i suck at spelling but i mean the veatamis war, spellnig again
but i would liek to know your tohguhtso n this war because over the summer i got quite interested in this war and the political things gonig on in the US at the same time I am hoppnig your opinions on if you were for or agasnt this war ( or if it would happen now owuld you) and would you enroll in the army for this war.Another hting i would liek is would you be a hippi( not the pot smoknig hippis the orignal hippis) or would you be soemone for the war. these are my questions to you.
Thanks very much

I would suggest that you spend more time studying your English lessons than worrying about national, international politics and war. I'd also suggest that you spend less time on the Internet, too ...it'll cloud your judgement with overly biased bullshit which you aren't equipped to deal with.

Baron Max

I was alive then. I was draft age. At first you could get a deferment simply by enrolling in a university. I was already in one so I escaped for a while. Then they ruled that you could only get a student deferment for four years and I was on my fifth year. But being married got you a deferment. My fiance and I pushed our wedding up and I escaped for a while longer. Then they ruled that being married wasn't good enough.

I studied my situation and my options. Move to Canada? Nice place, nice people, great music. (Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Ian and Sylvia, the list was endless, as it is today.) But was leaving my family and my friends forever the only way to avoid going to war?

I became a hypocrite. I realized there were plenty of assignments in the military that made the probability of seeing combat virtually zero. I had just gotten my university degree so I applied for Air Force Officer's Training School. With my eyeglasses, there was no way I would ever be put aboard a fighter or a bomber--especially if I didn't elect to go to flight school--and that was the only way a member of the Air Force was likely to see combat. I wanted to go the the Language School and master a new language, and be a translator or something like that.

A cop-out. Not making a statement, not making a sacrifice. Just saving my own ass. A lot of men with university degrees did that. The war was fought primarily by the least well educated Americans. If I could have figured out a way to save one of them from being killed in action, without having to risk my own life as a trade, it wouldn't have been so easy to make the choice. But there was no way. Lots of good people were trying to end the war and bring the boys home, but lots of very powerful assholes wanted the war to continue because it was good for business. (Sound familiar???)

Ironically, when I went in for my physical exam, I failed. I was injured in an accident the year before and have a poorly healed fracture. After all this, it turned out that they didn't want me!

I was never a hippie because in order to be a hippie you had to not have a job, and I always had a job.

To this day I remain a pacifist. I can envision situations in which going to war is the only reasonable option, for example if someone else attacks your country. But no military force has attacked the United States since 1941, and Hawaii at that time was not even a State. The States were not United during the Civil War so I would not have taken sides--despite all the after-the-fact retro-propaganda, the Civil War was not fought to free the slaves, it was purely a conflict over economics and culture. I think the last time the States themselves were attacked by a foreign nation was the War of 1812.

We should have stayed out of WWI. We should not have goaded Japan into attacking us and stayed out of WWII. We should really have stayed out of Korea and Vietnam--China is threatening to overtake us anyway, so what did we accomplish? The war in Iraq is sheer idiocy: the people responsible for Islamist terrorism and 9/11 are the Saudi Arabians, whom we call allies.

By the way, smoking pot was not a hippie activity. In the 1960s and 1970s, people from every demographic group smoked pot. Math majors, football players, fraternity and sorority members, mechanics, accountants, police, soldiers and sailors.

i said not the pot smoknig hippi's i nthe bigning in around 1969 ibelive hippies werep eopel who opposed the war,
that is a very good story though fraggle walker, and it sounds fimilir as with iraq,
there were 2 things that got me intersted in the war stephen kings hearts in atlantis and also ozzy osbornes song war pigs,
do you guys have anyhting i can read that is good, but wotn put me to sleep it being so dry and full of words i dotn really understand?( belive it or not i do have a high vocabulary, jsut soemthing without the big scientific terms) if you could tell me one thnaks. also, ifanyone knows of such a book that is about veitnam through the peopel opposing the wars eyes? if you know one of those it would be great also, again thanks

What the heck? Stop typing with your toes.

lol but its fun!... alright fine i will....... :(

Spoken like a true wise man, Fraggle. That's why everyone likes ya! :)

- N

I remember the war as being more public and more personal. It was in the news and gritty. America's war today is a sound bite at most. Where is the video and the drama in simple info bites of a war that is being waged with national sacrifice?

If you're looking for music about a dead war, here's one by The Who..


Out here in the fields
I fought for my meals
I get my back into my living
I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right
I don't need to be forgiven

Don't cry
Don't raise your eye
It's only teenage wasteland

Sally ,take my hand
We'll travel south crossland
Put out the fire
Don't look past my shoulder
The exodus is here
The happy ones are near
So let's get together
Before we get much older

Teenage wasteland
It's only teenage wasteland
Teenage wasteland
Oh..yeah
Teenage wasteland
They're all wasted

The time is ripe for protest. Now is the time for you to get involved with history--where is a good liberal activist without a cause when you need one. :D

The Vietnam War dragged on for many years, killing off thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Vietnamese people... and providing billions of dollars of profit for "defense" contractors. The West Coast underwent an economic boom that it may never see again. From Seattle to San Diego, factories turning out war materiel kept everyone employed and kept the standard of living incredibly high. In an era when you could rent a really nice apartment in frelling Hollywood for $150 a month, computer programmers with two or three years' experience were earning $800 a month.

President Nixon was a flawed man who did some really despicable things, but as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day. He foresaw the inevitability of rapprochement between the U.S. and China and he did the right thing by withdrawing our forces from Vietnam and embarking on a personal diplomatic mission to China.

Nixon was no liberal activist. It was an axiom in those days that Democratic Presidents got us into wars and Republican Presidents got us out. (WWII being the glaring exception, there was a Democrat at both ends.) The Republican Bush Dynasty's mindless frenzy to get us into WWIII in the Mideast in deference to the petroleum industry is a really scary paradigm shift in American politics. Can any Democrat get us out?

The Vietnam War dragged on for many years, killing off ….tens of thousands of Vietnamese people
10,000’s??????

Millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians died as a result of that war, either directly or indirectly.

Kennedy had started the decade by inspiring a new generation to ask not what the country would do for them but to ask what they could do for the country. By the end of the decade they were being asked to die in the rice patties of SE Asia because of an event (Gulf of Tonkein attack) that never happened. The theater d'absurd atmosphere reached the point where the kill numbers reported exceeded the population of the North. It did not feel like comic relief.

What in the name of his noodly appendages...take a fuckin' English lesson, rick!

would you guys say htis war was unnessisary? why r why not? i sjut want ot learn it through the eyes of the people books have imformation, but it doesnet have the emotions of people's ideas. if you have a good book about veitnam that isnt dry though, pelase tell me so i can loo kor it at my school and public library thiough, thanks in advance

Uh....if I am interpereting your retarded mish-mash jumble of words correctly:
1. No, it was not necisarry.
2. Caused millions of deaths, and in the end Vietnamese was united under NV anyway, so the US and ARVN's main mission was compromised.

il istned to the song by the who it was very good, and you did interprete it correctly

IMO, the 1960's are back--the protest movement is just getting under way. I lived through the Vietnam era myself--and being of military age then, I could have gone to war, but New Zealand's involvement was much smaller and I didn't end up going 'cos NZ pulled its troops out in '72 when Kirk's Labour govt. got in power. I have a feeling that the US govt. hasn't learned a thing from Vietnam, and are on the road to being sucked into another godawful swamp. :eek:

its calleed iraq.... basterds, im saprised there havent been many big protests liek vietnam had yet, or else bush is covering htem up ( and quite nicley if he is)

There are still protests going on, they're just not of the same violent nature as the ones during Vietnam. There are hundreds of books dedicated to the anti-war/anti-Bush groups. Look at today's pop culture, it's full of anti-war messages (Green Day, Fahrenheit 9/11...). It's just that nowadays people are channeling their political frustration differently. Besides, we're still in somewhat of a conservative backlash from the 60's/70's.

And riku--if you want ppl to give you book recommendations, I suggest you prove to them that you actually understand English.

The Vietnam war was a total clusterfuck, an enormous waste of lives and money, and the same people that lived through it and never learned it's lessons are responsible for doing it again in Iraq.

The difference is there is no draft, and "only" 2,000 or so killed instead of 50,000.

That's what I'm most about with Vietnam/Iraq; that the oompha-loompas who run the White House are going to find some reason to go in to Iran, Syria, et. al. and then we have a blow-up situation like I saw in the '70's when they gate-crashed the Cambodian party next door, and turned it into the front hall of Hell. I have a feeling that the swamp is about to get a lot deeper, and turn into quicksand just like Indo-china did.

Xylene, what do you mean? can you expalin what your talknig about for me please?

What I mean, riku, is that those dumb dreks in the White House don't seem to understand that they're right on the brink of the same cliff that they toppled over in the late 1960's-early 1970's, when they started getting more and more deeply involved in the IndoChina situation. They didn't realise what sort of shit they were getting into, they had no idea of the history of the area, and they thought they could just go in, smack a few people around and everything would be sweet, and then they could all go home. What they found was that they sank into a bloody morass from which it took them years and thousands of casualties to extract themselves. I grew to adulthood during those years, and I remember every day we'd open the newspaper to the international news, and youd see that latest stats on the number of Americans killed in Vietnam, Cambodia or wherever--the same thing is happening today, run by the same kind of stupid people who don't learn anything from history. :confused: :bugeye:

Thats the American government for you.But hey, im British ;) :m:

Thats the American government for you.But hey, im British ;) :m:

The British learned the hard lessons of empire in the 19th-early 20th Century--they don't need to relearn them.

It seems like america does though doesent it?

The parallel I see between Viet Nam and today is the belief that the ends just justifies the means.
Johnson believed in the Domino theory that the world would fall to communism one country at a time so to stop the fall he was willing to fabricate the Gulf of Tonkein lie.
The current administration considers anything that might stop terrorism to be allowable. Gathering information justifies circumventing wire-tap laws. The possibility of killing a terrorist leader justifies bombing an ally and killing 14 of their citizens.

Hey, Hey, LBJ,
How many kids did you kill today?

Geistkiesel

It seems like america does though doesent it?

Exactly--that's the problem, riku. It's what Napolean and everyone else found out the hard way--those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

napolean is the guy hwo sold us the luisana terrtory to pay for his war in europe right?

napolean is the guy hwo sold us the luisana terrtory to pay for his war in europe right?

That's right--$15,000,000 if I remember rightly--I stand to be corrected on that.

il istned to the song by the who it was very good, and you did interprete it correctly

Jimi Hendrix was actually there.

napolean is the guy hwo sold us the luisana terrtory to pay for his war in europe right?
"Napoleon is the guy who sold us the Louisiana territory to finance his war in Europe, right?"
That is what you should have said.

But, yes, you are correct, he sold Louisiana to us to us for 15 mil, that's about a nickel an acre. One of the best bargains in history. :D

well excuse me for my horrible spelling! lol