[exlrrp]

[i]And I would encourage you to put away your very broad brush about how we all hated the Vietnamese. You can either speak for yourself, or unjustly malign many others that don't subscribe to your attitude. I categorically deny this hating of the Vietnamese, and my various citations, my volunteering to teach civilians in my off-duty time, my very basic ethos would absolutely preclude me from hating them. What I hated was the violence that the communists brought to the country, the corruption that our flooding the country with money produced, the political venality of the LBJ administration, and grandstanding officers who stood on the shoulders of others to make themselves look good. All this confession comes from a position of rigorous honesty after a fearless moral inventory, as called for by our AA program.

And I don't think that your self-inflicted halo for open-mindedness is wearing too well - the tarnishing is getting a bit apparent! And believe it or not, forgiveness, compassion, and tolerance are VERY big words, and more important, VERY big actions and deeds, here in Texas.

Brice--first let me say I'km sorry about the misspelling of your name-- I have a postcard from Tom from Bryce Canyon up on the board in front of me and hehehwell, Doh--my bad,sorry, won't happen again

You may be right, absolutely right, I want to go into an argument openminded enough to start with that--I wouldn't bother otherwise
I also want to say that I believe you are telling the absolute truth as you know it and perceive it, just like Ron--but truth comes in many forms and what we perceive as middle class white Americans with White Supremacy backgrounds (ALL of us our age!) acting in our own interests is not necessarily how the worlds perceives itand what you and I think is best for the world is not how others perceive it.. People like you and I can ONLY look through that filter, it is our ground of being. We may be able to surmount it but its what we grew up with, its always there unless we stay conscious and fight it
It is very clear to me that we did not spend enough time looking through our enemies eyes and seeing if his needs were genuine.
And the greatest need for Vietnam was to end the war--there was nothing the Communists did to the people that was worse than the continuance of the war, we killed far more than they did. We're awesome at it. It was the war we were waging itself thatwas damaging to the Vietnamese. After all the political BS was gone, while we were there Vietnamese were dying at the rate of hundreds a day some years. When we left, that ended and the country could heal. Ive been there and I can tell you, theyre a LOT better off now than when we were there. The Communists brought them peace and prosperity, not us, no doubt about it. Go look yourself if you don't believe me.
I now have no doubt that the Communists had a more benign vision for their people than we did--this was what I was in the most denial about for decades and I probably still would be in denial if Al Gore hadn't created the internet (lol) You see, I feared the Vietnamese and held them in contempt but I was hoping against hope that all you guys were doing better than that, otherwise they wouldn't support us--now I see not but only after reading it time after time in the written words on these Vietnam veterans websites. You don't have to read between the lines--just read the lines.
You see: I tend to take things on face value too much and when I all I read on the internet is how much the Vietnbameae sucked and how most of the linedogs thought we should have been fighting on the other side I know why America lost The other side had The Fire and our side didn't--that fire was nationalism--throw the ugly white foreigners the hell out!!!, We could never have beaten this.
The facts are already established and indisputable, its just a matter of connecting the dots:
Lets say we have a young man-we'll call him Don
Fact A: Don hates the Vietnamese (there are other ways to express this)--we know this because he says this every time the subject comes and he is an honest person so you tend to believe him.
Fact B: Don called in B52s in Vietnam
Now what suspicious nasty thought jumps into your mind right here, based on a lifetime of dealing with people?If you are a combat vet, what do you KNOW happened? When Don plastered a valley he'd drawn fire from with B52s, did Don go check and make sure there weren't a ville full of innocent people there?? Would he?? Tell the truth, now--just connect the dots.
We're not calling B52 strikes surgical strikes are we--I evaluated them (through binoculars!) and I am here to tell you that it was the most awesome thing I saw in the war.
And calling in fire on places including villes that we had drawn fire from was SOP,as was reconning bunkers with grnades and rifle fire--wasn't it??--is this a good policy to enact on the side youre supposed to be supporting?
I'm sure that you were real nice to the Vietnamese but it wouldn't take more than one Don one day to cancel out all the work 100 people like you did in a year. And there were a lot of Dons--and Jameses.
The other side was not foreign to the South Vietnamese, the was another lie we told. The Vietnamese knew better. The VC were the brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts,faters, mothers, uncles, husbands, wives of the Vietnamese. An American going in there teaching home ec or whatever is not going to change that fact. But I wouldn't have known about this--they'd have sooner given me a pass to the moon than time off to teach classes. I figured I was helping them out enough just being there but I was wrong.We were in a whole country of enemy sympathizers, another fact every grunt knew.


If hatred is the wrong word, how about contempt? Is anybody going to disagree with me that the grunts held the Vietnamese in great contempt? I mean the South Vietnamese--most every grunt talks about the NVA admiringly for their fighting skills--I think they were the toughest opponents America ever faced--and did it with less.
And of course there were varying degrees of this hatred/contempt.whatever throughout, exhibited at different time--I'm just talking about me here but I nthink evrybody here knows exactly what I mean--ever have a buddy hit a mine in a ville and You KNEW the people knew where it was. What happened to that village? Think all the people in it were culpable VC, even the kids?
One time of this canceled out every good thing you ever did, Brice--and this was pretty much SOP--you could disguise this behind all kinds of military talk--reconning by fire in a freefire zone for instance or siting in PapaTangoes. Think I didn't see this done? Didn't you?
And how can you do this to people you don't hate?

This is what becomes clear from reading these websites. No one can EVER tell me that the best solution for the Vietnamese was to bomb more or invade the North. It wouldn't have been the best solution for us either. More hundreds of thousands of people kileed? For what??
Re: hatred and racism: it exists in everyone, ESPECIALLY in war, you would have been an unusually enlightened person not to be affected by it and an unusually enlightened person would have been smart enough to stay home. I sure was affected by it--I could tell all kinds of racist jokes:Yassuh Boss, trigger the nigger and coon to the moon-No the jig is up!! and I grew up in the most liberal place in America so I think people from places where aparteid segregation was the law and culture would have a harder time with it. Tell me how you got over it!!
. So when someone absolutely positively denies being racist or hateful I always suspect theyre in denial, instead of working on it--especially Vietnam Veterans -- thats just my opinion from knowing a lot of them and trying to understand them. We ALL need to keep working on it.

I Made a list of people we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
When I did that I had to include a lot of Vietnamese, there ws no doubt about it. I had all the good reason in the world according to you but I didn;'t feel like it. I just felt like we hurt a lot of people--forget what the Communists did and look at what WE did:
>Killed millions of them, wounded millions more--probably less than a quarter of these were soldiers (this also counts ARVN dead).
>Defoliated 14% of their country, dropping thousands of tons of toxic chemicals on them some with a shelf life of 100s of years, the same as we accuse Saddam of doing.
This killed approximately 100,000 more of them and left sickness and birth defects in their gene pool for generations to come
>Devastated their economy.Vietnam in the 50s was a net exporter, by the 60s, they imported everything--and the US taxpayer subsidized it. Now its the worlds 3d largest producer of rice#4:CA)
>There's a LOT more and these are OUR numbers and estimations, not the Vietnamese
Up against all this I can't see how your volunteering to teach the Vietnamese would have had much of an impact. I thin k they had more pressing things on their mind. It was a good thing to d, no doubt.
Its hard to see how they could like us much (not you Brice, I'm sure they loved you)
Re Halos: I might resnt that if I was a resentful person which I'm trying not to be. Feel how you want and say what you want: no argument. You might could get one too if you learned to forgive and love the Vietnamese, maybe even take a trip there and make nice to them--Schwartzkopf did, had his picture taking smiling with Giap. theyre even sending friendly military liasons there now. That would make you into a really BIG hero--I need a role model for this, I'm not very brave, didn't even get any medals except the one I had to bust their balls to give me.

Bye for now

J,mesa (see, we're even)