Vietnam: Body Counts and America as Victim - Christian Appy on Reality Asserts Itself

[Jefferson23]

On Reality Asserts Itself, Mr. Appy says the Vietnam War killed millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of American workers - yet the mythology is America as a whole emerged as the victim June 2, 2015

So let's just pick up where we were. We were about to talk about how the narrative is not only do we have to be the toughest in the world, but we're also a victim, which is why we then have to go be so tough. But everything gets turned into victimhood.

But before we get completely into that, a little bit of a segue--but it's connected to it. If you talk about Vietnam, we've talked about the real victims, who were primarily the Vietnamese people. But also, if you go to America, the real victims were African-Americans who paid with their lives in completely unequal numbers.

CHRISTIAN G. APPY, AUTHOR, AMERICAN RECKONING: Certainly at the beginning of the war. In '65 and '66, more than 20 percent of American fatalities were African-American, which was almost twice their proportion of the population, though over the course of the entire war, that percentage falls to about 12.5 percent, which was still a little bit disproportionate. But I really think the military, in response to civil rights activism and calling out the early disparities, began to try to reduce the number of African-American casualties. But it is clear they were certainly more vulnerable to the draft.

My own view is that the disproportions are primarily class-based. This really was a working-class war, and it was under a draft system that was biased in almost every possible way.

in full: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=13953

[DustyJoe]

1. 10s of thousands of workers ?

The US dead were SOLDIERS not workers. An attempt to relegate combat deaths to a factory worker or equivelant is ludicrous. Plus the stats have been out there for decades on casualty breakdown, and it was found that bullets and shrapnel was an equal opportunity killer with no regard to the recipients class, race or rank and killed our guys with statistics comparable to population percentages.
ie;

http://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics.html#race

The numbers speak for themselves. The disproportions at least in my opinion are the fact they died at all.

[Jefferson23]

2. snip*

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