whos good at vietnam?

Question

why was there so much support for vietnam war at the beginng of the 1960?
fear of communism
antii communist goverments
patriotism
easy victory
please add to these points???

Answer 1

This is at least the 3rd time you've asked about this. You might want to spend some time looking for the information you need on your own instead of asking strangers to do your homework at the last minute.

Answer 2

Well it was different for different generations. For the older WWII veterans it would have been patriotism and duty to ones country. The younger generation never really supported the war. You can tell that by the rates that they left the country to avoid the draft and all the anti war rallies that they hosted on college campuses. The biggest fear our country had however was the spared of communism to the rest of the world. During the Vietnam war you really had to watch your P's and Q's because if someone claimed that you were a communist for any reason you could loose a lot. People lost their jobs, friends and reputations to name a few. Although most people supported the war in the beginning by the end the support was so low that soldiers coming home from fighting were actually verbally abused and physically assaulted.

Answer 3

Very few Americans were getting killed in 1960.

Kennedy was a popular President.

People were terrified of communism just like they are afraid of terrorism and fighting in Vietnam was seen as a way to fight communism

American school children were taught the domino theory which stated that if we lost vietnam then all of Asia and then the world wour turn communist. This turned out to be completely false. But it was taught to me as fact. Thier was absolutely no truth to it what-so-ever.

Answer 4

Poopfang say stupid people, maybe he'd like to tell that to all the families of the men that were killed with me or, wounded.
I was with a Ranger unit in the Northern Highlands, at 18 and was a flag waver. I didn't;'t have his philosophy then, only the blood and guts I was ready to offer for my country thinking I was doing the right thing. I stay for two years, was wounded twice. Where was Poopfang, hiding in Canada, I met a lot of people like you,. all talk.

I had one man recently call me a fool. After I thought of Pete, he jumped into a quagmired of heat battle and never made the ground
. Frank the was shot through the legs, the shot came out his shoulders, and al he was used for targetpractise and shot twelve times. I was shot twice through the arms.

I couldn't help it, I hit him The cops were vets and understood..

We were lied to, we were used, we were a holding action but, look what's going on in Iraq now, the same thing.


If Braz50 was never spit on or called a baby killer, he wasn't from my time. I rememeber a civvi plane coming in from Jersey that had a near riot on it with Marines and Navy and Army, it started over name calling.

I left the states in '64 over all the crap and went into the deep forests of Minnesota to get away from the civilian scum, I stayed there for 30 years. The peace and harmony of nature took that long to cure me, the VA couldn't help. By tyhen I found 26 more of my buddies died.

Answer 5

stupid people led easier than goats into a war they know nothing about by there "patriotism" and a lying government... not much has changed..

Answer 6

The propaganda books of Dr. Tom Dooley were all over the Catholic high school I attended. They were full of bloodcurdling descriptions of Communist atrocities in Vietnam. Later turned out Dr. Tom was a CIA agent and his stories were largely bullcrap.

[A BRIEF ASIDE ADDRESSED TO THOSE WHO LIKE TO WRAP THEMSELVES IN A BLOODSTAINED FLAG AS THE FIRST,.LAST, ONLY, AND UNASSAILABLE ARGUMENT. THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT A LOT OF CATHOLICS DIDN'T LEAVE THE NORTH AFTER IT WENT TO HO CHI MINH UNDER THE GENEVA ACCORDS. OR THAT THE COMMUNISTS DIDN'T, E.G., STARVE THE FRENCH PRISONERS THEY TOOK AT DIEN BIEN PHU. NO, SCREAMING IGNORANT MORON, THE COMMUNISTS ARE NOT SAINTS. DO I HAVE TO REPEAT THAT, KNEE-JERK CONSERVATIVES? IF NOT, GOLLY, THANKS. IT GETS REAL F*ING TEDIOUS FENDING OFF THE STRAW MEN YOU KEEP INSERTING INTO ANY, ANY, ANY DISCUSSION OF EVENTS WITH ANY SORT OF VALUE COMPONENT, THAT IS, ANYTHING BUT SAY THE SCORE OF A BALL GAME, OR THE PRICE OF OIL BEFORE AND AFTER THE SECRET ENERGY TASK FORCE COMPLETED ITS WORK.]

I was on a camping trip when the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred in 1964. The whole country bought into the notion that the Commies had attacked us. The Congress granted the President extraordinary powers on the basis of an alleged attack by N. Viet torpedo boats that never happened (gee, does that sound familiar at all?) I don't know if the number of dissenters from the march to war was larger or smaller than with the Iraq war resolution, but in both cases they were a small and reviled minority. One of them, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, was actually a Republican.

President Kennedy had been elected in part because he promised to be tough with the Communists, e.g., closing a "missile gap" he alleged but turned out to be fantasy. Still being in possession of his faculties, he wasn't really into the Bay of Pigs abortive invasion of Cuba (promoted by Cuban Chalabis and their pals in the American "intelligence" community). But he went ahead with it, so he wouldn't be a liberal wimp (Sound familiar? American foreign policy is ALWAYS driven by the idiocy of domestic American politics). Any observation that the Castro Cubans sure fought hard against, rather than with, the invading "liberators" -- when they were supposed to be unhappy, disaffected, and ready to overthrow the Communist tyranny that oppressed them -- such observation was never made. A prime example of liberal media bias.

Henry Luce was still lord of Time and Life magazines and they were pumping out stuff about how Diem was "the democratic alternative" to the horrors of Communism... as Diem was throwing his opponents into jail, looting the treasury, etc.

My uncle was in the Green Berets. They were very fashionable, like the paras had been in French Algeria. In 1965, the #1 song on the American hit parade was not "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones. It was not "Help" or "Ticket to Ride" by the Beatles. It was "The Ballad of the Green Berets", by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler. The news was full of inspirational stories about GIs passing out candy to orphaned Viet kids, or teaching them to play baseball. Being a soldier was COOL. Don't buy into that horse crap about how America is a "peace loving" country. Just look at our history, our wars, our guns... and how we regard truly peace loving people, like Quakers, Moravian Brotherhood, etc. -- as wimps, fags, less than human, undeserving of respect.

The antiwar stuff came later -- it only really got going in 1968, after Tet, Hue, and the attack on the American embassy. And the obvious fact that the draft was biting deeper and deeper and that the mirage of victory kept receding. Even then the poll numbers were heavily pro-war. It was way more likely that you'd get beat up for having long hair than that you'd be spit on for being a veteran -- a baseless canard that the right never tires of repeating

It shouldn't be too hard for you to get longitudinal Gallup poll data on support for the war. My recollection is that anti-war started gathering real momentum when Martin Luther King, Eugene McCarthy, and Bobby Kennedy came out against it in 1968. How effective was the anti-war movement? Recall that the Americans didn't pull their combat troops out until 1972 and continued funding the southern regime until the Communists rolled into Saigon in 1975. Nixon beat the antiwar candidate McGovern in 1972 in one of the biggest landslides in American history.

Before '68, you were a traitor if you questioned the war, and to a lot of folks you were such a traitor after '68 -- or even now. The loons like to carry on about soldiers being spat on when they got back to the States. There is no confirmed incident of such a thing happening. People being the jerks they are, I wouldn't be surprised if it did happen, but it would be much more likely that people opposed to the war would try to get a veteran to desert, persuade his comrades to desert, and/or get involved in antiwar work.

(A note on the infamous My Lai massacre, where American soldiers under the leadership of Lt. William Calley slaughtered a village of unarmed Vietnamese men, women, and children. The Army convicted Calley of mass murder and sentenced him to life at hard labor. President Nixon, UNDER PUBLIC PRESSURE, commuted his sentence. Calley never served time, except briefly under house arrest. Calley personally murdered something like 125 people. Them law-and-order folks stay curiously silent on this one. It's way more horrible, they'll tell you, that a vet got called a baby killer by some fool drunken and/or stoned college student who wanted to be more radical-than-thou with his stoned friends.).

Speaking of which, the heroin angle. The Golden Triangle, Air America, the CIA. People who don't know sh*t will tell you that stuff's all loony conspiracy theory. For sure the details are kept well under wraps. But it's really not a secret that the worlds of organized crime and the intelligence communty have long been intertwined. Nor that arms-for-drugs is a favorite way to fund clandestine operations, like the spooks Col. Edward Lansdale controlled in North Vietnam after the French pulled out (most of whom ended dying a miserable death in front of N/ Viet firing squads, or, worse, in a N/ Viet prison camp, thanks to the customary American incompetence and inability to understand foreigners who don't play baseball or think America is this flawless Santa Claus out to help them selflessly and with no agenda of its own). Friend, a hell of a lot of GIs got turned into junkies while they were over there. And a hell of a lot of junk made its way back to the States, such that SE Asia displaced "The French Connection" out of the Turkish poppy fields via the refineries in Marseille and Sicily. IMO, this horrible business didn't cause and/or keep the war running -- that can be put at the door of the politicians and the fool public. But having folks with VERY LUCRATIVE business opportunities like this in a position to tailor intelligence -- well, that wasn't really conducive to good decision making.

Sorry for rambling. I do recall helping some folks chop up a block of Afghan hash stamped with an icon of an AK-47 and the words Smoke the Russians back when we were funding the Taliban (or "mujahedeen"), but I'm sure that doesn't mean anything, other than that I'm too stoned to make any sense. You'll be getting the REAL STORY from the other posters, I'm sure. Just remember two things: 1) these clowns couldn't tell a Communist from a Zoroastrian; and 2) stay away from anything that smells like the Vietnam War, including but not limited to its most recent reincarnation.



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