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Uncle Ho was prepared to throw any number of people under the bus for a unified Vietnam. Our senior command just didn't understand this or couldn't deal with it
by ArkyBeagle 11y ago
Uncle Ho was prepared to throw any number of people under the bus for a unified Vietnam. Our senior command just didn't understand this or couldn't deal with it.
Estimates are a million Vietnamese died between 1950 and 1975.
And you understand that the entire plot of "Apocolypse Now" ( which was fiction ) was that Kurtz was prepared to use any means to win, and that this is why he was targeted for assassination? "His methods were... unsound."
This led to the Powell Doctrine. In the early-90s Gulf War I, the objective was actually met, although the resulting equilibrium was not stable.
Open-ended foreign entanglements are generally bad practice.
- hga 11y agoUncle Ho was prepared to throw any number of people under the bus for a unified Vietnam. Case in point: they had a policy of regularly making battalion strength night attacks on our fixed positions, deliberately sacrificing about a company's worth of men. It worked because it made our commanders unreasonably afraid of venturing outside at night.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoIt's still hard to come to grips with even just as an exercise. We had similar difficulties in the Pacific in WWII with the Bushido Code. The reaction there was, shall we say, less restrained. Grim business, founded in a vehement racism as a central operating principle.