You know, those PAVN guys were incredibly brave and tough. I'm not saying anything in favor of their communist devil leaders, but Lt. Col. Moore had nothing but praise for those grunts on the other side and I also think some of those VC and PAVN earned respect. There's nothing about that which disparages Americans or ARVN. I'm not with Fonda and Sutherland. In my way of thinking, it takes incredible courage to fight an asymmetrical war and persist with the kind of determination that a lot of those guys showed. Their cause was hijacked by evil, as also the sake of the American cause, the RVN, was corrupted by it.
I admire courage wherever it's found among the lowly and humble -- the grunts. Whether they're volunteers in the Lafayette Escadrile, or submariners in the uboats after ASDIC and everything else brought their casualty rate to 75%, or the crews of the nightfighters whose superiors may have had an evil nazi cause, but whose task was at instruments and crude little cathode ray tubes for the purpose of fending off the Lancasters of Operation Gomorrah that incinerated Hamburg in an inferno. The only thing more courageous than subjecting oneself to the cruel realities of new inventions of warfare is to fight on the receiving end of their destructive force with no practical hope of survival. Imagine what courage it took to resist the onslaught of American warfare technology.
If anyone here served to help the Vietnamese, thank you. It was my family you helped in whatever way you could. They escaped the Communist oppression in 1978. Today, from this distance, I have a love of the land of Vietnam and the people. That war was, besides a proxy war between the Soviets with the Chinese against the US, also a civil war among the Vietnamese. As in our own (US) history, there was really only one just outcome of the civil war, the freeing of the slaves. I'm not convinced any other good came of the outcome. For the Vietnamese, the sole good was the gaining of their independence from foreign control. Everything subsequent seems to have been evil. Two very simply virtuous things, so costly.
Last edited by Western_Juniper; 06/27/21.
