[TheRealThing]

I don't disagree with most of your post here. However, Vietnam, with examples like General Ewell in abundance, and the MGR a well known moniker that was applied to mass civilian casualities, if not targeting? Yes, war is horrible. But, my point holds: large swaths of Vietnamese do not hold positive remembrances of what happened in their rural villages.

I disagree with you. Having been there I can tell you that the civilian population knew what was going on, and many chose not become complicit to the VC cause. The VC were North Viet Nam insurgents, who fought against the people and the government of South Viet Nam. They were therefore trained, equipped, supplied, paid, were part of and commanded by a battle plan executed by the north. Those who harbored the VC in the vast majority of cases, were a part of that guerilla network and certainly not innocent. The US Military had very good intel on the matter, and knew full well that the families of those villages by day were the fighters of the north by night. The parents were the ones who victimized their own children by inserting them into a combat situation.

Further, the VC were ruthless and sadistic mercenaries whose guerilla roots went back generations. You can focus on the innocents, whose numbers are far less than your side would ever admit. But from a rational standpoint, the fighting had to be stopped by force and our pretending to go along with the VC ruse was unacceptable to our political and military leaders of the time. You hear the words blood and treasure used a lot, and the phrase is not newly coined by any means. “I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means…” —John Adams (1776)

Frankly we've lost the vision of John Adams and George Washington, as somewhere along the way the liberal voice gained the upper hand. (Hopefully Clinton will not ascend to continue the madness) And it's not that they were not present and accounted for back in the days of our founding, and frankly at the beginning of WW2 for that matter, but they were in such minority that clearer thought prevailed. As a matter of fact, there were those (liberals) who thought King George would hang every one of the Framers for treason. They were wrong then, they were wrong when they marched in protest at the beginning of WW2, and they are wrong now. Nobody questions the horrors of war. But wining as quickly and as surgically as one can, does in fact save lives. We saw that to be the case in WW2 when millions of civilian casualties were seen both in Europe and Japan.

Post war quarterbacks who did whatever they had to in order to avoid service in wartime and peace, endured to now lead the US in the annals of compromise and appeasement. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama come to mind. Those who would appease have always been with us, and they have always been on the wrong side of history. It's nothing new and certainly not profound.

That being said, Viet Nam is only a small portion of the world in the broader Geopolitical sense, but the horrors of war are always the same. I can tell you that our enemy's record of murder and reckless wartime tactics is far and away more heinous than anything the US has ever been caught up in as the result. In other words, when the US has been responsible for causing civilian deaths in the past, it has been because unsubdued enemy forces have retreated back behind their own borders, sometimes to the interiors of elementary schools and hospitals. In such case, unfortunate and horrible as that may be, they still must be taken out though I am sure we would never knowingly take out school kids with them. As I said, I did not see the contempt and offense on the faces, or in conversation with those which we have vanquished in the past, and I spoke and interacted with them at relative lengths.

What you've put forth here is liberal spin and I am genuinely offended by your arrogance. Don the uniform and serve your country, then we'll talk.