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(82,383 posts)58000 dog tags there.
MADem
(135,425 posts)A lot of work to make all those replicas.
It does make a powerful display.
uppityperson
(115,677 posts)sheshe2
(83,791 posts)I fell the same uppity, the connection to all those lost souls.
uppityperson
(115,677 posts)each death. My kid helped me count them out and while it didn't amount to a lot of cash, it was very sobering counting out death by death by death. We quit at 1000 as it got to be too difficult.
So many gone.
calimary
(81,320 posts)Even just seeing it in a two-dimensional photo. I want to reach up and run my hands through them, and listen to the random percussive music they make. And watch them move. And think about the souls they represent.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
ancianita
(36,081 posts)valerief
(53,235 posts)but must wait to get it.
TBF
(32,067 posts)shraby
(21,946 posts)a generation of what could have been inventors, innovators, employers, etc. Why is it that old men feel it necessary from time to time to cull huge numbers of young men from the gene pool?
sheshe2
(83,791 posts)With my sister and soon to be brother in law also my future husband. We watched the draft, neither were on the low #'s list and both were in college.
An incredibly sad history as so much of ours is.
Sad times, shraby. We lost so many.
shraby
(21,946 posts)after coming home. I maintain a county genealogy site and just updated my cemeteries with deaths between 1978 and 2008. Shocked me at how many Vietnam vets I had to enter.
Divernan
(15,480 posts)Don't send your kids off to fight for "our country" unless your loyalty is to Halliburton. I mourn for all who died in wars - both soldiers and civilians. They didn't die "for our freedom" or "to keep us free" - they died for war profiteers, and General Butler spells it out with moral authority, in absolute detail and no uncertain terms. Smedley Darlington Butler was a United States Marine Corps major general, the highest rank authorized at that time, and at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. Thanks to my old friend (and Army vet) Fran for sharing this with me.
This video is a professional actor reading the words of USMC General Smedley Butler, circa 1935.
bigtree
(85,998 posts). . . thanks, sheshe2!
sheshe2
(83,791 posts)Powerful, so very powerful. The same as your OP on your dad. I was moved by that.
bigtree
(85,998 posts). . . thanks for looking in on my Dad story.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)What did the Vietnam War gain us? Other than the distrust of the world?
alfredo
(60,074 posts)napkinz
(17,199 posts)that IS a powerful image
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)for all the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people killed as a result of the U.S. government interventions, invasions and wars of aggression in Indochina in the years from 1954 to 1975.
sheshe2
(83,791 posts)We don't need to stop there either.
Lets add this to the GOP intervention, the war they wage with women...all the dead should be memorialized here. 11,766 women have died in the US due to domestic violence from 2001-2012.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025003403#top
Lest we forget the children that are being starved in this country due to GOP cuts in snaps and unemployment insurance. They love the fetus and starve the child. They are dying too. The list goes on because the GOP continues to wage a war against everyone that is not in the 1%. They hate us with a passion.
Their policies are geared to end our lives.
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)during that time.
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)They weren't invading from another continent, literally on the other side of the planet. They weren't bombing from the air with napalm, daisy cutters and Agent Orange. They were not shooting anyone who dared to breathe within a designated "free-fire zone."
The U.S. government prevented the elections under Geneva, then set up a kleptocratic dictatorship in the south under a Catholic elite from the north, lied to escalate the conflict when this dictatorship fell by inventing a fake casus belli, sent in half a million invaders, and proceeded to escalate murderous measures against civilians and combatants until it had put millions of people in concentration camps ("strategic hamlets" and was overseeing a system that rounded up 50,000 civilians largely at random for torture and murder without any kind of legal proceeding (Operation Phoenix).
It also overthrew the Cambodian government for wanting to stay out of this madness and bombed that country in secret, killing hundreds of thousands of people and smoothing the way for the Khmer Rouge (which it then tolerated in alliance with China since it was anti-Vietnamese).
In the end millions died, about half killed directly by the invading American forces, in a conflict that would have ended with the election of Ho Chi Minh by an 80% majority in 1956 (by Eisenhower's admission) if the U.S. had not intervened on behalf of a European imperialist project.
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)Sure, the US messed up in Indochina. I'm not denying that.
You quote Eisenhower as admitting that an 80% majority of Vietnamese favored Ho Chi Minh (which I have serious doubts about), yet the Eisenhower administration itself "used (SEATO) as its justification for refusing to go forward with the 1956 elections intended to reunify Vietnam". (http://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/seato) Do you really think that "Uncle Ho" was interested in free and fair elections? Do you really think that South Vietnam was better off once the North Vietnamese took over?
I don't want to sound like a John Bircher, but I have known people from both China and South Vietnam who were around both before and after the Communists took over in their respective countries, and they all said the Communist systems sucked. How many millions of people died in the Greal Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution? How many untold thousands of South Vietnamese were forcibly sent away to camps after the fall of Saigon? Uncle Ho would have had purges in the South, regardless of whether or not there had been US involvement.
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/vietnam/ddeho.htm
Eisenhower's Views on the Popularity of Ho Chi Minh
Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-56 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Compnay, Inc., 1963), p. 372
I am convinced that the French could not win the war because the internal political situation in Vietnam, weak and confused, badly weakened their military position. I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for. As one Frenchman said to me, "What Vietnam needs is another Syngman Rhee, regardless of all the difficulties the presence of such a personality would entail."
You, two questions:
Do you really think that "Uncle Ho" was interested in free and fair elections? Do you really think that South Vietnam was better off once the North Vietnamese took over?
1) Of course, since Ho knew what the certain outcome would have been! Furthermore, after World War II he sought alliance with the United States and chose July 4th, 1946 as the date for the second announcement of Vietnam's declaration of independence from France. The Vietnamese declaration directly cites the American. It is a great tragedy that the U.S. did not take this historic opportunity but instead chose to continue the bloody imperialist legacy of France.
2) Certainly, the people there were not as well-off after 1975 as they would have been if the U.S. government had not intervened 20 years earlier to create this non-existent nation in the first place. After 20 years of murder for which the U.S. government was the primary instigator, things were of course much worse for everyone.
What do you think was going on in the South, when despite all this butchery by the Americans they were unable to pacify it and their selected governments kept falling? An insurgency on that scale is not possible without popular support! Why do you think the Americans herded the rural population into concentration camps and let them out every morning to farm the rice fields? Because they were so damn beloved by the peasants?
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)Why was that? And why had the Eisenhower administration pushed for the establishment of SEATO in 1954? I think that by 1956, it had become quite clear that China was interested in creating Communist client states arounds its borders, in much the same way that the Soviet Union had done, and that Ho Chi Minh was just going to become a Chinese puppet. Just look at China's forced annexation of Tibet, Chinese military support for North Korea, Chinese clashes with India in border areas, Chinese support of Communist guerilla groups in the Philippines, Chinese threats against Thailand, etc, that had been occurring up to that time. And that's not to mention Mao's purges that were going on within China. So even though the US messed up bigtime in Southeast Asia, the countries of Indochina in all likelihood would have become Chinese puppet states anyway.
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts), the Eisenhower administration was not interested in the 1956 elections
Why was that? Because the side they preferred would have lost. So they destroyed the peace and put the country and region through another 20 years of even more horrific war, using the geostrategic garnish you serve up yourself as their excuse. The issue, then as now, was to enrich the military-industrial complex that diagnosed non-existent threats and created the problems it pretended to combat. A self-licking ice cream cone.
It was not the business of the United States government to interfere in the outcome of Vietnam's struggle for independence. Absolute zero legitimacy on behalf of either side. But the choice was made on behalf of continuing the historic crimes of European imperialism, and to do so on a genocidal scale, killing millions.
That is also what I should have answered to your last set of questions: regardless of the answers (could Ho be trusted, blah blah blah), it was not U.S. business to interfere! And for the people actually there, nothing could possibly be improved through a U.S. military intervention. Everything was made much worse.
That's reality, not one of your what-ifs -- which I reject, obviously: I'll pick my own what-ifs if I want them. Like, what if, instead of supporting French atrocity, the U.S. had taken up Ho Chi Minh's desire to be a nationalist ally to the America, rather than a communist enemy?
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)and that as a result, the US had signed a mutual defense treaty with Ho's Vietnam. What would or should the United States have done if (or more likely, when) the Chinese decided that it would be in their interest to train and fund Vietnamese insurgents, and perhaps even send troops into Vietnam to create a client state?
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)I feel no need to answer your what-ifs. What if aliens invade, won't we be happy then that the NSA has all these surveillance cameras, blah blah blah?
Contrary to all your counterfactuals, I am talking about something that actually happened, and that we must never forget:
Your U.S. government, apparently with your support, committed an inexcusable mass murder of millions of people, most of them civilian non-combatants, in large part by indiscriminately incinerating from the air. The blood from this crime will never wash out. The primary perpetrators were never prosecuted, they were rewarded. One of the architects still lives, his name is Kissinger.
Your U.S. government continues this indiscriminate murder of the Vietnamese today, as each year sees children who are stillborn and die prematurely because of the genocidal effort to render the jungle extinct using Agent Orange.
This war of aggression, the worst set of war crimes committed across borders in the period since 1945, was justified by intentionally exaggerated what-ifs like "the domino theory." Why do you feel compelled to sling variants of this discredited nonsense now, 50 years later?
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)One reason why the Truman administration turned down Ho's overtures in 1945 was that Ho was the leader of a Communist movement that had already been purging opponents.
And I think you are confusing the date July 4, 1946-- that was the day that the United States officially recognized Philippine independence. July 1946 in Vietnam was not a particularly auspicious month:
"In 1946, when Ho traveled outside of the country, his subordinates imprisoned 2,500 non-communist nationalists and forced 6,000 others to flee.[39] Hundreds of political opponents were jailed or exiled in July 1946, notably members of the National Party of Vietnam and the Dai Viet National Party, after a failed attempt to raise a coup against the Vietminh government.[40][41] All rival political parties were hereafter banned and local governments were purged[42] to minimize opposition later on."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)"Hundreds of political opponents were jailed or exiled in July 1946, notably members of the National Party of Vietnam and the Dai Viet National Party, after a failed attempt to raise a coup against the Vietminh government."
Those Vietminh! Why didn't they give hugs and chocolates to the people who tried to overthrow them? In the face of this shock, shocking behavior by a liberation movement that was literally under attack from multiple foreign invaders, it was America's sacred duty to step in from the other side of the Pacific! We were the only ones who could restore the righteous, legitimate, bloody, racist, imperialist rule of the French republic over a randomly-conquered territory at the opposite end of Eurasia from France!
It's not like Truman was conducting any purges of perceived domestic enemies at the same time, on a lot less pretext. The man who had just dropped atomic bombs on cities was totally the one to tell the Vietnamese how to run their affairs!
JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)The astonishing thing at the moment this was first issued is that there were no French occupation forces in Indochina, they had been expelled and a force to reimpose their rule was still being assembled in Europe.
A small contingent of British who had accepted the Japanese surrender were trying to maintain the French interest by keeping the Japanese forces under arms as police against the Vietnamese people!
Better the fascists than freedom and self-determination for the inferior Asian peoples. Or any other peoples who had some weird idea that their country belonged to them, and not to the European and U.S. empires or "spheres of influence."
Righteous!
From September 2, 1945 (reiterated July 4, 1946)
"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights."
Those are undeniable truths.
Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellowcitizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.
In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.
They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center, and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united.
They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood.
They have fettered public opinion; they have practised obscurantism against our people.
To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.
In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land.
They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of banknotes and the export trade.
They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty.
They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers.
In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese Fascists violated Indochina's territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them.
Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quang Tri province to the North of Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow citizens died from starvation. On March 9, the French troops were disarmed by the Japanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered showing that not only were they incapable of "protecting" us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese.
On several occasions before March 9, the Vietminh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead of agreeing to this proposal, the French colonialists so intensified their terrorist activities against the Vietminh members that before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners detained at Yen Bay and Caobang.
Notwithstanding all this, our fellowcitizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese putsch of March 1945, the Vietminh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property.
From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession.
After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French.
The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic.
For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; we repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Vietnam and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland.
The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country.
We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam.
A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.
For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country-and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.
Ho Chi Minh, "Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Viemam, " Selected Writings