Keep in mind, the U.S. would routinely slaughter entire villages, counting all the old people and children they would kill as ‘casualties’. The actual Vietnamese soldier to American soldier casualty ratio was not nearly as lopsided, and quite often entire platoons of soldiers would be sent somewhere, only to be ambushed and killed outside of a few who would escape.
This is one of the reasons many Vietnam vets were so fucked up mentally coming back, was because they knew we were losing the war, that we weren’t actually killing that many Vietcong, but they would come back to the U.S. to a media what would claim that they were winning, and that they were taking extremely few casualties.
It was one of the reasons the whole MIA/POW narrative started, was to obscure the number of American casualties coming out of the war.
We decisively lost Vietnam, and the idea that we “pulled our punches” is revisionist horseshit. We killed so many civilians, corraled so many villages, and it didn’t make a single bit of difference to us winning the war.
We killed so many civilians, corraled so many villages, and it didn’t make a single bit of difference to us winning the war.
Terror bombing is absolutely fantastic at pissing the enemy off (for pretty self evident reasons), so in a way it did make a different to us winning the war.
As in: It further secured the loss of the US losing.
Keep in mind, the U.S. would routinely slaughter entire villages, counting all the old people and children they would kill as ‘casualties’. The actual Vietnamese soldier to American soldier casualty ratio was not nearly as lopsided, and quite often entire platoons of soldiers would be sent somewhere, only to be ambushed and killed outside of a few who would escape.
This is one of the reasons many Vietnam vets were so fucked up mentally coming back, was because they knew we were losing the war, that we weren’t actually killing that many Vietcong, but they would come back to the U.S. to a media what would claim that they were winning, and that they were taking extremely few casualties.
It was one of the reasons the whole MIA/POW narrative started, was to obscure the number of American casualties coming out of the war.
We decisively lost Vietnam, and the idea that we “pulled our punches” is revisionist horseshit. We killed so many civilians, corraled so many villages, and it didn’t make a single bit of difference to us winning the war.
Reminds me of German reports of counter-partisan operations “killed 1000 partisans, captured 10 rifles”.
It’s almost, almost as though they were taking military advice from former Nazi commanders… Sorry, I mean, NATO generals.
Terror bombing is absolutely fantastic at pissing the enemy off (for pretty self evident reasons), so in a way it did make a different to us winning the war.
As in: It further secured the loss of the US losing.