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Message: [QUOTE="connie, post: 2349824, member: 7882"] Respectfully, not [I]my [/I]enemy, not [I]my [/I]leadership. Nor the enemy or leadership of the considerable majority of Americans, who to their credit regard the U.S. war against Vietnam as not a "mistake" but fundamentally immoral. As background, it is worth noting that the U.S. was bombing Laos at least as early as 1964. There is a very good study of this in [I]The Air War in Indochina[/I]. One summary indicates that from 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions, equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. A considerable amount of the ordnance remains unexploded. The literature indicates that even to this day, children are being maimed if not killed as a result. As a thought experiment, one might contemplate the reaction in the U.S. had, say, Libya carried out a comparable campaign over Appalachia for a similar period of time. That plenty of people suffered horribly in the wake of the war is hardly disputable. To characterize the event as a result of a "North Vietnamese invasion" is rhetorically dubious even if factually accurate, particularly given that it is the U.S. government that invaded the country of Vietnam well over a decade before the fact. In any event, knowing what human beings are, it should come as no surprise that when you invade another country and subject it to years of ground and aerial assault--destroying its meager industries and economies, poisoning its natural resources, propping up a corrupt puppet government, and killing hundreds of thousands of its people--any opposition that manages to survive at all is likely to become hardened, ruthless and vindictive, even to its own people. That does not excuse the behavior. But it goes some distance toward explaining it. One need only look at the aftermath of the American Revolution and the American Civil War to see examples of like behavior. I am sure that vastly more Vietnamese and others in the region wished that the U.S. had followed the advice of Marine Commandant David Shoup, that the best contribution the U.S. could make to its people is "to get our [sic] bloody, dollar-crooked hands out of their affairs". And with that, I am done with this thread. Anyone interested can PM me. [/QUOTE]

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