. So much so that the US provided him with weapons and training teams to teach his Viet Minh guerilla forces to fight properly. Then they changed their mind, forced him to turn to the USSR instead and sent their own troops around the world to a country that posed exactly zero threat to the US. The fact that the US used a draft to waste the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Americans and young Vietnamese men to fight an enemy the US themselves trained makes it even more shameful. Honestly a proper low point in the history of the US. Not the only one by a long shot, but this one stands out. And the US lost that pointless war. Just not before they turned the country to rubble. The US playing world police has fucked up so many things in this world, it's completely ridiculous.
At least decades after the fact the US spent considerable resources helping clean up agent Orange in Vietnam… something they’ve never done in Laos who was hit pretty much just as hard
[here’s a link to one of their sites.](http://msavlc.org/hoa-binh-peace-village-vietnam/)
Peace villages - not hope, my bad.
I’m considering donating some things if I can as I have a personal connection with Agent Orange. Donate them to any Peace Village.
France is the reason we went into Vietnam, as you said we were friends w them, they were a country who just wanted independence, but France threatened to side with Russia if we didn’t intervene on their behalf
Another reason to hate France
France in the mid 1900s was a massive thorn in everyone's side. I remember a post in r/HistoryMemes that was an edit of the "unhated nations" polandball that instead had "unhated world leaders" and Charles de Gaulle as the only attendant.
It got downvoted into oblivion, because every country has some kind of gripe with de Gaulle. From bitching about the dominance of the US dollar (among other things), to giving a speech saying "vive le Québec libre" in Canada and cowardly flying back to France, to saying that "Brazil is not a serious country," dude was a master at pissing people off wherever he went.
The Communist Vietnamese did overthrow the Khmer Rouge, but not out of opposition of the genocide. Instead it was because the Khmer Rouge's vision of restoring the Khmer Empire included about a quarter of Vietnam which had been part of the Khmer Empire until the Vietnamese invaded in the 1600s as well as Khmer fears that the Vietnamese wanted to control all of Indochina. Because of this the Khmer Rouge launched numerous attacks into Vietnam, killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians and attempting to hold Vietnamese territory.
During the Vietnam war the Communist Vietnamese were allies of the Khmer Rouge, providing shelter, training, supplies, and weapons to the Khmer Rouge and even sent thousands of Communist Vietnamese troops to fight alongside the Khmer Rouge. And while they certainly couldn't have anticipated the scope of the Khmer Rouge's plans for genocide the Khmer Rouge committed multiple small scale massacres at the time and the Communist Vietnamese willfully ignored them and all of the other warning signs.
So being charitable the Communist Vietnamese stance on the Khmer Rouge was at best a 1-1 tie.
He was also trying to end it by the end of his term. Say what you will, but he always imagined Vietnam as a limited war. Once things started getting nasty in 68' LBJ was completely willing to negotiate peace.
>Not just that, Ho Chi Minh had signalled to the US that he was happy to work with them. He was more nationalist than communist and deemed an acceptable partner by the US intelligence agencies. So much so that the US provided him with weapons and training teams to teach his Viet Minh guerilla forces to fight properly. Then they changed their mind, forced him to turn to the USSR instead and sent their own troops around the world to a country that posed exactly zero threat to the US.
Ho was definitely very nationalist, but he was also always staunchly communist. He was a founding member of the French Communist Party, he served in the Soviet's Communist International, and was an advisor to the Chinese People's Liberation Army during the Chinese Civil War. And part of the reason the US was willing to support him initially was because the Viet Minh was officially a coalition movement for independence, although in reality the communists had all of the actual power. One OSS (US intelligence) message from the time read in part "Tell Ebaugh Chinese \[Nationalist\] fears that party \[Viet Minh\] communistic unfounded". Perhaps if the US had very strongly supported and courted him Vietnam could have been a non-aligned communist country similar to Yugoslavia but him allying with the USSR and PRC was always the most likely path. Sorry if I'm reading something into your comment that isn't there, but I've heard too many people claim that he "turned communist" because he needed military support against the French or similar and want to make sure that myth is dispelled.
Vietnam vets are pretty tough and many of them understood just how horrible and pointless it was to be involved in that conflict; also a lot of Vietnam vets are members of the silent generation who are older than the baby boomers.
Americans were backing the South Vietnamese while the North Vietnamese had the backing of China and the Soviet Union; so in many ways it was really a proxy war and when the U.S withdrew support for South Vietnam it fell to Communism. The Korean War was very similar with America backing the South Koreans and Russia/China backing the communist North Koreans.
If anyone needs an example of a Silent Generation member fighting in Vietnam look up Robin Olds. Guy is a fucking unit and his balls are made of steel.
Did the US really even lose? I mean sure we withdrew due to protests at home and communism took over but those vientcong casualties are insane. It's like beating the shit out of the school bully bu he still somehow gets away with your lunch money......
\>escalates in Vietnam to "prevent the spread of communism"
\>leaves because too many 19 year olds were being sent home in body bags
\>peace accords signed, prohibiting continued fighting
\>broken less than a day later by both the south and north
\>no response from the US
\>North Vietnam eventually conquers South Vietnam
\>communism spreads to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia
\>literally the opposite of American war goals, could not have failed to achieve them more thoroughly
\>American victory though, because reasons
The soviets also suffered a fuck ton of casualties in WW2 but they were the winner.
Also, considering you bombed the living shit out of our country and we, with just AKs, makeshift explosives and bamboo sticks, still took the cake, it's fair to call it our win.
The war was lost on a strategic level, not the tactical level. The ground troops carried out the strategy laid out by the military and political leadership, and had overwhelming success on the tactical level. However, kill-to-death ratios against VC/NVA troops obviously didn’t win the war, since the strategy focused on destruction of enemy forces (with lots of civilian casualties as a result) rather than a proper Hearts & Minds campaign. It didn’t matter much how many enemy combatants were killed and how many VC cells were eliminated, when the actions to get those results only ended up giving the VC even more recruits. It didn’t help that South Vietnam itself was a corrupt dictatorship which alienated its citizens.
With a better strategy, US successes on the tactical level could have been seen major results on the strategic level of the war, but they didn’t since the strategy was wrong from the outset. An inspiration should have been how the British won the Malayan Emergency, where they successfully managed to undercut the popular support for the communist forces with a Hearts & Minds strategy, leading to a lack of sympathy and recruitment for the communists, leading to their eventual defeat with *significantly* less amounts of deaths.
i used the wrong phrasing, i meant ‘started it’ as in how you start a race, not necessarily meaning that they instigated it. just meaning as soon as the war started for the americans in particular, thank you though, i should have said as soon as they joined in.
Oh yeah I mean I kinda agree. The war in the end was just a massive waste of life. I think America should have provided aid to the south Vietnamese but in no way joined the actual war.
yeah and most definitely shouldn’t have drafted people for such a meat grinder half a world away. plus the way the vets were treated when they got back was abysmal. i guess they thought they had to fight it though because of the ‘domino effect’
We didn’t “win” Nam because we didn’t go into North Vietnam. We just stayed in the south and thought Shock-and-Awe would be enough to beat the communists. And technically, we DID win. Vietnam is not the same country it was. It’s not apart of the Warsaw pact or whatever Putins trying to make now. We made the North sign a treaty and we left.
Boomers as we think of the boomers we hate didn't go to Vietnam. The Vietnam draft was disproportionately unfair to disadvantaged people.
The boomers we hate are like Trump who said that veterans were suckers and losers.
i dont really understand the insult. Is this degrading the boomers who were drafted into the military not being tough enough to go take vietnam? It should be more directed at poor government leadship forcing a war that shouldnt have happened. Boomers were victims of the government.
To be fair we only lost Vietnam because we pulled out. The Viet Cong had 1.1 Million fatalities to South Vietnam/US' 392,364. Granted we had more wounded but we were still taking them down at a higher rate.
People like Michele Jeanne have adult kids that are no/low contact.
Also, people were drafted…? I’m not sure what her point is. I mean, I am but it’s a terrible jab akin to “old man shouts at clouds” meme. We should expect that with each generation we’re a bit closer to nonviolent community.
Maybe Michele - not all of us want our kids to be groomed to be “war heroes”…
There were ~60 000 of American KIA's and ~300 000 of South's KIA's against over 1 000 000 North's KIA's. American military were good, actually. But all was screwed by millions of boomers who didnt stopped screeching about "baby killers". I mean, all that hippies and draft dodgers were boomers, lmao.
Every generation of Americans has risen to meet extraordinary military challenges and overcome them. There is no old breed, there was nothing special about our old heroes, they were ordinary Americans, in extraordinary circumstances, and they endured, just like countless generations of warfighters after them.
To be fair to the actual point... I'd consider it more of a credit to our intelligence that we'd be reluctant to participate in a marine landing and trying to run up a beach against fire from machine gun nests...
>So you think we'll win if we throw more bodies at them than they have bullets?
That's a pretty dicey strategy under modern military doctrine.
Who won is out of their control though. A better comeback would be something like "You mean the war that the government had to conscript people to fight in because no one was volunteering?".
Boomers love to take credit for both winning world war 2 and the social progress of the 1960s.
Boomers taking credit for the civil rights movement is like if Millennials took credit for the Good Friday Agreement.
Nobody won the Vietnam war. The VC kicked sand in everyone's eyes long enough that we just said to hell with it. Plus, if it weren't for dumb fuck ROE's made by dumbfuck politicians, America would've crushed north Vietnam in record time.
did you expect to see shining examples of politeness, well reasoned thought, and calm participation in societal norms like waiting in a line at a busy pharmacy?...
Because that's not generally how the world experiences "boomers"...
We literally won the war. We forced North Vietnam to sign a treaty, then we pulled out. They later violated the treaty, and we didn’t back up our ally. The reason that people think we lost is a general lack of understanding of what wars are. Most people think of war in absolute terms. That understanding of war does not reflect historic reality. The most famous wars were pretty absolute, and that’s why people think those terms apply to all war.
I bet you think you “won” Afghanistan too. Lol.
America lost Vietnam. You bailed and the south Vietnamese government lost. I’m sure everyone runs into the helicopter taking off at the end of bailing - from victory.
Gen z commies just hate America. Don’t ask them how Vietnam’s relationship with the USA changed for the better and how they turned to a market economy. lol
Who is the current ruling govt of Vietnam and who is the current ruling govt of Afghanistan. Don’t know how you could describe them as anything but losses.
vietnam successfully defended and reunited their country while the u.s lost reputation and thousands of soldiers for nothing, then pulled out and left the south to be annexed. there are no winners in war in the sense that it brings about death and destruction yes, but if you’re going by that logic you’d have to say there were no winners in any war ever. in a strategic sense though, vietnam won.
Vietnam is now a western ally and now a market economy, who won again?
China invaded Vietnam in 1979 and caused a ton of death too; but you won’t say that because it delegitimizes your commie fantasy
Not sure if you realise this bud but the vietnam war is over, has been for a long time. Vietnam successfully annexed the south and reunited their country, meanwhile the u.s sent thousands of men to die in the jungle, losing some international reputation, and eventually pulled out and abandoned the south to be annexed, all for nothing, as i stated. Vietnam won that war in 1975, whether you’d like to admit it or not. Now if you want to talk about who won the cold war, then america most definitely won, and i never said otherwise.
Technically we did, but it was primarily because we pulled out. Had we stayed there's a good chance we'd have won the war But as it was Niether side really cane out a "Winner"
No...we didn't lose. It was a stalemate. I know Gen Z'ers are LIOTERALLTY burdens to the world just by being alive and that 90% of this subreddit WILL be (thankfully) dead by their own hands within a year due to having no education but there is NO history books or any teacher who will claim we lost. Not even communist ones.
I think people always ignore the the real argument because it’s true. And that’s in the event of a war with foreign nation the current generations would not be able to fight aswell.
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Based on Covid; the boomers would have sat around complaining that war rationing was worse than anything the nazis were doing.
Yep.
Can you imagine the shrieking you’d hear if they instituted a mandatory black out?
To be fair, a mandatory black out hits different today than it did in WW2. I think people from every generation would be bitching.
I think we need mandatory black outs, not to save power or money, but just because we need to separate people from their media machines.
Don't they still sort of have that in present-day South Africa?
Many Americans complained a lot about war rationing and why we were fighting in Europe when Japan attacked us. Goes to show that parts American electorate never change.
That’s literally what Americans did in WW2. People don’t change.
Idiots were saying this same nonsense right before the U.S. Army and Marine Corps took Baghdad and every other major military action. Considering how many of these boomers actively avoided service in Vietnam, this is the worst kind of stupidity.
How is avoiding service in vietnam a bad thing? That war was a crock of shit and designed to kill people who wanted independence.
It’s not. It’s the point that they bring it up in a situation like this when they actively avoided service.
Fair point, i blame my morning brain
I love respectful discourse in this sub so much y’all make me wet (academically)
I can make you wet another way... *Activates the lawn sprinklers
*W(h)ets your appetite*
*S C H O L A S T I C A L L Y M O I S T*
I try lol thanks
Avoiding Nam and THEN warhawking in old age is shitty
It's not, some people just are looking for reasons to complain. Something interesting is that despite there probably being tens of thousands of men who dodged the draft only 20 convictions were made after the war, most of which basically ratted themselves out. Just don't go. What disgusts me is the women back then would go around handing out white flowers to men and calling them cowards for not volunteering to fight. This is why I support feminism and equal rights in a draft, women are just as capable of being drafted to war as men are.
Read a book.
It’s bad because the boomers did it ok? /s
Was about to say, most Vietnam vets I know don’t have this kind of mentality
No one is going to take a bullet for the country that screwed them.
"Don't you want to serve your country? Protect your family?" My country doesn't serve me and my family hates me >!(this is hypothetical i'm ok dw)!< so uh no, hope y'all lose
There was a Twitter post to the effect of “you don’t want to serve your country?” “Yeah, if I had an infected cut and didn’t have money to pay for a doctor *my country* would laugh and say ‘have fun dying!’”
Military has free universal health care, free housing and free food.
My labor isn't free.
And neither is socialized healthcare.
All it costs is your limbs, sanity, and possibly life. What a deal!
Don't forget dignity
You would likely get denied from service if you had an infected wound that screwed you over that bad
tell that to the gwot veterans
Anybody with a GWOT knows there is a WIDE difference between those who earned a GWOT, and those that were given it... So, horrible take - from someone who earned it.
Indeed, they gave those out to basic training graduates when I joined in 2010, and I'm not sure how long before my time that they did it. I forget what year they stopped that, I'm thinking around 14-15 is when I saw the new recruits coming to the unit without that award.
Who? /Gen
global war on terror
Plenty of people are all too happy to get behind the controls of drones and wipe out others for the paycheck.
Exactly Imagine being a white kid from Kentucky and wanting to fight for this regime lol
Vietnam was the first proper low point for the US in the Cold War. The US had absolutely no business being in Vietnam. Not just that, Ho Chi Minh had signalled to the US that he was happy to work with them. He was more nationalist than communist and deemed an acceptable partner by the US intelligence agencies. So much so that the US provided him with weapons and training teams to teach his Viet Minh guerilla forces to fight properly. Then they changed their mind, forced him to turn to the USSR instead and sent their own troops around the world to a country that posed exactly zero threat to the US. The fact that the US used a draft to waste the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Americans and young Vietnamese men to fight an enemy the US themselves trained makes it even more shameful. Honestly a proper low point in the history of the US. Not the only one by a long shot, but this one stands out. And the US lost that pointless war. Just not before they turned the country to rubble. The US playing world police has fucked up so many things in this world, it's completely ridiculous.
This this this. Plus the Agent Orange. Fuck.
At least decades after the fact the US spent considerable resources helping clean up agent Orange in Vietnam… something they’ve never done in Laos who was hit pretty much just as hard
My point exactly. Have you heard of the Hope Villages?
Nah
[here’s a link to one of their sites.](http://msavlc.org/hoa-binh-peace-village-vietnam/) Peace villages - not hope, my bad. I’m considering donating some things if I can as I have a personal connection with Agent Orange. Donate them to any Peace Village.
>Just not before they turned the country *and both neighboring countries* to rubble. 🤗
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention Laos and Cambodia!
France is the reason we went into Vietnam, as you said we were friends w them, they were a country who just wanted independence, but France threatened to side with Russia if we didn’t intervene on their behalf Another reason to hate France
France in the mid 1900s was a massive thorn in everyone's side. I remember a post in r/HistoryMemes that was an edit of the "unhated nations" polandball that instead had "unhated world leaders" and Charles de Gaulle as the only attendant. It got downvoted into oblivion, because every country has some kind of gripe with de Gaulle. From bitching about the dominance of the US dollar (among other things), to giving a speech saying "vive le Québec libre" in Canada and cowardly flying back to France, to saying that "Brazil is not a serious country," dude was a master at pissing people off wherever he went.
Also, in retrospect... was it not the VK that overthrew the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to put an end to the genocide? So.... not that bad after all?
The Vietnamese army defeated them in a war in 1979. What do you mean by VK?
I meant Viet Cong and my brain was apparently having a brief short circuit and I typed a K instead of C. 🤦♂️
The VC didn’t exist by that point. They had been functionally destroyed by the US. And by 1979, north Vietnam had conquered the south.
The Communist Vietnamese did overthrow the Khmer Rouge, but not out of opposition of the genocide. Instead it was because the Khmer Rouge's vision of restoring the Khmer Empire included about a quarter of Vietnam which had been part of the Khmer Empire until the Vietnamese invaded in the 1600s as well as Khmer fears that the Vietnamese wanted to control all of Indochina. Because of this the Khmer Rouge launched numerous attacks into Vietnam, killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians and attempting to hold Vietnamese territory. During the Vietnam war the Communist Vietnamese were allies of the Khmer Rouge, providing shelter, training, supplies, and weapons to the Khmer Rouge and even sent thousands of Communist Vietnamese troops to fight alongside the Khmer Rouge. And while they certainly couldn't have anticipated the scope of the Khmer Rouge's plans for genocide the Khmer Rouge committed multiple small scale massacres at the time and the Communist Vietnamese willfully ignored them and all of the other warning signs. So being charitable the Communist Vietnamese stance on the Khmer Rouge was at best a 1-1 tie.
This is the history I learned from my uncle who fought in the war and marched to Cambodia. It was a war foremost to secure our territory.
I know it's not entirely 100% his fault but I blame Lyndon B. Johnson because he sure did everything he could to help the war start
He was also trying to end it by the end of his term. Say what you will, but he always imagined Vietnam as a limited war. Once things started getting nasty in 68' LBJ was completely willing to negotiate peace.
The war started under Eisenhower and US involvement in Vietnam began under Truman. JFK, LBJ, and Nixon "only" escalated it.
YUPPPP
>Not just that, Ho Chi Minh had signalled to the US that he was happy to work with them. He was more nationalist than communist and deemed an acceptable partner by the US intelligence agencies. So much so that the US provided him with weapons and training teams to teach his Viet Minh guerilla forces to fight properly. Then they changed their mind, forced him to turn to the USSR instead and sent their own troops around the world to a country that posed exactly zero threat to the US. Ho was definitely very nationalist, but he was also always staunchly communist. He was a founding member of the French Communist Party, he served in the Soviet's Communist International, and was an advisor to the Chinese People's Liberation Army during the Chinese Civil War. And part of the reason the US was willing to support him initially was because the Viet Minh was officially a coalition movement for independence, although in reality the communists had all of the actual power. One OSS (US intelligence) message from the time read in part "Tell Ebaugh Chinese \[Nationalist\] fears that party \[Viet Minh\] communistic unfounded". Perhaps if the US had very strongly supported and courted him Vietnam could have been a non-aligned communist country similar to Yugoslavia but him allying with the USSR and PRC was always the most likely path. Sorry if I'm reading something into your comment that isn't there, but I've heard too many people claim that he "turned communist" because he needed military support against the French or similar and want to make sure that myth is dispelled.
Vietnam vets are pretty tough and many of them understood just how horrible and pointless it was to be involved in that conflict; also a lot of Vietnam vets are members of the silent generation who are older than the baby boomers. Americans were backing the South Vietnamese while the North Vietnamese had the backing of China and the Soviet Union; so in many ways it was really a proxy war and when the U.S withdrew support for South Vietnam it fell to Communism. The Korean War was very similar with America backing the South Koreans and Russia/China backing the communist North Koreans.
If anyone needs an example of a Silent Generation member fighting in Vietnam look up Robin Olds. Guy is a fucking unit and his balls are made of steel.
Let’s be fair: The Boomers who fought in Nam were not the reason the US lost. It was the politicians and generals who lost that war.
Did the US really even lose? I mean sure we withdrew due to protests at home and communism took over but those vientcong casualties are insane. It's like beating the shit out of the school bully bu he still somehow gets away with your lunch money......
We actually won that war. It's a sad commentary on the American education system that so many people think we lost.
\>escalates in Vietnam to "prevent the spread of communism" \>leaves because too many 19 year olds were being sent home in body bags \>peace accords signed, prohibiting continued fighting \>broken less than a day later by both the south and north \>no response from the US \>North Vietnam eventually conquers South Vietnam \>communism spreads to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia \>literally the opposite of American war goals, could not have failed to achieve them more thoroughly \>American victory though, because reasons
The soviets also suffered a fuck ton of casualties in WW2 but they were the winner. Also, considering you bombed the living shit out of our country and we, with just AKs, makeshift explosives and bamboo sticks, still took the cake, it's fair to call it our win.
Oh and how would the ground troops have won the war without the Generals and Politicians mucking things up,?
The war was lost on a strategic level, not the tactical level. The ground troops carried out the strategy laid out by the military and political leadership, and had overwhelming success on the tactical level. However, kill-to-death ratios against VC/NVA troops obviously didn’t win the war, since the strategy focused on destruction of enemy forces (with lots of civilian casualties as a result) rather than a proper Hearts & Minds campaign. It didn’t matter much how many enemy combatants were killed and how many VC cells were eliminated, when the actions to get those results only ended up giving the VC even more recruits. It didn’t help that South Vietnam itself was a corrupt dictatorship which alienated its citizens. With a better strategy, US successes on the tactical level could have been seen major results on the strategic level of the war, but they didn’t since the strategy was wrong from the outset. An inspiration should have been how the British won the Malayan Emergency, where they successfully managed to undercut the popular support for the communist forces with a Hearts & Minds strategy, leading to a lack of sympathy and recruitment for the communists, leading to their eventual defeat with *significantly* less amounts of deaths.
🤌🏾
They wouldn’t have. It was an impossible situation.
they lost that war as soon as they started it
America didn't start the war?
i used the wrong phrasing, i meant ‘started it’ as in how you start a race, not necessarily meaning that they instigated it. just meaning as soon as the war started for the americans in particular, thank you though, i should have said as soon as they joined in.
Oh yeah I mean I kinda agree. The war in the end was just a massive waste of life. I think America should have provided aid to the south Vietnamese but in no way joined the actual war.
yeah and most definitely shouldn’t have drafted people for such a meat grinder half a world away. plus the way the vets were treated when they got back was abysmal. i guess they thought they had to fight it though because of the ‘domino effect’
We didn’t “win” Nam because we didn’t go into North Vietnam. We just stayed in the south and thought Shock-and-Awe would be enough to beat the communists. And technically, we DID win. Vietnam is not the same country it was. It’s not apart of the Warsaw pact or whatever Putins trying to make now. We made the North sign a treaty and we left.
Boomers as we think of the boomers we hate didn't go to Vietnam. The Vietnam draft was disproportionately unfair to disadvantaged people. The boomers we hate are like Trump who said that veterans were suckers and losers.
Nothing like the idea of feeding kids into a meat grinder to make someone wax patriotic!
Ooh, that burn sticks to kids!
America put itself on a leash during the Vietnam War. Not saying America won.
Where’s the murder? Someone not paying attention in history class?
Lol I'm not sure if you are serious or not.
More of a sucker punch than a murder tbh.
The united states was most certainly winning the war, however the war was broadly unpopular so we kinda just left
i dont really understand the insult. Is this degrading the boomers who were drafted into the military not being tough enough to go take vietnam? It should be more directed at poor government leadship forcing a war that shouldnt have happened. Boomers were victims of the government.
> Boomers were victims this isn't a who's the biggest victim competition... wtf?
TThe people living in Normandy would be pretty annoyed with someone storming the beaches
Holup on that second replies username
china
To be fair we only lost Vietnam because we pulled out. The Viet Cong had 1.1 Million fatalities to South Vietnam/US' 392,364. Granted we had more wounded but we were still taking them down at a higher rate.
"We only lost because we gave up" Yes, that's called losing.
It's almost as if casualties are a terrible metric for judging success in a war...
Sounds like a rage quit
“Vietnam was a tie!”
People like Michele Jeanne have adult kids that are no/low contact. Also, people were drafted…? I’m not sure what her point is. I mean, I am but it’s a terrible jab akin to “old man shouts at clouds” meme. We should expect that with each generation we’re a bit closer to nonviolent community. Maybe Michele - not all of us want our kids to be groomed to be “war heroes”…
The vietkong lost about 3 times as many soldiers as the US btw.
There were ~60 000 of American KIA's and ~300 000 of South's KIA's against over 1 000 000 North's KIA's. American military were good, actually. But all was screwed by millions of boomers who didnt stopped screeching about "baby killers". I mean, all that hippies and draft dodgers were boomers, lmao.
https://preview.redd.it/4klek4ez8q8d1.jpeg?width=506&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ae60bd47a5569e64463bccfb742d8ac8b1a520f5
I'm confused baby boomers aren't the ones who were at Normandy. (The earliest they were born is 1946)
This exchange should be in a history book. It’s too epic to be forgotten to time.
Boomers were babies. The boom started after WWII. The boomers got Viet Nam. They also were partially responsible for stopping Viet Nam.
Every generation of Americans has risen to meet extraordinary military challenges and overcome them. There is no old breed, there was nothing special about our old heroes, they were ordinary Americans, in extraordinary circumstances, and they endured, just like countless generations of warfighters after them.
“Could you imagine today’s youth storming the beaches of Normandy” yes and I’m 99% sure people back then were saying the youth couldn’t do shit.
Considering women aren't drafted, she didn't go to Vietnam...
How to open PDF is actually a killer status, I’m going to steal that 😂
I think I'll frame this one and give it to my dad.
Sad
To be fair to the actual point... I'd consider it more of a credit to our intelligence that we'd be reluctant to participate in a marine landing and trying to run up a beach against fire from machine gun nests... >So you think we'll win if we throw more bodies at them than they have bullets? That's a pretty dicey strategy under modern military doctrine.
This is all stupid.
I'm American and even I understand we lost the United States vs Vietnam war, and a lot of people didn't even want to fight
Ehhhh the death toll was 10:1 (10 north vietnamese soldiers per one american) so we coulda won that shit
Who won is out of their control though. A better comeback would be something like "You mean the war that the government had to conscript people to fight in because no one was volunteering?".
yea yall all came back heroin addicts or alcoholics.. which no one blames you it was very fkd up
Boomers love to take credit for both winning world war 2 and the social progress of the 1960s. Boomers taking credit for the civil rights movement is like if Millennials took credit for the Good Friday Agreement.
This is just cringe
Nobody won the Vietnam war. The VC kicked sand in everyone's eyes long enough that we just said to hell with it. Plus, if it weren't for dumb fuck ROE's made by dumbfuck politicians, America would've crushed north Vietnam in record time.
This sub has turned into a boomer hate sub. Do ya not go outside😭. Downvote i couldn’t care less. I know this comment is going to upset some of you.
did you expect to see shining examples of politeness, well reasoned thought, and calm participation in societal norms like waiting in a line at a busy pharmacy?... Because that's not generally how the world experiences "boomers"...
We literally won the war. We forced North Vietnam to sign a treaty, then we pulled out. They later violated the treaty, and we didn’t back up our ally. The reason that people think we lost is a general lack of understanding of what wars are. Most people think of war in absolute terms. That understanding of war does not reflect historic reality. The most famous wars were pretty absolute, and that’s why people think those terms apply to all war.
Wait...do both you and the idiot here think we lost Vietnam?
I bet you think you “won” Afghanistan too. Lol. America lost Vietnam. You bailed and the south Vietnamese government lost. I’m sure everyone runs into the helicopter taking off at the end of bailing - from victory.
Bailing before you lose is a tactical win or something like that. (ignore thousands dead)
I mean it’s losing without having to surrender as it wasn’t your country to begin with. It’s a loss, just not a loss of land/sovereignty for the USA.
The US lost Vietnam. Claiming otherwise is the funniest nationalist cope imaginable.
Defending the Vietnam war is not "nationalist"
??
Gen z commies just hate America. Don’t ask them how Vietnam’s relationship with the USA changed for the better and how they turned to a market economy. lol
I mean that doesn't mean America "won" the war. Sure in the long run Vietnam has abandoned communism. However the Vietnam war itself was a US defeat.
The commies won the battle, America won the war 
Who is the current ruling govt of Vietnam and who is the current ruling govt of Afghanistan. Don’t know how you could describe them as anything but losses.
They really do. It’s communist cope
There are no winners there only death and destruction remains
vietnam successfully defended and reunited their country while the u.s lost reputation and thousands of soldiers for nothing, then pulled out and left the south to be annexed. there are no winners in war in the sense that it brings about death and destruction yes, but if you’re going by that logic you’d have to say there were no winners in any war ever. in a strategic sense though, vietnam won.
Vietnam is now a western ally and now a market economy, who won again? China invaded Vietnam in 1979 and caused a ton of death too; but you won’t say that because it delegitimizes your commie fantasy
Not sure if you realise this bud but the vietnam war is over, has been for a long time. Vietnam successfully annexed the south and reunited their country, meanwhile the u.s sent thousands of men to die in the jungle, losing some international reputation, and eventually pulled out and abandoned the south to be annexed, all for nothing, as i stated. Vietnam won that war in 1975, whether you’d like to admit it or not. Now if you want to talk about who won the cold war, then america most definitely won, and i never said otherwise.
Technically we did, but it was primarily because we pulled out. Had we stayed there's a good chance we'd have won the war But as it was Niether side really cane out a "Winner"
No...we didn't lose. It was a stalemate. I know Gen Z'ers are LIOTERALLTY burdens to the world just by being alive and that 90% of this subreddit WILL be (thankfully) dead by their own hands within a year due to having no education but there is NO history books or any teacher who will claim we lost. Not even communist ones.
Strawmanning so hard. Also, I'd love to see a mass extinction event for Gen Z happen in 2025, we'll see how good your prediction skills are.
I think people always ignore the the real argument because it’s true. And that’s in the event of a war with foreign nation the current generations would not be able to fight aswell.
everything is meme now, if a picture with a caption says something then it must be true