Knew it would happen

[exlrrp]

Originally posted by Stick Viet Nam. Late 1967 I believe. Election day for the Republic of South Vietnam. Just a regular work day for the REMFs at the First Army Postal Unit. We were billeted about two miles away from the post office and I had to drive the unit personnell in a 37 passenger Isuzu bus through the western side of QuiNhon on public road to the unit which was just inside the rear gate of the QuiNhon airfield. It was the first day that I was allowed to go to the armory to get my M-14. Everyone of the troops with the unit was also issued their weapon but none of us were issued ammunition.
Driving down the road we passed several poling places and low and behold there were several people wearing black and carrying AK-47's beating up on the Vietnamese people that wanted to vote. Those Black pajamaed people were also firing those AK's into the air as we drove by. They had ammo. All I could do is drive by.
Hey. It was a supervised election wasn't it?
Who was watching the poles?

The probelem with this election was that it was run under the Auspices of the South Vietnamese government and by us indirectly It certainly is a farce of an election when there is only one candidate to vote for. Why were the people there anyway? there was only one candidate to vote for: the current military dictator Nguyen Van Thieu and SURPRISE! He won in a landslide. He would have even if nobody showed up.
That was the kind of election we brought to them in stead of the internationally supervised elections supervised by Canada, Indi and Poland stipulated in the Genevea Agreements, the ones we stood there beaming when Diem cnceled them.
You think we did better?

PS re: bllack pajamed people firing guns in the air.
If they were your enemies, theyd have fired them at you.

[MORTARDUDE]

Wow...lots of under-currents here...Hal....good post !! James, James...correct me if I am mistaken...Didn't a whole bunch ( millions ?? ) of Catholic North Vietnamese vote "with their feet" by hauling ass across the DMZ to the South around 1954 ? Don't get me wrong, the South Vietnamese governement was corrupt and dependent on us ( esp. after JFK had Diem blown away in 1963 ), but a lot of folks did not want to live in the Communist People's Paradise / Dictatorship.....Your perspective ?

As far as products in the USA from Vietnam..they are all over the place. I suspect you have had some dioxin-laced catfish from there that might have been grown in a bomb-crater-lake close to where you were in Vietnam !!!!

Take care,

Larry

P.S. -- Stick : How come you guys didn't have ammo ?

[the humper]

Same, identical question would apply to the North, then and NOW, in the one that I was in!!!!!!!!!!!
SF
NC

[Packo]

Vietman War Protesters: I agree with Andy that many were there for the sex. drugs, and rock and roll. I believe that protesting the government, even in times of war, is a right that must always be protected in this country. That being said, why I hated most of the Vietnam Protesters, they were our peers and were protesting US calling us vile names and carrying the flags of our enemies. They carried their protests to our embarkation stations and our return bases. They painted us all with one brush and chose the side of our enemy. There were some in this country that protested WWI, and WWII but nobody carried Japanese or German flags. They attacked and burned government, read the people's, property and then were shocked when they faced retribution. They were funded by the Communist Party, Soviet, and Red Chinese organizations. They attacked our system, capitalism, and everything America stood for. They did give aid and comfort to our enemy by showing that America's divide would guarentee victory for the Communists. Picture the will of the Japanese or Nazi's if the exact same thing was going on here during WWII. Don't any of you remember how demoralizing it was to US who were fighting to see what was going on here? It sealed our fate for sure that we knew we would never fight the war to win, even though WE were fighting to win. How would you have liked landing at Iwo or Normandy knowing your own peers were forcing the government to not allow you to win. That because of your protests we only did limited bombing in Germany and Japan and would not block their resupply. The Nazi's would have had their jets and atomic bomb and we would have lost. No my dear friends, there is a big difference in protesting the government and doing it the way it was done.

Draft Dodgers, CO's, and Canada boys: Draft dodger is a realitive term. Our draft system was hosey right from the begininng. Deferments for college?????? What kind of crap is that. Anyone that actively dodged the draft I hate. Those that went to college then took their chances after graduation.....well, if the gov said you could go to college and stay out, so be it. That was screwed from the begining. CO's. We had them in Boot camp and most went to field medics school. No problem with someone who was a CO and served. One CO medic was awarded the CMH postumously. Those that said they were CO's and dodged the draft.....screw them. Anyone that went to jail does not really have my respect, but alot more than any SOB that left this country. The altimate slap in our faces was when they were allowed back in. I spit on any SOB that did that and the president that decreed it. They ones that stayed in Canada, screw them but atleast they stayed away.

I can speak to unions and jobs from experience. I was a United Steelworker twice, a United Mine Worker once, and a Teamster. Unions were created because of the horrible plight of the worker in the United States. We had to have unions. They WERE a great thing. By the time we became old enough to work the unions had become corrupt and because of them and the corporations, we have lost our manufacturing edge. I will not go into all the ridiculous stuff I went through as a union man but let me say that it is no wonder why our steel industry died. One day I sat for 8 hours waiting for an "electrician" to come and change one lousy light bulb. Safety man said I couldn't do my job without the light bulb, and the union also said they couldn't give me something else to do, so I had to wait until an electrician freed up enough time, from sleeping and visiting other guys in the mill, to come change one lousy light bulb. I have 100's of other stories like this. Once the unions got their power, the companies were had. Neither ever learned how to work together and our steel industry died. We live in a capitalist society folks. If I owned a business I would do every damn thing I could to keep the jobs here, but with over government regulation, union idiocy, and protecting my investment, with my money and possibly the money of friends, relatives, and other "investors", I would maybe have to look elsewhere. It's sad, but in many cases we made our own beds people, and now we have to sleep in them.

Just my 50 cents worth.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND A GREAT NEW YEAR!

Packo

[exlrrp]

Originally posted by MORTARDUDE Wow...lots of under-currents here...Hal....good post !! James, James...correct me if I am mistaken...Didn't a whole bunch ( millions ?? ) of Catholic North Vietnamese vote "with their feet" by hauling ass across the DMZ to the South around 1954 ? Don't get me wrong, the South Vietnamese governement was corrupt and dependent on us ( esp. after JFK had Diem blown away in 1963 ), but a lot of folks did not want to live in the Communist People's Paradise / Dictatorship.....Your perspective ?

Take care,

Larry

P.S. -- Stick : How come you guys didn't have ammo ?

Well this is always an interesting subject to argue.
I'll start by saying this: When I was in Vietnam in May, we saw Catholic Churches all over, every town had one or more, seemed to me about as many as Buddhist but I don't recognize all the Buddhist manifestations so I might not know what I was looking at. I know what a Catholic Church looks like though and there didn't seem to be any shortage of them. There were other Christian churches too, there's a missionary presence in the Montagnards yet.
We stayed in a nice hotel right on the beach In QuiNhon and both nights they had 2 weddings going there, they were Catholic (Buddhist don?t sing Ave Maria)
Thats whats going on in this picture while your 2 hardened GIs take the waters--they didn't demand we overdress. We tried to look as decorous as possible. What a racket, yeah Tom??they had the BAttle Of The Karaokes going on at full volume. They shut it all off right at 8:00 tho.
These were affluent people, they dressed well and all pulled up on motorscooters (everybody drives one) and acted just like they owned the joint, which, technicallly (peoples ownership) they did.
The brides and grooms all left in driven Mercedeses or whatever. They all looked happy.
Well, now, thats what I saw--there's probably a lot going on there I didn't understand but these people did NOT look like they were being oppressed except when the waiter was late bringing around the drink tray
May I add that this is the same Communist Governement that supposedly oppressed them years ago? They seemed to have gotten over it.

OK lets talk about history.
There's a lot of dispute about what actually happened here. Our man at the time: Lansdale, was into a program which included a lot of rumors and disinformation--to the Vietnamese and to us. The Communists had their own version, no doubt. The truth is probably neither. At this point, we can only surmise based on the accounts we think are most credible and what we know bout human behavior.
The circumstances go way back. The French government used the Catholic Church as a political arm during the colonial period, just like the Spanish did as a means of controlling the natives. Vietnamese converts were favored and became the upper class. The vast majority of the Vietnamese are some variation of Buddhists or some variation of animist. There was also a substantial presence of cults like the Cao Dai.
The Catholic converts, like the Diems, became the Mandarin class under the French but don't think that was welcomed by the other Indochinese. There was considerable resentment against the Catholics, and more so when, during the Franco-Vietnamese War, the Catholics sided with the Francos.
Now think about it larry, the revolutions over and its payback time. It happens after every revolution, successful or not. Whats going to happen to the rich people who sided with the losers? ?Spect their stuffs going to get, er, redistributed?
Yeah, I think so too, especially in times of starvation. Theyre not going to like it for sure.
We say Ho did this and Ho did that but he was actually a part of the pluralistic leadership?he answered to a committee and other people, for instance Giap and Le Duc Tho, were responsible for other parts of the organization.
He had both competing. radical and conservative factions to deal with his whole time. This was a time the radicals got the upper hand. No doubt about it, villages were indeed oppressed, with show trials an public executions but, as th Catholics supported the French, its hard to tell if this was anti Catholic or just some Post Revolutionary payback.
There was no official policy, as far as I can tell, that was anti Catholic. Others of the identified landlord class also got screwed.
After 1954, the Catholics even more identified with the South Vietnamese govt because the Bishop of all Vietnam was Diems brother.
Whats most interesting and that you don?t often hear from our side was that Ho publically apologized for these excesses and promised that corrective measures were taken. Whether they were or not, at least that society had the value of introspection and redress which is at least a good start.

OK lets look at the South.
Before, during and after Diem?s power grab in 1954 that created South Vietnam, as I say, Lansdale was embarked on a program of disinformation and. Sabotage against the north which included armed commando saboteurs and as much economic havoc as they could raise.
Diem, once he gained power, took stock of the fact that he was a Catholic dictator in a Buddhist country and started sending truck convoys up to the North to bring whole villages of panicked Catholics South, promising them good land and plenty of relief.
Don?t forget the North had been the most devastated in the war, there was starvation conditions in much of the country.
Once down South, the Catholic Diem family made sure they got the best land in their huge?Land Reform? movement when they grabbed most of the best land in the South.
But wait a minute?that lands been inhabited over 3000 years?there IS no good land that isn?t owned. The Diem ?Land Reform? policy turned out to be a huge land grab from its longtime rightful owners and especially if they were Buddhists or other than Christian, as most of th Viet Minh were..
This is actually where the shooting war started that turned in to be our war?resistance to Diems land and power grab in 1954. The US view of it was Yippie!! All the Christians are living safe in nice houses. The Vietnamese view was that Diem had grabbed all the best land and given it and all the power away to his favorite people. Nothing to do but pick up the ol AK and throw the foreigners out, according to the most of them and I can't say at this late date that I disagree.
But it didn?t stop there. As the Diems further solidified their hold on they imposed an sedition law against their regime that was a capital crime. They had guillotines mounted on trailers going around the country taking care of dissent. Ive seen estimates of executions running from 10,000 to 100,000?take your pick.
Ho at least apologized later and promised redress whether he did it or not?it wouldn?t have occurred to Diem and broaching the idea to him would have got you in jail. He believed he ruled by divine authority, I?m not kidding. When Dulles called him The Churchill of Asia ol Winnie must have sht a square turd.
But where the Diems really blew it was clamping down on the Buddhists hard. They got real oppressive, refusing to allow them to congregate or parade their religion. They jailed many Buddhists on sedition, which, by that time, amounted to any real resistance to their regime. Remember The Flaming Monks? That was what they were protesting?political oppression, not the war.
I think this, and his refusal to approve of more military presence, was what got him killed with USA approval?it was obvious his government was going no where and that the whole nonCatholic country was up in arms against him.

So my take on it is that the Catholics, motivated by free land in a better place, after experiencing some oppression came South. But anybody who says there was freedom of religion in the South was not a Buddhist
There seems to be freedom of religion now

Just more twists on a tragic story. Perhaps there will be Shakespeare some day to do it justice


Have a good one!!

James

[MORTARDUDE]

Jmaes :

As usual, a very well thought out and detailed historical analysis. Some questions : What exactly does "pluralistic leadership" mean ? How would you describe our leadership ? The leadership of South Vietnam from 1966 - 1975 ?

Let's cut to the chase..."Communism" ( whether "Marxist" or "Leninist" or "Socialist" or "with a human face"... LOL ) in all its myriad forms and shapes ( since materializing in 1918 with indirect USA assistance in the Soviet Union...look it up ! ), is simply another form of a fascist / dictatorship. The leaders are not elected the way we do things here. Political executions are WRONG, no matter which side spills the blood, or how and why they APOLOGIZE for it. JFK had Diem killed and he had signed the orders to withdraw all of our military from all of South East Asia ( and disband the CIA ) ...when LBJ had him knocked off ( either directly or indirectly ) and reversed that order and created the horror that many of us were in from 1963 - 1975 ( one of us was on the last chopper out from atop the American Embassy in April 1975... )

Vietnam was a Civil War. We had no business there...


your turn James....

Larry

[exlrrp]

"That being said, why I hated most of the Vietnam Protesters, they were our peers and were protesting US calling us vile names and carrying the flags of our enemies. They carried their protests to our embarkation stations and our return bases. They painted us all with one brush and chose the side of our enemy."

I perceive that that is exactly what you are doing here--painting all the protestors with one brush. There as a HUGE spectrum of protestors just as there was a huge spectrum of pro war people--there should have been no middle ground. As a matter of fct I think you take isolated incidences and make it reality.
How many hippies got their asses kicked by GIs, their longhair cursed? A lot more than the other way around.
I saw many many people appeal to soldiers on the human level, as I did.
I took the side of America and what was the best thing for America. I am telling you now: America or Vietnam did not need one single life lost more than what was lost and would have been a lot better off not to lose a life at all..
I supported and stood up for an end to the war, and peace and I'm glad I did, I was right as history proved so well, ending the war was the best thing. If that makes me your enemy, then so be it but I did not make it so

I'm glad I did what I did every time I look at the picture in Pleiku.

James

[exlrrp]

Originally posted by MORTARDUDE Jmaes :

As usual, a very well thought out and detailed historical analysis. Some questions : What exactly does "pluralistic leadership" mean ? How would you describe our leadership ? The leadership of South Vietnam from 1966 - 1975 ?

Let's cut to the chase..."Communism" ( whether "Marxist" or "Leninist" or "Socialist" or "with a human face"... LOL ) in all its myriad forms and shapes ( since materializing in 1918 with indirect USA assistance in the Soviet Union...look it up ! ), is simply another form of a fascist / dictatorship.
Vietnam was a Civil War. We had no business there...


your turn James....

Larry

I certainly agree with thisstatement: "Vietnam was a Civil War. We had no business there..."
except we instigated the whole mess. And it was bad business.
It should have ended in n 1954 with the Geneva Agreements, the supervised election in 1956.
Diem canceled them because he said the Communists would rig them. Would Ho have won an honest election? Maybe, maybe not but Diem and the Eisenhower administration believed real strongly he wouldn't win an honest election--or they would have had one. They certainly had the means to do so and theycertainly did not.
So theycanceled it and all the other provisions of the Agreement that a long hard war had been fought for, by people other than them.
I have no doubt Ho would have won an honest election, he was by far` and away the person of greatest statue in Vietnam in the mid 50s. Diem was almost unknown in Vietnam before 1954 whereas Ho had started orgainzing for revolution in 1911, was the country's best known political figure, had actually governed the country once. Ho had a lot of good PR working for him, he lived simply an humbly, his whole life was the revolution whereas Diem was a closet monarchist with a Let em eat cake attitude. This in an austere country with essentially conservative attitude . He lived on the backs of some mighty poor off people and they knew it..
He was no politician as we know it, he abhored public contact as per handshaking electioneering. Ho moved and lioved among the population generaly in humble circumstance, with no bodyguard at all, a well loved figure.
Diem would not have stood a chance in an honest election


Pluralistic leadership is opposed to a monarchy or oligarchy--we have a form of pluralistic leadership, a 3 part government providing checks and balances. We have people serving defined terms, its not a nepotism presidency passed down father to son.
Well scratch that last but you get th picture.
Communism and socialism theories are based on pluralistic leadership. Leading committees theoreticlly comprised of the workers. This is easy to subvert into a dictatorship by consolidating the power but then-- true democracy gets subverted quite a bit also--our current president is not the one who got the most votes, for instance, he was appointed by the Supreme Court.
A form of pluralistic leadership at least provides some manner of internal dialogue over policies where an oligarchy, like Saddams or Kin Il Jong's or Diems allows none.
One of Ho's legacies is that he insisted that there would be no personlity cult made around him and this is what saved his country from beoming another Cuba or North Korea.
The leadership is and always was plural, we just say Ho did this or Ho did that but what we mean mostly is his organization--that was his genius--organization on a shoestring, back to the wall, with the world's cheapest suits for allies--its quite a story, well worth reading
Gotta run, Larry, Tom, have a good one

James

[Andy]

Packo brought up a point that needs to be addressed. I went to a few street rallies on a college campus or two and had a lot of fun. Most of the kids there were looking for fun and found it. That is a far cry from the people who went out of their way to hassle troops, committed vandalism or even bombed buildings.

As a cop we always knew that in a crowd of 100 people there were usually no more than 10 agitators. The 10%ers all needed a good ass kicking and were out of step with the rest of the world. However a 10%er who had good speaking abilities could often rile up at least some of the other 90%.

In previous posts I mentioned going to protest rallies. If anyone didn?t catch it, I was protesting the fact I hadn?t been to bed with a young lady in at least the last 12 hours. For most protesters it was like going to a bar or dance hall, except it was outside and there were more girls to pick from. If there was any talk of ?baby killers? I spoke loud and long. Those of you who know me probably will have little difficulty believing that.

I don?t agree with some of what James has said, however by the end of ?69 the President had a plan to end the war and it didn?t include winning. So why should another 20,000 of our brothers die? It just didn?t make sense to me, still doesn?t.

I?m tempted to get into the discussion regarding elections and the fact that on a communist ballot there is only one candidate but that?s another story.

Stay healthy,
Andy

[MORTARDUDE]

One thing I would like to add about the catch-all phrases, "protests" ( and "protestors" ). The ones I really respected were the Vietnam, Cambodian, and Laotian combat vets ( all services ) who came back and instead of trying to bury or forget all they had been through, took it to another level and tried to educate those who were unwilling to go, couldn't go, were stupid, had friends or relatives in harm's way, or just didn't get it. John Kerry is in that group. He sort of bugs me now, but not for that reason. Does that make sense ? When I got out of the US Army after 23 months and left Ft. Hood in May 1971, I didn't want to hear, see, or talk about most of it for quite awhile....

Larry