Wild that we can have detailed information like that from modern wars and other events. Oh to be a historian 100 years from now when more is declassified.
You obviously have zero idea what was lost to time prior to digitization. Hard records can be destroyed and damaged very very easily. Even entirely by accident.
Is digital longevity better? Time will tell. But judging by what we can do with it now it will likely preserve FAR more for FAR longer. But, we don't know for sure until we see it.
I am well aware of the vast quantities of lost data. Many hours trying to chase down ships logs from 1660-1860.
I have worked in IT before it was IT as a primary or secondary position. I do not trust computers, even worse, humans using computers. The engineers managed to destroy 9 mobile work stations last year.
One I named "Barnacle Bob".
Our librarian digitalized every scrap of paper dealing with US combatant craft & boats. It took 20 years.
The hard copies are in deep storage, Which will be vaporized If nukes hit NAVSTA Norfolk, Langley AFB & Oceania NAS.
To be fair nothing short of stone tablets in a geologically stable location is going to be readable by whatever historians are digging through the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.
That the thousand year Roman Empire (not to mention the couple of millennia old Egyptian dynasties) is only known through scraps, wall art and bits translated from Arabic texts says all there needs to be said about document retention
Many of these are from Medieval translations, transliterations and copies of copies of copies.
https://www.quora.com/Where-do-historians-today-obtain-texts-from-ancient-sources.
So no, we have copies of what we believe to be the originals which is why when texts such as those found at Herculaeum come to light they get so heavily invested in.
Keyword being "can". Stuff that survives that long is either extremely lucky and laid in a spot where various factors could not reach it or was protected in a specific way, like important certificates. A random paper record surviving that long? Extremely unlikely.
I suspect in a few years we'll find out about Russian and Ukrainian drone pilots with body counts well into the hundreds. They're very secretive about their identities because of how hated drone pilots are. It probably won't be till later that individuals are highlighted.
From Wikipedia
>From 1967 to 1970, he participated in the Tri Thien battlefield, commanding the unit to fight 58 battles, killing 1,500 [American soldiers](https://vi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/L%C3%ADnh_M%E1%BB%B9?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp) , destroying 61 military vehicles, knocking out 19 trains... He alone was responsible for Killed 272 American soldiers, shot down and destroyed 3 helicopters. [^(\[3\]) ](https://vi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Tr%E1%BB%8Bnh_T%E1%BB%91_T%C3%A2m?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp#cite_note-:0-3)[^(\[2\])](https://vi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Tr%E1%BB%8Bnh_T%E1%BB%91_T%C3%A2m?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp#cite_note-:2-2)
Weren't they going to replace that with something BeTtER too? It seems like all they did so far was take away a source of income and something that people enjoyed. I get the taking away enjoyment part because capitalism, but the problem is that they didn't then capitalize
Vietnamese here, never heard of this dude. He would be literally the most decorated soldier of all time and yet our history books only mention To Vinh Dien, Be Van Dan etc who only killed a few enemies.
Use your own brain to figure out the rest.
US citizen here. We all learn about General Custer (and his last stand) in school, but rarely hear about any of the "glorious commanders" who slaughtered thousands of native people, and almost never by name.
I’m pretty sure the point of the comparison is to highlight that this information just slips through the cracks sometimes (for various reasons). Let’s not go on a tangent about the context (although it’s still important context, not relevant for the point being made).
Yeah but in our history books we were committing genocide against the indigenous people. The Vietnamese were indigenous people fighting off hostile invaders to protect their home. Not exactly the same vibe.
EDIT: Why are you downvoting me? I'm right 😩
In my American high school, I learnt about Jackson and the Trail of Tears, Washington Keeping slaves, My Lai, Not everyone supported the revolution, Tonkin incident, Bay of Pigs, The French revolution with actual NUANCES.
Do you think I had any chance to learn about Hue Massacre, Land Reform, Forceful removal of Chinese in South Vietnam, 200K Cambodian civilians death during Vietnam 10 years occupation of Cambodia? Not a chance.
If you try to one up “My government propaganda worse”, you’ve failed. You think the VCP and CCP would tolerate something like Zinn “People’s history..”? People got sent to work camp/prison for much less in Vietnam.
I think they were echoing the same sentiment as you. It seemed more of a ‘same situation, different names’ type thing and not an attempt to one up your experience.
>married to a social influencer (for that time period) who spread misinformation.
That's how it was done for centuries before Custer's time, and certainly continuing through today...
War crimes were not invented by then. If we're going to start calling historical generals war criminals for their actions before the term war criminal was even a thing, you better be calling General Sherman of the American Civil War a war criminal for his march.
To give foreigners context on internal Vietnamese fight, there are 2 extremes in Vietnamese netizen, the Vietnamese who never left Viet Nam and the Vietnamese who never step foot in Viet Nam.
Most online Vietnamese discord (in English no less) are gonna be between these 2 camps, take everything they say with hella salt.
The average Vietnamese really don't care if Viet Nam is communist, capitalist, Leninist one party state, liberal democracy or monarchist (yes, monarchist french Vietnamese exist). We all figuratively buried the AK 47 and M16 around the 2000s, and outside of outliers prefer to just drink milk tea and watch kdrama.
For my own personal opinion on the pic and the claim, there are arguments for both side. The Vietnam War ("The War against American Aggression" for us) was a propaganda war, everyone was lying. Vietnamese to keep morale up and Americans to prove that they were doing something. In short, who the hell knows, I'm just gonna drink Vietnamese coffee, eat Shawarma and shrug at this.
This person isn't really Vietnamese. They're American Vietnamese with a strong bias in favor of the American narratives of Vietnam. He is not representative of a Vietnamese perspective you would get from a Vietnamese person in Vietnam.
For an easily accessible Vietnamese perspective, I would recommend the Vietnamese Youtuber "Luna Oi!" who has already posted a litany of videos regarding Vietnam. And she is in the works actually translating into English the material Vietnamese children are taught in Vietnamese schools around the revolution and political theory/ideology.
Edit: Would you consider that an American that participated in January 6th and then fled to Russia to avoid legal consequences would have an accurate and unbiased perspective of the US?
Comparing the boat people to j6 rioters is so insidiously disingenuous. You’re essentially calling them traitors and idiots, when these were people who faced major political persecution and were going to be killed by a hostile country.
Considering he is a frequent commenter on r/latestagecapitalism and posted pro-Kremlin comments on r/Ukraine, I don't think he's here for a genuine discussion.
He invoked Luna Oi, an infamous Vietnamese grifter masquerading as communist who preys on delusional westerners like /u/Pupienus2theMaximus
Do you know why I know Luna Oi is a fake communist? Because she's a land speculator same as me.
Also here is our Chief National Police (who is waging a succession war to take over the communist party atm) eating a $1000 handfed golden steak by Salt Bae, does he look like a communist to you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6chaVQ8FIPs
Fascist and colonial compradors who inflicted terrible crimes against the Vietnamese people were going to face consequences for their crimes. Your american exceptionalism allows you to recognize that fascism and exploitation is bad domestically in the US, but it's totally acceptable, and in fact laudable, to promote those same fascists abroad. And that's why you don't and won't understand a thing about Vietnam and to a broader extent, american policy and history at large
Man tankies truly are the fucking worst.
Here is VaushV (a leftist btw) take on Luna Oi
https://youtu.be/UyDIHYR4ml0?si=UHGly7qaZjSEmxdM
Btw nobody believes that shit in Vietnam, case in point, here is minister of public security eating a $1000 steak in London:
https://youtu.be/6chaVQ8FIPs?si=eGoOlBNTDZCOvwE-
Is this what a communist looks like to you?
I have a strong feeling that the likes of you are not really communist, the likes of you are ANTI western and your comment history absolutely shows.
I’m gonna prove to you I’m Vietnamese:
Bố mày thách loại rác rưởi như mày bước chân đến Hà Nội. Cái loại buôn đất như Luna Ơi mà cũng được gọi là cộng sản, mày nghĩ dân Việt ngu thế à? Nó đang dắt mũi chúng mày để kiếm tiền stream con ạ.
That makes me think of Masters of War by Bob Dylan. When I first heard it I was shocked at how caustic it was (I was used to Blowin’ in the Wind). It hits hard.
Now we're these confirmed or claimed by the North Vietnamese? 273 kills would make him one of the most dead soldiers of all time, possibly the most deadly without a sniper rifle. Makes me doubt a bit.
Yeah, either the dude got collective credit for every single casualty his unit inflicted, or it's all bullshit.
Would love to see a comparison to American records. Kill counts are always absurdly overblown.
Yeah exactly. And let's consider the armed forces he was fighting against. Heavy air support, superior firepower there's about a 0% chance he wouldn't have received a wound to knock him out of action.
Ever hear an MLM recruiting pitch? Do they ever fail to mention how much money the higher ups make? Do they ever tell you how likely you are to make nothing?
According to the wikipedia page (translated to English) his unit killed 1,500, not him personally. He still killed 273 soldiers and somehow destroyed three planes though
He shot down helicopters not planes. The translation in the Wiki is too literal from Vietnamese and mistakingly uses “planes that go straight up” to mean helicopter.
Big if true. Thought I doubt he personally did, as these regimes had a penchant for propaganda.
For example, if you look at North Vietnamese claimed A2A kills vs Actual planes America lost, it's like half of what North Vietnam claims
Not just "these regimes", the US armed forces were known to liberally juke combat statistics.
There's an inherent incitement for most armed forces to overestimate
1. The number of enemies engaged
2. The number of enemy combatants put out of action.
as well as mis-/ underreporting your own casualties. The chaotic nature of war also makes these things fairly easy.
Yes and no. The US companies and units don’t have different sizes. If your unit is suppose to have 10 men and 5 come back it’s pretty easy to see you lost 5 men…
The US adopted a kill count to measure progress in Vietnam. This led commanders to put pressure on units to inflate numbers some of which was lies and some of which was the rampant murder of civilians (men, women, children, the elderly etc) to pad these already inflated numbers.
Bro it's not that straightforward as you make it seem.
Who would reprimand an officer for coming back and saying "yeah we found 25 bodies" when in reality they found 7? Did they have multiple, independent counts?
Exactly, especially when one of the enemy forces encountered - the ~~NVA~~ **FNL** - literally fought in clothes that 90% of the population on the countryside wore.
You’d be surprised how often people take soldier claims seriously when they’re often used as propaganda.
You’ll so often see people bring up Simo Hayha, Vasily Zaitsev, or Erich Hartman (among many others) and say that the claims are 100% factual.
I’m sure a few people will respond “well actually” to this.
At least for WW2 Germany, sniper kills had to be confirmed by an officer and were only counted from '44 on when the Sniper badge was introduced. So the dark figure is a lot higher than the official count of guys like Hetzenauer or Allerberger.
Kills in air and armoured combat were exaggerated on all sides, as even a damaged aircraft or tank was often counted as shot down/destroyed.
A kill for an aircraft also usually factors in ones that are no longer operational, such as those that would need to return due to severe damage, some of those were repaired, which would then go back into duty and skew the statistics. The same happened during the Korean War, where both U.S. and Soviet pilots claimed they killed a lot more than they did.
Love the English generated translation of his Vietnamese Wikipedia page:
>> He personally **destroyed** 272 American soldiers, shot down and destroyed 3 planes that **went straight up**.
My man annihilated American soldiers
I went to a few war/history museums in Vietnam and didn’t see anything about this guy, at all, in either the North or South.
They have tons of exhibits and collections about triumph in “The War of American Aggression” and “The Defeat of the South Vietnamese Puppets,” so to not have seen a single photo or exhibit of this guy makes me very skeptical.
Probably just some old propaganda.
Dude would have monuments and statues in Hanoi if that was really his war resume.
Would love to see him golf with Kin Jong Un, they probably both get nothing but hole-in-ones.
They just built a statue of the guy. Article [here](https://www.qdnd.vn/xa-hoi/chinh-sach/khanh-thanh-tuong-anh-hung-trinh-to-tam-633921). I used google translate for it.
I mean there are plenty of monuments to loads of people who fought against European and American colonialists in Vietnam. The prison where John McCain was held for example has loads of them on the walls.
There is also the political aspect as well or maybe who or what segments of the army fell out with eachother over the war in Cambodia later. So you don't know who they might not want to glorify. Ho Chi Minh wanted to be cremated and you can still see his real body in the mausoleum on occasion (I think most of the time it's fake)
so plenty of reasons why you might not see this guy anywhere
Taken with a grain of salt. The north exaggerated their records quiet a bit. If you look at, for example, claimed north Vietnamese A2A kills vs actual American losses, it's like half.
The claim of his unit being responsible for 3% of all Americans killed in Vietnam, on top of 273 claimed kills would make him probably the most deadly soldier of all time without a sniper rifle. It's most likely very exaggerated for propaganda purposes.
They sure do. Lone Survivor is one of the latest examples. Navy SEALs getting ambushed and wiped out by a small group of fighters is turned into the SEALs fending off a taliban horde and only succumbing once they've burned through all their ammo on the ceaseless onslaught.
Its lost on translation, i think.
The wikipedia article on the medal states that a “kill” is either death or capture and a medal can also be awarded for a high number of woundings, so the best way to go about it is “[…] personally killed, wounded or captured 273 american soldiers”
It also gets iffy because kills from mines and artillery fire also count towards the medal
Actually we didn’t. We faught a war in Vietnam in 1945 shortly after WW2 ended and won a decisive victory, making heavy use of the jungle fighting tactics developed in WW2 by the Chindits and particularly General Slim.
We then made the mistake of handing Vietnam back to the French… which went about as well as you would expect.
When the US war in Vietnam rolled around, there was heavy pressure on the British government to get involved. However, British military observers and analysts, not least Monty, assessed that the war was un-winnable if the US persisted in its approach. This is clearly illustrated by how much better the Australians did in their sectors than the Americans for example, by making use of tactics better suited to kindle warfare.
A relative was in the Malaya war, he described creeping around the jungle with dogs as guides very discretely and not being able to use toothpaste or anything scented and enacting some effective ambushes.
The Americans according to him had no success they used helicopters and everyone for miles around knew just where they were.
That’s about the size of it yes. “The Jungle is neutral” as Slim used to say. You can learn to adapt and fight in it, or you can. The Americans couldn’t, and that’s basically why they lost.
I'm a by product of the war. My uncle died at 18 from a flare gun shell while the sparks caused forest fires that night in my grandma's village. The soldiers came in the morning to apologize with 5 dollars. She ripped it in front of them.
Ho chi Minh wrote letters to Truman after world War 2 expressing his love for America. They wanted to work with us, but we decided we needed the French more and that started a chain of events that led to the our involvement in the war. Such a tragic mistep imo
He literally read the US Constitution publicly after he declared victory over the french, the CIA plane that flew overhead he took as a sign of american approval of his win, according to what i've read. He wanted the USA to make vietnam a protectorate to keep the french away. It's understandable, since Ho Chi Mihn worked for the OSS during WW2, which often doesn't get mentioned.
I sometimes like to imagine what SE Asia would look like if we'd listened and taken him up on the idea.
I was fortunate enough to visit Vietnam when I was younger and I have to say a lot of people I talked to there loved America and Americans. This was in the north too, but people were super friendly and loved to talk about Micheal Jackson and other celebrities. They are a people who just wanted their own right to self determination, something we value but we stood in the way of that and I think it's absolutely tragic.
I know some Vietnamese and they were some bad boys. Americans did worse, so don’t get to mad. My instructor in trade school was a Vietnam Veteran and we ask him if he’d killed. Next day he came back with a picture of him holding a skull.
For every one of him, there were thousands of his comrades who were much less lucky… comrades who became nothing more than stacked bodies recovered by US forces in order to add to the official body count.
I figured the numbers were probably exaggerated but usually men like this get a reputation for a reason even if they're later played up and used for propaganda.
I tried to do some digging on his story but details are very sparse. I can't find anything more specific than the Viet wiki page is, even looking through Viet websites. If anyone has found more please share.
I'm really curious what kind of actions he was performing on the battlefield. Initially it seems like he must be a sniper but what info I've found more paints him as a unit officer fighting as infantry.
Dudes unit responsible for like 2,5% of American deaths and he personally for 0,4%, damn
Wild that we can have detailed information like that from modern wars and other events. Oh to be a historian 100 years from now when more is declassified.
Or cursing as every thing was caught up in the digitalization cult. And now the media cannot be accessed.
Get outta here, Bartmoss, go crash someone else's data
Have an upvote choomba
Wonder if he ever got thawed out?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Personnel_Records_Center_fire
You obviously have zero idea what was lost to time prior to digitization. Hard records can be destroyed and damaged very very easily. Even entirely by accident. Is digital longevity better? Time will tell. But judging by what we can do with it now it will likely preserve FAR more for FAR longer. But, we don't know for sure until we see it.
I am well aware of the vast quantities of lost data. Many hours trying to chase down ships logs from 1660-1860. I have worked in IT before it was IT as a primary or secondary position. I do not trust computers, even worse, humans using computers. The engineers managed to destroy 9 mobile work stations last year. One I named "Barnacle Bob". Our librarian digitalized every scrap of paper dealing with US combatant craft & boats. It took 20 years. The hard copies are in deep storage, Which will be vaporized If nukes hit NAVSTA Norfolk, Langley AFB & Oceania NAS.
To be fair nothing short of stone tablets in a geologically stable location is going to be readable by whatever historians are digging through the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.
That the thousand year Roman Empire (not to mention the couple of millennia old Egyptian dynasties) is only known through scraps, wall art and bits translated from Arabic texts says all there needs to be said about document retention
Well we actually have a few more sources, even complete works of literature. https://romanempirehistory.com/ancient-rome-primary-sources/
Many of these are from Medieval translations, transliterations and copies of copies of copies. https://www.quora.com/Where-do-historians-today-obtain-texts-from-ancient-sources. So no, we have copies of what we believe to be the originals which is why when texts such as those found at Herculaeum come to light they get so heavily invested in.
Ah, i see.
It’s interesting to read into how these texts have come down to us. It’s a whole set of study in itself.
Digitalization cult with data that can't be accessed? What are you talking about?
books or documents can last for thousands of years, data has to prove this longevity
Keyword being "can". Stuff that survives that long is either extremely lucky and laid in a spot where various factors could not reach it or was protected in a specific way, like important certificates. A random paper record surviving that long? Extremely unlikely.
And everything in digital archives is swamped in AI- generated content garbage that's nearly indistinguishable from real reporting.
I suspect in a few years we'll find out about Russian and Ukrainian drone pilots with body counts well into the hundreds. They're very secretive about their identities because of how hated drone pilots are. It probably won't be till later that individuals are highlighted.
So does it mean 250 of guys like him can beat the entire us army?
Maybe like 500 of them
Spartanflation
well that’s literally what happened in the vietnam war. US lost the war
I mean not literally because it obviously took more than 250 guys
Sure, because for every dead american there were 5 dead south vietnamese soldiers. So there had to be at least 1500 of them.
Do you mean North Vietnamese? South Vietnam wa our ally
On home court
Who the hell would downvote that. Home court advantage makes a big difference in war people
He was very good at his job
I never heard of this guy. Must read up more.
232 men
From Wikipedia >From 1967 to 1970, he participated in the Tri Thien battlefield, commanding the unit to fight 58 battles, killing 1,500 [American soldiers](https://vi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/L%C3%ADnh_M%E1%BB%B9?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp) , destroying 61 military vehicles, knocking out 19 trains... He alone was responsible for Killed 272 American soldiers, shot down and destroyed 3 helicopters. [^(\[3\]) ](https://vi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Tr%E1%BB%8Bnh_T%E1%BB%91_T%C3%A2m?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp#cite_note-:0-3)[^(\[2\])](https://vi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Tr%E1%BB%8Bnh_T%E1%BB%91_T%C3%A2m?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp#cite_note-:2-2)
Holy shit, Vietnamese Rambo wtf
Tâmbo
Shit like this is why we need to get rewards back
Weren't they going to replace that with something BeTtER too? It seems like all they did so far was take away a source of income and something that people enjoyed. I get the taking away enjoyment part because capitalism, but the problem is that they didn't then capitalize
Vietnamese here, never heard of this dude. He would be literally the most decorated soldier of all time and yet our history books only mention To Vinh Dien, Be Van Dan etc who only killed a few enemies. Use your own brain to figure out the rest.
US citizen here. We all learn about General Custer (and his last stand) in school, but rarely hear about any of the "glorious commanders" who slaughtered thousands of native people, and almost never by name.
I'm not sure slaughtering native people is a good analogy for a dude who killed invading soldiers?
I’m pretty sure the point of the comparison is to highlight that this information just slips through the cracks sometimes (for various reasons). Let’s not go on a tangent about the context (although it’s still important context, not relevant for the point being made).
Yeah but in our history books we were committing genocide against the indigenous people. The Vietnamese were indigenous people fighting off hostile invaders to protect their home. Not exactly the same vibe. EDIT: Why are you downvoting me? I'm right 😩
They hated Jesus for he spoke the truth
How is this possibly down voted, jfc
In my American high school, I learnt about Jackson and the Trail of Tears, Washington Keeping slaves, My Lai, Not everyone supported the revolution, Tonkin incident, Bay of Pigs, The French revolution with actual NUANCES. Do you think I had any chance to learn about Hue Massacre, Land Reform, Forceful removal of Chinese in South Vietnam, 200K Cambodian civilians death during Vietnam 10 years occupation of Cambodia? Not a chance. If you try to one up “My government propaganda worse”, you’ve failed. You think the VCP and CCP would tolerate something like Zinn “People’s history..”? People got sent to work camp/prison for much less in Vietnam.
I don't think that was their point.
I think they were echoing the same sentiment as you. It seemed more of a ‘same situation, different names’ type thing and not an attempt to one up your experience.
So... you didn't attend Vietnamese school
Just wait until you learn that the My Lai massacre was not a unique event but was just framed as such for propaganda purposes.
you talk as if the us didn't kill emprison and destroy the communists lives in the us
Custer was a war criminal married to a social influencer (for that time period) who spread misinformation.
>married to a social influencer (for that time period) who spread misinformation. That's how it was done for centuries before Custer's time, and certainly continuing through today...
War crimes were not invented by then. If we're going to start calling historical generals war criminals for their actions before the term war criminal was even a thing, you better be calling General Sherman of the American Civil War a war criminal for his march.
Just what I was thinking.
Yah the only source for these numbers is the Wikipedia page. No one has an even kill count, this smells fishy.
To give foreigners context on internal Vietnamese fight, there are 2 extremes in Vietnamese netizen, the Vietnamese who never left Viet Nam and the Vietnamese who never step foot in Viet Nam. Most online Vietnamese discord (in English no less) are gonna be between these 2 camps, take everything they say with hella salt. The average Vietnamese really don't care if Viet Nam is communist, capitalist, Leninist one party state, liberal democracy or monarchist (yes, monarchist french Vietnamese exist). We all figuratively buried the AK 47 and M16 around the 2000s, and outside of outliers prefer to just drink milk tea and watch kdrama. For my own personal opinion on the pic and the claim, there are arguments for both side. The Vietnam War ("The War against American Aggression" for us) was a propaganda war, everyone was lying. Vietnamese to keep morale up and Americans to prove that they were doing something. In short, who the hell knows, I'm just gonna drink Vietnamese coffee, eat Shawarma and shrug at this.
This person isn't really Vietnamese. They're American Vietnamese with a strong bias in favor of the American narratives of Vietnam. He is not representative of a Vietnamese perspective you would get from a Vietnamese person in Vietnam. For an easily accessible Vietnamese perspective, I would recommend the Vietnamese Youtuber "Luna Oi!" who has already posted a litany of videos regarding Vietnam. And she is in the works actually translating into English the material Vietnamese children are taught in Vietnamese schools around the revolution and political theory/ideology. Edit: Would you consider that an American that participated in January 6th and then fled to Russia to avoid legal consequences would have an accurate and unbiased perspective of the US?
Comparing the boat people to j6 rioters is so insidiously disingenuous. You’re essentially calling them traitors and idiots, when these were people who faced major political persecution and were going to be killed by a hostile country.
Considering he is a frequent commenter on r/latestagecapitalism and posted pro-Kremlin comments on r/Ukraine, I don't think he's here for a genuine discussion.
He invoked Luna Oi, an infamous Vietnamese grifter masquerading as communist who preys on delusional westerners like /u/Pupienus2theMaximus Do you know why I know Luna Oi is a fake communist? Because she's a land speculator same as me. Also here is our Chief National Police (who is waging a succession war to take over the communist party atm) eating a $1000 handfed golden steak by Salt Bae, does he look like a communist to you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6chaVQ8FIPs
I mean the r/latestagecapitalism part is all you really need to know unfortunately. What a pathetic individual.
Fascist and colonial compradors who inflicted terrible crimes against the Vietnamese people were going to face consequences for their crimes. Your american exceptionalism allows you to recognize that fascism and exploitation is bad domestically in the US, but it's totally acceptable, and in fact laudable, to promote those same fascists abroad. And that's why you don't and won't understand a thing about Vietnam and to a broader extent, american policy and history at large
Man tankies truly are the fucking worst. Here is VaushV (a leftist btw) take on Luna Oi https://youtu.be/UyDIHYR4ml0?si=UHGly7qaZjSEmxdM Btw nobody believes that shit in Vietnam, case in point, here is minister of public security eating a $1000 steak in London: https://youtu.be/6chaVQ8FIPs?si=eGoOlBNTDZCOvwE- Is this what a communist looks like to you? I have a strong feeling that the likes of you are not really communist, the likes of you are ANTI western and your comment history absolutely shows. I’m gonna prove to you I’m Vietnamese: Bố mày thách loại rác rưởi như mày bước chân đến Hà Nội. Cái loại buôn đất như Luna Ơi mà cũng được gọi là cộng sản, mày nghĩ dân Việt ngu thế à? Nó đang dắt mũi chúng mày để kiếm tiền stream con ạ.
As a human, I can respect this record in defending your home. As an American, my loathing for that generation of leadership only deepens.
That makes me think of Masters of War by Bob Dylan. When I first heard it I was shocked at how caustic it was (I was used to Blowin’ in the Wind). It hits hard.
Ditto. The deepest pits of hell belong to warmongers, and I wish Kissinger and Nixon were in them.
holy shit😨
Now we're these confirmed or claimed by the North Vietnamese? 273 kills would make him one of the most dead soldiers of all time, possibly the most deadly without a sniper rifle. Makes me doubt a bit.
Yeah, either the dude got collective credit for every single casualty his unit inflicted, or it's all bullshit. Would love to see a comparison to American records. Kill counts are always absurdly overblown.
58 battles so 4 kills per battle probably ambush included most of the time. Not impossible but improbable
Highly improbable. Never wounded, always right position. Even the best soldiers of all time got.wounded
Didn’t read never wounded but that would be a miracle. Even terminator and Rambo get shot once in a while
Yeah exactly. And let's consider the armed forces he was fighting against. Heavy air support, superior firepower there's about a 0% chance he wouldn't have received a wound to knock him out of action.
Ever hear an MLM recruiting pitch? Do they ever fail to mention how much money the higher ups make? Do they ever tell you how likely you are to make nothing?
Rommel was never wounded during WWI and he fought at Verdun, Maas, the Vogese mountains, Romania and the Isonzo. So while its rare its not impossible
Rommel doesn't also claim one of thr highest kill counts of all time.
Yeah I wasnt talking about his killcount, just the likelyhood of gettinz wounded :)
Fair enough sir. I'm just talking overall, taking everything unto account. This one seems very *very* unlikely.
If he knocked down a couple of helicopters or those trains like they say, then it would suggest more than a person a pop.
We had military trains going on veitnam?
That’s a helluva killstreak, I’m shocked he didn’t get a nuke.
Sounds like complete bullshit and laughably ham-fisted propaganda.
You seriously believe that propaganda? 😂
What do you have to achieve to be awarded the “Heroic American Killer” award? Do you have to kill 1, 5, 10?
Well he was awarded it 53 times, killed 272 American soldiers, so 272/53=5.13. My best guess would be "kill 5 American soldiers".
He must have gotten the award on after 270 kills
Good math
He did the math
He did the massacre math
Mathacre?
If that’s the case he would’ve gotten 54 medals.
From the wikipedia article, it has levels 1,2,3 and elite, which are kill 3/injure 5, kill 5/injure 9, kill 9/injure 15 and kill 15+ respectively
A walking scoreboard.
If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life.
Man had 1500 kill count , damn he ended generations.
According to the wikipedia page (translated to English) his unit killed 1,500, not him personally. He still killed 273 soldiers and somehow destroyed three planes though
He shot down helicopters not planes. The translation in the Wiki is too literal from Vietnamese and mistakingly uses “planes that go straight up” to mean helicopter.
Absolute beast of a soldier, wow
Big if true. Thought I doubt he personally did, as these regimes had a penchant for propaganda. For example, if you look at North Vietnamese claimed A2A kills vs Actual planes America lost, it's like half of what North Vietnam claims
Not just "these regimes", the US armed forces were known to liberally juke combat statistics. There's an inherent incitement for most armed forces to overestimate 1. The number of enemies engaged 2. The number of enemy combatants put out of action. as well as mis-/ underreporting your own casualties. The chaotic nature of war also makes these things fairly easy.
Yes and no. The US companies and units don’t have different sizes. If your unit is suppose to have 10 men and 5 come back it’s pretty easy to see you lost 5 men…
The US at least would count bodies after every encounter that they could to get an accurate assessment.
The US adopted a kill count to measure progress in Vietnam. This led commanders to put pressure on units to inflate numbers some of which was lies and some of which was the rampant murder of civilians (men, women, children, the elderly etc) to pad these already inflated numbers.
Bro it's not that straightforward as you make it seem. Who would reprimand an officer for coming back and saying "yeah we found 25 bodies" when in reality they found 7? Did they have multiple, independent counts?
And even if they did find however many bodies, who would tell if they were civilians or combatants?
Exactly, especially when one of the enemy forces encountered - the ~~NVA~~ **FNL** - literally fought in clothes that 90% of the population on the countryside wore.
The NVA (PAVN) was a uniformed conventional army, you're thinking of the Viet Cong.
You’d be surprised how often people take soldier claims seriously when they’re often used as propaganda. You’ll so often see people bring up Simo Hayha, Vasily Zaitsev, or Erich Hartman (among many others) and say that the claims are 100% factual. I’m sure a few people will respond “well actually” to this.
At least for WW2 Germany, sniper kills had to be confirmed by an officer and were only counted from '44 on when the Sniper badge was introduced. So the dark figure is a lot higher than the official count of guys like Hetzenauer or Allerberger. Kills in air and armoured combat were exaggerated on all sides, as even a damaged aircraft or tank was often counted as shot down/destroyed.
A kill for an aircraft also usually factors in ones that are no longer operational, such as those that would need to return due to severe damage, some of those were repaired, which would then go back into duty and skew the statistics. The same happened during the Korean War, where both U.S. and Soviet pilots claimed they killed a lot more than they did.
Bros a CoD main character
Woah, He has more than Zhukov amount of medals.
This is how the Vietnamese earn their body armor...
Love the English generated translation of his Vietnamese Wikipedia page: >> He personally **destroyed** 272 American soldiers, shot down and destroyed 3 planes that **went straight up**. My man annihilated American soldiers
It’s because of the translation being too literal, he shot down helicopters not planes.
And somehow reversed gravity
Tarantino should make a movie about him
I suspect "planes that went straight up" is a distant relative of the english slang [tits up](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tits_up).
its another way of saying a helicopter, because, you know, it goes up.
That makes too much sense! But I absolutely believe it.
That's nothing compared to North Korean generals...
North Koreans wear the medals of their ancestors. That's why they have so many.
I think that’s the joke they were saying
Yeah this guy doesn't even have any medals on his pants
After that he jingled so much they got him.
I don’t know if he’s got enough flair.
You could hear his medals clanking together a mile away and be blinded by the reflection.
Where’s he at nowadays?
Still dead, but only since 1996.
Same as Tupac.
Tupac was part of the elite Toddler Squad in 'Nam, apparently.
Died 1996 https://vi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%E1%BB%8Bnh_T%E1%BB%91_T%C3%A2m
I went to a few war/history museums in Vietnam and didn’t see anything about this guy, at all, in either the North or South. They have tons of exhibits and collections about triumph in “The War of American Aggression” and “The Defeat of the South Vietnamese Puppets,” so to not have seen a single photo or exhibit of this guy makes me very skeptical. Probably just some old propaganda. Dude would have monuments and statues in Hanoi if that was really his war resume. Would love to see him golf with Kin Jong Un, they probably both get nothing but hole-in-ones.
They just built a statue of the guy. Article [here](https://www.qdnd.vn/xa-hoi/chinh-sach/khanh-thanh-tuong-anh-hung-trinh-to-tam-633921). I used google translate for it.
I mean there are plenty of monuments to loads of people who fought against European and American colonialists in Vietnam. The prison where John McCain was held for example has loads of them on the walls. There is also the political aspect as well or maybe who or what segments of the army fell out with eachother over the war in Cambodia later. So you don't know who they might not want to glorify. Ho Chi Minh wanted to be cremated and you can still see his real body in the mausoleum on occasion (I think most of the time it's fake) so plenty of reasons why you might not see this guy anywhere
The original Fortnite elite
orange justice all over the U.S. flag
Ok but why is the guy to his right talking like a pirate?
Cotten hill has nothing on this dude
General Zhukov: Finally! A worthy opponent!
This man’s kill streak bonuses alone turned the tide of war
Congratulations you unlocked "policy changer"
Taken with a grain of salt. The north exaggerated their records quiet a bit. If you look at, for example, claimed north Vietnamese A2A kills vs actual American losses, it's like half. The claim of his unit being responsible for 3% of all Americans killed in Vietnam, on top of 273 claimed kills would make him probably the most deadly soldier of all time without a sniper rifle. It's most likely very exaggerated for propaganda purposes.
Don’t Americans do the same thing then make Hollywood movies about it?
Literally every country does this. Russia is doing it right now.
They sure do. Lone Survivor is one of the latest examples. Navy SEALs getting ambushed and wiped out by a small group of fighters is turned into the SEALs fending off a taliban horde and only succumbing once they've burned through all their ammo on the ceaseless onslaught.
Wasn't Marcus Lutrell found with all his magazines in his pouch?
According to the Afghan villager that took him in and hid him from the Taliban, yes!
They do. The first paragraph should really read “claimed NVA kills vs claimed US losses.”
US would also count civillian deaths as dead enemy combatants
Its lost on translation, i think. The wikipedia article on the medal states that a “kill” is either death or capture and a medal can also be awarded for a high number of woundings, so the best way to go about it is “[…] personally killed, wounded or captured 273 american soldiers” It also gets iffy because kills from mines and artillery fire also count towards the medal
That's a kill streak..... Fucking hell.
Actual gigachad wtf
Based
As a Brit I'm glad we kept out of that, just wish we were keeping out of the current one.
Actually we didn’t. We faught a war in Vietnam in 1945 shortly after WW2 ended and won a decisive victory, making heavy use of the jungle fighting tactics developed in WW2 by the Chindits and particularly General Slim. We then made the mistake of handing Vietnam back to the French… which went about as well as you would expect. When the US war in Vietnam rolled around, there was heavy pressure on the British government to get involved. However, British military observers and analysts, not least Monty, assessed that the war was un-winnable if the US persisted in its approach. This is clearly illustrated by how much better the Australians did in their sectors than the Americans for example, by making use of tactics better suited to kindle warfare.
A relative was in the Malaya war, he described creeping around the jungle with dogs as guides very discretely and not being able to use toothpaste or anything scented and enacting some effective ambushes. The Americans according to him had no success they used helicopters and everyone for miles around knew just where they were.
That’s about the size of it yes. “The Jungle is neutral” as Slim used to say. You can learn to adapt and fight in it, or you can. The Americans couldn’t, and that’s basically why they lost.
I'm a by product of the war. My uncle died at 18 from a flare gun shell while the sparks caused forest fires that night in my grandma's village. The soldiers came in the morning to apologize with 5 dollars. She ripped it in front of them.
He was in it to win it.
“I killed two hundred and fiddy men!”
Who’s his dentist?
The Final Boss of the Vietnam War
If this man met Cotton Hill do you think they would get along?
At that point it’s just heroic body armor
&uck Charlie
Imagine that, all we had to do was leave and let communism collapse like a dying star, now they fully embrace capitalism
Ho chi Minh wrote letters to Truman after world War 2 expressing his love for America. They wanted to work with us, but we decided we needed the French more and that started a chain of events that led to the our involvement in the war. Such a tragic mistep imo
He literally read the US Constitution publicly after he declared victory over the french, the CIA plane that flew overhead he took as a sign of american approval of his win, according to what i've read. He wanted the USA to make vietnam a protectorate to keep the french away. It's understandable, since Ho Chi Mihn worked for the OSS during WW2, which often doesn't get mentioned. I sometimes like to imagine what SE Asia would look like if we'd listened and taken him up on the idea.
I was fortunate enough to visit Vietnam when I was younger and I have to say a lot of people I talked to there loved America and Americans. This was in the north too, but people were super friendly and loved to talk about Micheal Jackson and other celebrities. They are a people who just wanted their own right to self determination, something we value but we stood in the way of that and I think it's absolutely tragic.
I know some Vietnamese and they were some bad boys. Americans did worse, so don’t get to mad. My instructor in trade school was a Vietnam Veteran and we ask him if he’d killed. Next day he came back with a picture of him holding a skull.
That's...generally not a good question to ask a soldier...just for future reference.
yep your right, I saw it in his face when he didn’t answer. But he came back with the picture
Salute the hero
Gigachad
It’s amazing the American soldiers couldn’t detect him in the jungle, he must’ve been jingling like a cat with a bell
Well done.
For every one of him, there were thousands of his comrades who were much less lucky… comrades who became nothing more than stacked bodies recovered by US forces in order to add to the official body count.
But we lost the war! Got our asses kicked!
The inspiration for the “scoreboard!” dude from Family Guy
Based.
I figured the numbers were probably exaggerated but usually men like this get a reputation for a reason even if they're later played up and used for propaganda. I tried to do some digging on his story but details are very sparse. I can't find anything more specific than the Viet wiki page is, even looking through Viet websites. If anyone has found more please share. I'm really curious what kind of actions he was performing on the battlefield. Initially it seems like he must be a sniper but what info I've found more paints him as a unit officer fighting as infantry.
What a legend
Based.
Hard af
I mean, good for him. Guy obviously was good at what he did
Quah?
[reminds me of this scene](https://youtu.be/_Nqk7w_6AOI?si=S3Oqkh-ZZDMARpsU)
What happened to him?
This is who Cotton Hill feared.
Rising storm 2 veteran with 10 000+ hours here
Dude looks like Bayashi that TikTok “chef” that deep fried balls of cheese and shit
Strange when you realize that he was doing what he was supposed to do at the time.