Click HERE to see this thread with all of the graphics, features, and links.

Do you think America did the right thing by getting involved in Vietnam in the manner we did? It seems a lot of people these days think the entire thing was a mistake. But I wonder was going to Vietnam in general the mistake..or was the mistake that we stayed there too long? In other words should we of avoided it all together or merely just pulled out a lot sooner?

I would say yes. It was. Because our political leaders at the time had no intention of actually WINNING the war.

I think some of them did, but they had a weird definition of winning. Some figured that as long as we killed more people then we lost that we would be the "winners".

Follow up question: was it right for us to give college students deferments for the draft during the war? For instance that would essentially mean the poorer you were the more likely you were to be sent to Vietnam.

American interventionism has more or less always been wrong.

Was it wrong that even as we were in the process of pulling out troops..we didn't take up strictly defensive measures? By this I mean you would figure if the military is in the process of sending the soldiers home that you wouldn't actually send soldiers out on the defensive. You'd figure if the enemy came to them they'd defend themselves, but that they wouldn't go looking for it.

Well that wasn't the case, though a lot of people just flat out refused orders like that.

Another thing I found interesting is that when you think of the protests over the Vietnam War people usually tend to think of college students and stuff like that. However the reality was there was a very sizable amount of college students who supported the war.

Another thing to remember is the problems this war caused for even the soldiers who survived it. A lot of them came back addicted to heroin. But heroin was a lot cheaper to buy in Vietnam then it was in the states, so a decent amount of them couldn't afford to support their habits and thus turned to crime in order to do so.

I know that a lot of Vietnamese people from the south were pissed as hell when America pulled out, as they felt like they were abandoned to the armies of the north.

As far as going in, in the first place? No. It was just another in a long line of countries that thought they could go in to Vietnam, only to fail pretty badly.

Originally posted by Surtur
Do you think America did the right thing by getting involved in Vietnam in the manner we did? It seems a lot of people these days think the entire thing was a mistake. But I wonder was going to Vietnam in general the mistake..or was the mistake that we stayed there too long? In other words should we of avoided it all together or merely just pulled out a lot sooner?
Sure, why not? Gotta be somebody needs some killing.

I remember reading about a lot of disturbing things we did during this war. In this one documentary this one soldier talked about how when it came to taking prisoners and transporting them via helicopter they were told to never count the amount of prisoners getting onto the craft and only count the number of prisoners that got off the craft.

In other words, it was very likely they'd quite literally be tossing prisoners out of airplanes/helicopters for no reason. Thus why they said not to count them when they get in, because the number would most likely be different from the number of people that get off the craft once it lands.

There was also a time during the war that 1 out of every 4 soldiers that died weren't dying in combat, but via drug overdose. I'm sure people have also heard the stories of military personnel shipping back drugs in the body bags of dead marines. A direct result of this war was a vast amount of heroin hitting the streets of America.

Yes. Kennedy was completely wrong and should have never been president because he was a mafia thug.

Vietnam was a good thing.

I do think the war would of ended sooner had Kennedy not been killed. Kennedy did make some mistakes, but not all of them were necessarily his fault. Some were the result of his advisors either misleading him or outright lying to him.

Rude. (auto quote)

Edit: what's with the hush garage post deletes?

I demand repayment for the time I wasted writing that post

Revolution, when?

A complicated series of events happened that would result in the escalation into Vietnam, not just the popular domino theory, which was proven to be false (ie. We let Vietnam go Communist, all of Southeast Asia will follow.) That didn't happen, so the war in the end was a waste of time and put America through trauma - but maybe the trauma was necessary growth, as young people revolted & really shook the foundations of the country there for a while.

Vietnam is still Communist, but is stable, has normal trade relations with the West, and is not ever listed as being one of those rogue nations.

The whole reasoning for us going into Vietnam was that we thought if we did nothing then the entirety of Southeast Asia would fall to communism. We intervened and many nations did fall anyway, but even after South Vietnam fell it wasn't a complete victory for global communism.

We never were able to prop up a government in South Vietnam that was both strong enough to resist communist pressure AND popular with its own people.

Originally posted by roughrider
A complicated series of events happened that would result in the escalation into Vietnam, not just the popular domino theory, which was proven to be false (ie. We let Vietnam go Communist, all of Southeast Asia will follow.) That didn't happen, so the war in the end was a waste of time and put America through trauma - but maybe the trauma was necessary growth, as young people revolted & really shook the foundations of the country there for a while.

Vietnam is still Communist, but is stable, has normal trade relations with the West, and is not ever listed as being one of those rogue nations.
I actually have a good friend who's teaching English in Vietnam as a Fullbright scholar. From what he says it seems like a pretty okay place. It's not free by our standards, but it isn't anything close to North Korea either.

Yeah they truly thought the Domino theory was a thing. Was it ever shown if their fears had any basis in reality?

Originally posted by Surtur
Yeah they truly thought the Domino theory was a thing. Was it ever shown if their fears had any basis in reality?
Well, some, but it was exagerrated. If a country became communist, it would start giving support to communist organizations/insurgencies in neighboring countries.

Do you think the world would be drastically different if we'd stayed out of Vietnam? Or if we'd never sent actual troops in and the most we did was airstrikes? Since I've seen some people say they felt that all we should of done was airstrikes and nothing else.

Originally posted by Surtur
Do you think the world would be drastically different if we'd stayed out of Vietnam? Or if we'd never sent actual troops in and the most we did was airstrikes? Since I've seen some people say they felt that all we should of done was airstrikes and nothing else.
The North Vietnamese would have won the war quicker, we'd have lost much fewer people. My guess is that people who say we should have just done airstrikes are thinking of contemporary air power. What we had in Vietnam wasn't really comparable to the level of aerial sophistication and power we have today. We didn't have smart bombs, we didn't have stealth aircraft, and the technological gap between our airforce and the North Vietnamese airforce wasn't as massive as it was between the USAF and the Iraqi Air Force in Desert Storm and the Iraq War. I don't think an aerial campaign alone would have been successful at all.


There's no telling though how different America would have been, as Vietnam was a really important cultural event for our country's history.

Yes. It gave us The Punisher!

But seriously, no.