51–60 of 624 posts
Looking at those pictures, I would not have predicted them as the winning side. The picture of the field operating theater in the middle of a swamp is particularly moving. They must have felt they were fighting against unbelievable odds: the most powerful military in the world, with all the bombers, the agent orange, the napalm, the best equipment.. it must have taken a lot of courage to keep up the fight against tha…
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You are confused two thing though. First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. I don't see anything wrong with it. Their people, born in that country, fight that war, and they win. Second, after the war, the winning party didn't do a great job to improve the country and condition. That's another discussion.
It wasn’t a war of independence from the US, it was a civil war the US was dumb enough to get involved in.
It would have been over by the mid-1950s, otherwise. 20 years of fighting primarily western troops with a fig leaf of local rule.
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China fought in the Vietnam war too, just not as directly as the U.S. Without the U.S. supporting the south, the north will easily win with the full resource support from China. People who don't understand the historical context like to say the U.S. did not need to involve in the Vietnam civil war. This is simply wrong. If the U.S. did no get involved, the Chinese Communist government will support communists throw ov…
To add to the above, as much as some people want to mock America's involvement in Vietnam, one must note that The Domino Theory (used to justify that involvement) came true. Granted, the worst case scenario did not happen (Australia was spared communist takeover), but what actually happened was horrific, nonetheless. Laos and Cambodia fell to communism, in part thanks to communist forces from Vietnam. And anyone who…
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Have you seen Vietnam in the last 10 years? Sure, it's not what I would call a wealthy country but I didn't see much poverty either over my 6 months there - some of it spent in the countryside.
I wouldn't say it's abject poverty. But it's certainly far less developed than South Korea or Taiwan, which is the most likely counterfactual for a free South Vietnam. OTOH you could possibly argue (though far more speculatively) that North Vietnam would've turned into North Korea from the paranoia, isolation and humiliation of a loss.
Vietnam is still developing.
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>Yet the largest city frequently floods with a foot of water during monsoon season. Same thing can be said about parts of Tokyo during the typhoon season.
That's funny because I actually live in Tokyo. My family also owned a property next to a guy in Vietnam who owned a collection of 30 Ferraris. To suggest Tokyo's flooding problem is anywhere close to Saigon is disingenuous.
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Have you seen Vietnam in the last 10 years? Sure, it's not what I would call a wealthy country but I didn't see much poverty either over my 6 months there - some of it spent in the countryside.
I definitely saw it years ago up north. And it still occurs today: “In some areas stunting is as high as 75 percent. I don’t recall coming across such high rates anywhere else in the world. The average in the northern mountainous province of Lao Cai is 40 percent, almost twice the national average in Vietnam.” - https://blogs.unicef.org/east-asia-pacific/visiting-nutritio... That sentence implies the national average…
There were these elementary-school aged kids smoking cigarettes, cussing, etc. Eventually I realized they were 17.
These are some great photos! But I really do wonder if "the winning side" was _actually_ the winning side. It seems to me that nobody won, and it's very likely that the Vietnamese people ultimately lost bigtime. USA fought a similar war a decade earlier in Korea and now South Korea is one of the preeminent countries in the entire world. Imagine what could have been for South Vietnam? Instead the entire country has be…
We grieve 58,000 deaths, but they lost more than a million (the figures are very fuzzy).
Their soldiers lived rough as hell, and weren't particularly well-equipped.
We bombed the living hell out of them. We used napalm.
Being an NVC was a tough gig.
From what I can see, Vietnam is actually starting to thrive, and I sincerely wish them the best.
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> First, it's a country and their people want to remain independent from the US. And some people did not want to live under socialism/communism, and asked the US in defending themselves. The two countries, North and South Vietnam, and their allies, agreed to end hostilities: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords North Vietnam then broke that agreement: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_spring_offensi…
Without USA & France we wouldn't suffer from that war
When I was in HCMC, I visited the The War Remnants Museum. It is on the same level as Auschwitz in my mind. It made me physically ill.
I was so unbelievably ashamed for my country and it's awful leaders during that time. The more I've learned about the war in the time since, the more I've started to understand that we are heavily indoctrinated in the US to believe a ton of bullshit growing up, particularly in relation to our foreign policy blunders.
I'm sorry for the suffering inflicted upon your country and people.
I wonder how much of this is truth, or it's just the US trying to save face by claiming that they've lost to a world-class military.
My dad was a hospital corpsman on the USS Repose (hospital ship) during Vietnam. Having seen some of his operating room photos, I can't imagine that we were on the "winning" side.
The video above is his amateur footage he took while aboard the ship. Probably 1968/1969.
I had the film digitized after he passed in 2016.