Oh I know it wasn't aimed at me, and when my year came the draft had been ended. My lottery number was 13.
I do as always appreciate your candor.
At the remove of all these decades, and knowing so much more than we did in our innocent days about the kind of thinking behind "bear any burden, pay any price," what do you think was the real reason we went over to Vietnam?
Oh I know it wasn't aimed at me, and when my year came the draft had been ended. My lottery number was 13.
I do as always appreciate your candor.
At the remove of all these decades, and knowing so much more than we did in our innocent days about the kind of thinking behind "bear any burden, pay any price," what do you think was the real reason we went over to Vietnam?
I could only speculate about "the" reason, but I think that there were enough ideas floated that people latched onto one, or more. The cold war was in full bloom and the military thinkers didn't want Russia to have access to a year-round fair weather navel port on the coast of Vietnam. America was not a pre-WW2 colonialist in Southeast Asea, that was America's friends, the French and British. We had no historical attachment to the region or the fate of its inhabitants.
It is easy to get people to go fight in them. I came from a long line of military veterans on my mother's side of the family going back to a roster of privates in the Revolutionary War. There was a war going on and young men like me didn't want to miss it. Interestingly I am the last in that long line, there are none in my extended family who followed suit.
If there is a root cause reason, Old Gimlet Eye probably put his finger on it. https://papersourceonline.com/war-is-just-a-racket/ In the longer version of this he described war as something where profits are in dollars and losses are in lives.
Of course were told that opposition to communism has always been about their lack of reverence for freedom but at the same time we've cozied up to the worst totalitarian governments as long as they let our corporations loot their resources, so the freedom thing doesn't wash.
My own belief has been for most of my life that we didn't want to see an ideology that didn't coddle the wealthy gain any prominence. Since then of course we've gotten all those "Russian oligarchs" but they weren't a thing under Khrushchev and Brezhnev that I know of.
Oh I know it wasn't aimed at me, and when my year came the draft had been ended. My lottery number was 13.
I do as always appreciate your candor.
At the remove of all these decades, and knowing so much more than we did in our innocent days about the kind of thinking behind "bear any burden, pay any price," what do you think was the real reason we went over to Vietnam?
I could only speculate about "the" reason, but I think that there were enough ideas floated that people latched onto one, or more. The cold war was in full bloom and the military thinkers didn't want Russia to have access to a year-round fair weather navel port on the coast of Vietnam. America was not a pre-WW2 colonialist in Southeast Asea, that was America's friends, the French and British. We had no historical attachment to the region or the fate of its inhabitants.
It is easy to get people to go fight in them. I came from a long line of military veterans on my mother's side of the family going back to a roster of privates in the Revolutionary War. There was a war going on and young men like me didn't want to miss it. Interestingly I am the last in that long line, there are none in my extended family who followed suit.
If there is a root cause reason, Old Gimlet Eye probably put his finger on it. https://papersourceonline.com/war-is-just-a-racket/ In the longer version of this he described war as something where profits are in dollars and losses are in lives.
Of course were told that opposition to communism has always been about their lack of reverence for freedom but at the same time we've cozied up to the worst totalitarian governments as long as they let our corporations loot their resources, so the freedom thing doesn't wash.
My own belief has been for most of my life that we didn't want to see an ideology that didn't coddle the wealthy gain any prominence. Since then of course we've gotten all those "Russian oligarchs" but they weren't a thing under Khrushchev and Brezhnev that I know of.