Michael Griffith

Oh my goodness. Is Elvis still alive? Were the Moon landings faked? Were the WTC towers brought down by controlled demolitions? Did a missile, and not an airliner, hit the Pentagon on 9/11? Did Churchill poison FDR? Did Paul McCartney really die in 1966 and get replaced by a lookalike? Is everything a conspiracy? Princess Diana did not die because her brakes were tampered with. She died because her driver was drunk and high on drugs and was dangerously speeding. How does Prouty's nutcase speculation that the "Secret Team" whacked Princess Diana garner any support from the alleged Princess Diana letter, which says that she believed that Prince Charles was going to have her car brakes tampered with to kill her in a car accident so that Charles could marry again. Did the "Secret Team" really care whom Charles married or whether he could remarry? Really? Is it not much more likely that Princess Diana was being a bit paranoid and was voicing unfounded fears in the letter? What do we expect regular educated people to believe about the case for conspiracy in the JFK case when they see JFKA conspiracy theorists peddling nutty conspiracy theories that range from fake Moon landings to WTC controlled demolitions to Princess Diana's and John Lennon's alleged assassinations by intelligence agencies? It is just nutty and embarrassing.

You discovered the "allegation" that the ambulance took Diana to the hospital that was the fourth farthest away. And this is supposed to be some kind of indication that she was assassinated? Who made the allegation? Was it confirmed? Was she taken to that hospital because it was considered to be better than the others? Was she taken there because that is where the ambulance driver usually took patients? Anyway, how have I decided there was no conspiracy in Diana's death? One, no one had a motive for assassinating her. Two, there is no rational doubt that she died in a car accident. Three, her driver was drunk and on drugs and was driving exceedingly fast and just lost control of the vehicle. Four, there is no evidence of any conspiracy to kill her.

The voice does not sound like any description of Ferrie's voice that I have read.

I see. I suspect your mind was already made up before you began posting. You did not address any of the evidence that Elegant and Turner present, yet you say you are not "moved" by their theses. I said you somehow only seem to find left-wing sources because, well, you somehow only seem to find left-wing sources, as evidenced by your reply, in which you quote David Brock, a long-time ultra-liberal and founder of Media Matters. Pray tell, what are Brock's qualifications for judging Vietnam War scholarship? The news media and the anti-war movement played an enormous role in misrepresenting and undermining the war effort. Even North Vietnamese sources admit this. You might read journalist Peter Braestrup's book The Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (Yale University Press, Anchor Book edition, 1978). Braestrup was the Washington Post's bureau chief in Saigon from 1968 to 1973. No one could accuse him of being a conservative, but he was profoundly bothered by the media's misleading coverage of the Tet Offensive. He correctly noted that the warped coverage helped lose the war. Finally, your description of Dr. Robert Turner's qualifications is rather incomplete. For starters, Dr. Turner served as in intelligence officer in South Vietnam for several years, after serving there as a news correspondent in 1968. After the war, he was a professor of international law and national security at the University of Virginia, and a professor at the Naval War College. He is the author of two best-selling books on the Vietnam War, and the co-author of two other books on the war. He worked as Senator Robert Griffin's national security adviser and helped author the language of the measure that created the Church Committee. He also served three terms as chairman of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security. His experience and qualifications dwarf those of David Brock.

Sometimes I really wonder about Mike. This is a curious, comical comment for you to make, given the number of severe gaffes you have committed about the war just in this thread. We had the war won in 1971? Mike, I hate to tell you this, but the Easter Offensive was in 1972. That was the biggest land invasion since the Chinese overran North Korea. It was so successful at first that Nixon and Kissinger contemplated using atomic weapons and bombing the dykes. You made these same arguments several days ago and I answered them. Yet, you have ignored my response and have simply repeated your arguments. So, let me repeat mine: Yes, we most certainly had the war won in South Vietnam by 1971. Dr. Lewis Sorley presents dozens of pages of evidence and analysis on this very point in his best-selling book A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (2007). Several other scholars have made the same point. The Easter Offensive only enjoyed initial success because the NVA came across the DMZ in massive numbers, something they had never done before. Until then, the NVA had showed some respect for the zone's neutrality and had refrained from launching large-scale assaults from it. Even the Saigon regime did not believe that Hanoi would so brazenly violate the Geneva Accords as to launch an invasion from the DMZ. Bombing the dikes had been suggested by none other than McNamara devotee John McNaughton way back in 1966, as well as by others. The dikes were a valid target because the NVA put SAM batteries, AAA batteries, and anti-air radar units on them and near them. One of the ways we compelled the North Koreans to end the Korean War was when we began bombing their dams. I ask again, Has it occurred to you that Hanoi launched the Easter Offensive precisely because the war went so badly for them from 1969-1971? Similarly, the Hanoi regime launched the Tet Offensive in 1968 in desperation because they suffered so many severe defeats in 1967 that they decided that time was no longer on their side and that they had to try to win the war with one massive knockout punch. It [the Easter Offensive] was only stopped due to heavy US air intervention and Operation Linebacker, some of the heaviest bombing from air and sea of the war. LOL! A Third Reich apologist could say, "The Allies only won the Battle of the Bulge because of heavy U.S. air intervention!" Furthermore, you obviously do not know that the South Vietnamese air force played a big role in defeating the NVA in the Easter Offensive--it was not just "heavy US air intervention." You once again show that you have no business pretending to be any kind of an authority on the Vietnam War or on warfare in general. Moreover, just as in the Battle of the Bulge, in some key locations, fierce ARVN resistance, before massive air power was available, blocked or greatly slowed the NVA advance, allowing crucial time for more U.S. air assets to be brought into the fight. I suspect you do not know that massive U.S. air reinforcements did not arrive in the region until 11 days after the Easter Offensive began. Until then, a significant part of the air support was provided by the South Vietnamese air force (VNAF). A little educational background for you: By 1971, the VNAF had assumed control of the Direct Air Support Centers (DASCs) in all four military regions in the country (MR I, MR II, MR III, and MR IV). Military historian Matthew Brand (Lt. Col., U.S. Army, now retired): Along with other forces in South Vietnam, Vietnamization pushed the USAF to begin a relatively rapid shift of the TACS [Tactical Air Control System] to VNAF control. In June 1971, the TACC [Tactical Air Control Center] at Tan Son Nhut transferred completely to VNAF control with a separate TACC at 7AF to control US air assets. The VNAF TACC had no USAF operational advisors, although the Air Force Advisory Group did set up an initial qualification training program to help educate VNAF officers for duty in the TACC. The VNAF assumed control of the DASCs in all four regions by August 1971, with a USAF detachment in each VNAF DASC providing command and control of US tactical aircraft supporting the ARVN. (Lt. Col. Matthew Brand, Airpower and the 1972 Easter Offensive, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 2007, p. 80) A few more facts about the VNAF role in repelling the NVA offensive: The TACS in MR II was in better shape than MR I when the NVA attack began. . . . The VNAF were so effective in this region that they were eventually granted the job of providing CAS to Kontum City itself, allowing US airpower to focus on other vital areas around the besieged province. As stated earlier, but worth repeating, MR II’s senior US advisor, John Paul Vann, called the performance of the VNAF “magnificent, absolutely magnificent.” (pp. 81-82) So, yes, American air power was the most crucial factor in defeating the Easter Offensive, but it was not the "only" reason the invasion was defeated. I should add that the NVA came equipped with large numbers of sophisticated anti-aircraft systems (provided by the Soviets). The fact that the NVA still took such a terrible beating from the air is a testament to the American and South Vietnamese pilots who took part in the fighting. By the way, Brand touches on the point that the Viet Cong had been neutralized by 1972, i.e., that they no longer posed a significant threat, which meant that in order to threaten Saigon, the NVA had to go through ARVN units: With the VC no longer a significant threat, the North Vietnamese no longer had a legitimate military means at striking at the strategic targets in South Vietnam, specifically Saigon. To reach Saigon, the NVA would have to tactically slug its way south through ARVN defenses. (p. 96) Exactly, which is why Hanoi decided to launch the Easter Offensive. They had lost control of the countryside in South Vietnam. The VC no longer posed a meaningful threat. They were losing the war. South Vietnam was growing stronger. Hanoi realized they had to take dramatic action because once again time was no longer on their side. The Easter Offensive ended in disaster. The NVA suffered catastrophic losses in manpower and weaponry. In addition, the Easter Offensive proved that if the U.S. would just keep providing air support and would give the VNAF enough time to get fully equipped and trained, ARVN could defeat the NVA indefinitely. The few American advisers who served with ARVN during the offensive constituted less than 1% of the ground forces that were involved in the fighting. Providing air support (direct or advisory after the VNAF were fully equipped and trained) and ground advisory support for another decade or two would have cost a fraction of what we spent to maintain a large military presence in South Korea during the same period.

Since you say that you have not made up your mind yet about the Vietnam War, and that you are still researching the subject, and since you seem to be searching for sources online (although somehow you only seem to find leftist sources), here are some online sources that I recommend: How to Lose a War http://academics.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm Myths and Realities in the Vietnam Debate http://www.viet-myths.net/turner.htm Marines in Vietnam: The Bitter End, 1973-1975 https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/U.S. Marines in Vietnam_The Bitter End 1973-1975 PCN 1900310900_1.pdf Among other things, this article discusses the devastating impact on South Vietnam's army from Congress's slashing of aid to South Vietnam. U.S. Marines in Vietnam: Fighting the North Vietnamese 1967 https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/U_S_ Marines in Vietnam Fighting the North Vietnamese 1967 PCN 19000309000.pdf This is relevant because it relates to Westmoreland's factual claim that the war was going very well in 1967. Linebacker and the Law of War https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/1983_Vol34_No1-6/1983_Vol34_No2.pdf The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam 1960-1968 (two parts) https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/History/Vietnam/Vietnam_1960-1968_P001.pdf https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/History/Vietnam/Vietnam_1960-1968_P002.pdf War in the Shallows https://www.history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/publications/publication-508-pdf/WITS_508.pdf

Oh, sheesh. Really? Seriously? That is your reply to my point? Obviously, you have no interest in substantive, serious discussion on the subject.

Mark Lane disgraced himself by his conduct as Liberty Lobby's lawyer in Liberty Lobby's bogus libel suits against the Wall Street Journal and National Review (LINK). It is curious that nearly all anti-war liberals regard Neil Sheehan as a courageous opponent of the Vietnam War, but you are so far on the fringe edge of the far left that you view him as a sellout. Your 2021 article on Sheehan is literally loaded with errors, distortions, and omissions. I cite just one discrediting, inexcusable example: Neither Harkins nor Winterbottom was unaware of the true situation on the ground. In fact, as Newman shows in his book, Winterbottom would simply create Viet Cong fatalities out of assumptions he made. Harkins understood this and went along with it. (Newman, p. 224) The idea was to control the intelligence out of Saigon in order to bamboozle Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. (Newman, p. 225) You wrote this in 2021, years after numerous books had documented the fact that North Vietnamese sources alone, not to mention numerous other sources, confirm that the war was going well in 1962 and 1963. The fact that Newman did not address this information does not reflect well on his research. Here is just some of that information regarding the progress made in 1962: The foreign press, despite its hostility to Diem and its skepticism about official claims of progress, took note of the military progress. Trustworthy American sources, Bigart reported in April [1962], had concluded that “the erosion of the Government’s authority had been slowed if not halted by aggressive action by the Vietnamese Army.”[441] Newsweek, one of the publications most hostile to Diem, reported later that month that its correspondents had traveled all across South Vietnam to interview American military personnel and had found that these advisers believed South Vietnamese forces were “gradually turning the tide of war against the Communist guerrillas.” For instance, one senior American adviser had remarked, “Today we can usually expect a village hit by a surprise attack to fight, where previously the defenders would surrender or flee.”[442] By mid-year, the government had staunched the deterioration of the military situation. . . . Helicopters allowed government soldiers to reach the enemy’s mountain and jungle strongholds in fifteen minutes, whereas in the past the troops had needed to march for three days or more to get there. . . . One Communist account noted, “It became difficult for our cadre to move around during daylight because the helicopters could see our people walking from a considerable distance away. Just a few helicopters were enough to surround a target and to make a surprise landing of assault troops to capture or kill our cadre and troops in any terrain, and especially in open fields.”[443]. . . . The South Vietnamese President more often cashiered bad leaders and directed his division commanders and provincial chiefs to take the war to the enemy. The third factor [behind the improved situation] was the improvement of leadership in the South Vietnamese armed forces and provincial administrations. The year 1962 saw the coming of age of many young South Vietnamese men cultivated by Diem after 1954 in his efforts to replace the colonial-era officials with dedicated nationalists. . . . Rufus Phillips, a very able protégé of Lansdale, discovered a remarkable improvement in the quality of local officials during an extensive tour of the countryside in mid-1962. (Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 154-155) At an early stage in the development of the strategic hamlet program, Theodore Heavner, a Vietnamese-speaking State Department official who examined the strategic hamlets in considerable depth, commented, “One of the brighter aspects of the program at the moment appears to be the remarkable effort to send good cadre into the hamlets to get the program in motion.”[448]. . . . In the absence of American pressure, Diem enacted a string of American-backed reforms. . . . He purged officials guilty of abuses, created an organization for investigating complaints, and set up aid programs for disabled veterans and war widows and orphans. Conscription of educated men into the officer corps commenced, while low-ranking soldiers received pay raises. . . . In Hanoi, the improvement in Diem’s war effort convinced the Communist Party leadership, by mid-1962, that the war was going to be long and difficult. The Vietnamese Communist Party now had no chance of attaining a rapid victory without a massive, overt infusion of North Vietnamese troops. . . . (Triumph Forsaken, pp. 158, 160) Harkins’s enemies in the press corps were to accuse him of spending little time in the field and relying solely on statistical reports for information. The journalist and author Neil Sheehan later claimed that “General Paul D. Harkins and his staff sat in their air-conditioned offices in Saigon and waxed optimistic on the same kind of supposedly impressive statistics the French had comforted themselves with during the First Indochina War.”[469] In actuality, as those who worked with him would attest, Harkins spent a great portion of time in the field. “He lived a Spartan military life in Saigon, traveling almost daily around the country in small planes to keep in touch with the war,” noted John Mecklin, the embassy counseler for public affairs.[470] At dusty district headquarters and remote mountain militia posts, Harkins sought firsthand information on the war from South Vietnamese and American officers, and then afterwards obtained independent appraisals to make sure the officers in the field knew their stuff and were not sugarcoating anything for the boss.[471]. . . . South Vietnam’s armed forces were to make even greater progress in the second half of 1962 than in the first. Weak commanders were replaced with aggressive young men from the new generation of leaders. Government units hit the Viet Cong hard in VC-held areas and at night. . . . Using American equipment and relying upon American advice, the South Vietnamese made tremendous advances in the conduct of air and armor operations. . . . A Communist historical account of 1962 noted, “Our people’s war forces were unable to stop the enemy’s helicopter-borne and armored personnel carrier assaults, and so our three spearheads [military, political, military proselytizing] became confused and hesitant, and our losses increased. . . . Many units were forced to disperse.”[477] In the latter part of the summer, the number of government victories soared, and the government reasserted its control over many areas that had fallen into Viet Cong hands over the past two and a half years. After repeated maulings of large Viet Cong units, the Communists cut back severely on large-unit operations, making it more difficult for them to overwhelm government units and strategic hamlets. . . . Optimism surged within the Diem government, invigorating the people responsible for executing the war, and similar changes could be seen in the attitudes of the South Vietnamese populace and American advisers and officials. As the summer came to a close, Ambassador Nolting’s deputy William Truehart exclaimed that he was “tremendously encouraged” by progress in the military realm that was “little short of sensational.”[478] Even South Vietnamese intellectuals and discontented politicians were impressed, with the result that Saigon witnessed less grumbling and plotting against Diem. (Triumph Forsaken, pp. 165, 168-169) South Vietnamese leaders continued to launch aggressive military operations in areas dominated by the Viet Cong after October 5, including some operations that penetrated areas of the central highlands where government troops had not ventured since 1960. South Vietnamese soldiers were still out in the rice paddies and jungles tracking down the enemy and disrupting their activities with the same determination, and they were still running into ambushes and dying quietly in suffocating heat. Following the loss of the Rangers, weekly South Vietnamese casualty and weapon losses actually increased, a development the American embassy attributed to the “increasing aggressiveness of [government] units in small actions.”[506] At just this time, government forces started capturing more weapons from the enemy than they lost – during October and November 1962, Diem’s troops captured 860 Viet Cong weapons while losing 736 of their own.[507] These figures were a sure indicator that government forces were fighting not only aggressively but also effectively – of all the war’s statistical indicators, weapon losses were among the most reliable, since the South Vietnamese could not misrepresent them to the Americans as they could other statistics. . . . Other American journalists who visited Vietnam in late 1962 came away with the same general impressions as Tregaskis. Touring Vietnam for Newsweek after Sully’s removal, Kenneth Crawford wrote, “In the opinion of Diem’s responsible American advisers, his strategy is right and he has made a promising start.” Crawford also noted, “Missionaries scattered through the country report that the Communists are in fact complaining about lack of support.”[512] Writing in The Saturday Evening Post in late November, Harold Martin concluded that the huge American investment of men and materiel had begun paying dividends in recent months.[513] Time commented that the war in South Vietnam “looks far more hopeful than it did a year ago,” and “U. S. advisers are confident that the Viet Cong now have virtually no hope of achieving their goal of setting up a separate Communist-ruled puppet state in South Viet Nam.”[514] Most remarkably, the reporting from the Saigon correspondents themselves in late 1962 confirmed that the South Vietnamese Vietnamese government had not cut back on aggressive military operations and that the South Vietnamese armed forces were fighting well. (Triumph Forsaken, pp. 177, 179) Much other evidence shows that Diem’s war effort did not falter between October and December 1962. In some areas, especially those distant from Saigon, American military advisers witnessed successful operations during this period that entirely escaped the attention of the press corps. Among the most noteworthy was a series of joint air-ground assaults in Ⅲ Corps near the Cambodian border. . . . Theodore Heavner, following a visit to Vietnam from October 18 to November 26, noted that American advisers “say that the GVN forces are doing more and better night work,” with the result that “the night no longer belongs only to the VC.” The South Vietnamese armed forces were performing much better on the whole, he noted. . . . Most compelling of all, the Communists themselves acknowledged that the Diem government was attacking the Viet Cong energetically and adeptly during the last months of 1962. Meeting on December 6, the North Vietnamese Politburo remarked, “The enemy is using his military superiority to expand the war in a determined effort to annihilate our forces.” It conceded that “our armed forces are still weak,” and that if the Communists continued the armed struggle at the present level, they would be unable to maintain the movement in the South.[529] One official Communist history noted that South Vietnamese government leaders “obstinately continued to strengthen their forces and wage an increasingly fierce ‘special war’ against our people in the South” through the end of 1962.[530] A Communist document concerning the upper delta – the 7th Division’s own area of operations – in late 1962 acknowledged that “the enemy succeeded in mopping up our weak areas, repressing the people’s political movement, expelling our forces, and activating strategic hamlets. The enemy then employed concentrated Civil Guard, Self-Defense Corps, and Ranger units to attack liberated areas.”[531] Similar descriptions appeared in a Communist history of Military Region 6, which encompassed six coastal and highland provinces in central South Vietnam.[532] According to these Communist histories, South Vietnam’s regulars as well as its irregulars caused great harm to the Viet Cong in this period, a strong indication that the South Vietnamese Army was becoming more proficient in counterinsurgency operations.[533] The latter part of 1962 also witnessed major advances in the implementation of the strategic hamlet program.[534] A good illustration of the progress came from a Communist report on two villages where the government had built strategic hamlets during the fall. . . . Communist sources show that the strategic hamlet program, despite the relatively limited number of hamlets completed, was already having a substantial effect on the war in much of South Vietnam before the year ended. One of Hanoi’s postwar histories credited the Diem government with reducing the Viet Cong’s “liberated areas” in Cochinchina, the southern third of Vietnam, by the end of 1962 through the creation of 2,000 strategic hamlets.[538] As the hamlets sprouted up across the country, Hanoi ordered the Viet Cong to set the destruction of the strategic hamlets as their top priority. The Viet Cong, however, were not capable of annihilating the new hamlets, not even in the Mekong Delta, where the program was making the least headway and was most vulnerable. The Communist history of the upper Mekong Delta noted that when the Viet Cong tore down the strategic hamlet fences and guard posts, “the enemy would just force the people to rebuild them, this time even stronger, and would tighten his defensive alert procedures, tighten his controls on the population, and aggressively hunt down our guerrilla organization inside the hamlet to suppress it, making it more difficult for us to conduct our operations. . . . When we destroyed a strategic hamlet they usually rebuilt it and then built even more.”[539] The official Communist history of the southern Mekong Delta region stated, “We expended tremendous efforts in the program to destroy strategic hamlets but in fact accomplished very little.”[540] (Triumph Forsaken, pp. 181-183)

Oh, boy. The dikes. The Red River dikes. Once again you prove that you have merely dabbled in Vietnam War research, and that your dabbling has been mostly in left-wing sources. Also, you keep telling me that Newman is a conservative, yet you keep quoting/citing him making leftist arguments about the war. I present the following facts in response to your comments: -- The Easter Offensive enjoyed early success because the North Vietnamese army (NVA) came across the DMZ, something they had never done before. The North Vietnamese sources alone confirm that the offensive’s early success was short-lived, and that soon the NVA suffered horrendous losses and were pushed out of most of the territory they had initially seized. They NVA lost more military equipment in the Easter Offensive than they lost in all three of the 1968 Tet offensives combined. -- As early as 1966, none other than McNamara devotee John McNaughton proposed bombing not only the Red River dikes but the Red River dams because doing so would flood the rice fields and cripple the Hanoi regime’s food production. -- The Red River dikes were perfectly valid military targets because the NVA put SAM batteries, anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) batteries, and anti-aircraft radar units on top of the dikes. Toward the end of the Korean War, the bombing of North Korean dams in 1953 was a key factor in compelling the North Koreans to agree to a ceasefire. -- Hanoi’s thugs were so consumed with waging war against South Vietnam that they failed to properly maintain the Red River dikes. This came back to haunt them in 1971. -- Partly as a result of the Hanoi regime’s failure to adequately maintain the Red River dikes, and partly as a result of placing heavy SAM batteries, AAA guns, and anti-aircraft radar units on the dikes, four major breaches occurred in the dikes during the massive flooding caused by unusually heavy rains in August 1971. One of the breaches was 30 miles wide, while another was one-half-mile wide. These breaches flooded huge areas of rice fields in the Red River Delta, inundating about 1.1 million acres of rice fields. The flooding did not subside until October. -- NVA SAMs that missed their targets frequently ended up exploding near or on the dikes, causing at least some of the damage that the Hanoi regime blamed on U.S. aircraft. -- The NVA also positioned logistical assets, including roads and rail lines, near the dikes, as well as SAM and AAA batteries. On a few occasions, American bombs intended for those targets accidentally struck on or near the dikes, but these errant bombs caused only minor damage to the dikes. -- It is highly unlikely that 500,000 people would have died if we had bombed the Red River dikes. When heavy flooding caused four major breaches in the dikes in August 1971, the death toll was estimated at 100,000. And, it bears repeating that the dikes were valid military targets because the NVA placed SAM and AAA batteries and anti-air radar units on them and near them. -- The Hanoi regime spread the lie that American aircraft bombed the Red River dikes. The Communists gave gullible Western journalists tours of the same damaged dike for several years, and the journalists dutifully reported this alleged “war crime.” This lie was debunked soon after it was spread, but anti-war activists continued to repeat it for years. The issue of the Red River dikes is discussed in some detail in military historian W. Hays Parks’ classic article “Linebacker and the Law of War,” Air University Review, 34:2 (January-February 1983), pp. 2-30. Other good sources on the issue include the following: NORTH VIETNAM: THE DIKE BOMBING ISSUE (Cia.Gov) To Hanoi and Back (defense.gov)

I should add that I have an advantage here: I joined the U.S. Army in 1982 and thus had the chance to meet dozens of Vietnam veterans. I'd say 1/3 of the E-6-to-E-9 NCOs and O-4-to-O-6 officers I worked with from 1982 to about 1994 were Vietnam vets. Nearly all of them were proud of their service in Vietnam and felt the war was honorable and worthwhile. Many of them had firsthand experiences with the insane restrictions that were placed on our air and ground operations during the war. Some helpful facts from Dr. K. G. Sears' essay "Vietnam: Looking Back -- At the Facts": Only about 5,000 men assigned to Vietnam deserted and just 249 of those deserted while in Vietnam. During WW II, in the European Theater alone, over 20,000 US Military men were convicted of desertion and, on a comparable percentage basis, the overall WW II desertion rate was 55 percent higher than in Vietnam. Only 25 percent of the US Military who served in Vietnam were draftees. During WW II, 66 percent of the troops were draftees. The Vietnam force contained three times as many college graduates as did the WW II force. The average education level of the enlisted man in Vietnam was 13 years, equivalent to one year of college. Of those who enlisted, 79 percent had high school diplomas. This at a time when only 65% of the military age males in the general American population were high school graduates. The charge that the “poor” died in disproportionate numbers is also a myth. An MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) study of Vietnam death rates, conducted by Professor Arnold Barnett, revealed that servicemen from the richest 10 percent of the nation's communities had the same distribution of deaths as the rest of the nation. In fact his study showed that the death rate in the upper income communities of Beverly Hills, Belmont, Chevy Chase, and Great Neck exceeded the national average in three of the four, and, when the four were added together and averaged, that number also exceeded the national average. Vietnam: Looking Back – At The Facts – CherriesWriter – Vietnam War website

Ms. Sawyer's propaganda piece notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that every survey done among Vietnam Veterans has consistently found that the vast majority are proud of their service and view the war as honorable, and that a large majority of that vast majority believe the war could have been won had it not been for interference from Washington. I guess it depends partly on how one defines "small minority." The above-mentioned surveys found that 82-90 percent of the Vietnam vets surveyed viewed their service as honorable, and about 78 percent said the war was winnable but Washington-imposed restrictions prevented victory. B. G. Burkett examined this issue in great detail in his book Stolen Valor.

Wow, this is shameful. I hope it opens some folks' eyes about the nature of the Biden administration.

Lots and lots of interesting information. I hope you will tie all this information together in a book. I would just be careful about automatically assuming that every single German who worked for the Third Reich was a devout fascist or Nazi. Many of them were not fascists but were ardent anti-communists who supported democracy and disliked the SS. This was true even for a small minority of SS personnel.

No book about Watergate can be complete or accurate without including the information presented in Geoff Shepard's books The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President (2021) and The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (2019).

This brings us to the issue of FDR's disgraceful performance regarding the Jews and the Holocaust during World War II. A few diehard FDR apologists have actually tried to pretend that FDR and his administration acted nobly in this regard, but the record is clear that FDR and most of those under him showed a callous disregard for the plight of European Jews, and what few limited actions he did take were only done under intense pressure after he had stalled as long as he dared. Amazon.com: The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 eBook : Wyman, David S.: Kindle Store Amazon.com: FDR and The Holocaust: A Breach of Faith eBook : Medoff, Rafael: Kindle Store Amazon.com: America's Soul In the Balance 2nd Edition: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy eBook : Wallance, Gregory J.: Kindle Store The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust: Medoff, Rafael: 9780827615199: Amazon.com: Books Amazon.com: Barred! (Living History of the Holocaust) eBook : Steinhouse, Carl L. : Kindle Store Of course we could and should have bombed Auschwitz (i.e., the rail lines leading to the camp and the SS barracks less than 2 miles from the camp). We bombed military facilities that were very close to Auschwitz, and Auschwitz survivors recalled seeing Allied airplanes and hearing nearby air-raid sirens, refuting the lie floated then and later by FDR apologists that it was unfeasible to bomb the death camp.

The article mentions the conspiracy theories about Princess Diana's death. Well, just remember that Fletcher Prouty said, in writing, that he would not be surprised to learn that the Secret Team assassinated Princess Diana. It is exactly that kind of nutjob material that makes all conspiracy theorists look like crackpots, like uneducated people on the fringe of society. Of course, Prouty said nuttier things than that, yet we have a number of conspiracy theorists who continue to quote him and defend him.

It turns out that Bobby Kennedy's 4/30/1964 oral history interview was not the last time he expressed opposition to pulling out of Vietnam, nor was it the last time he voiced support for the war effort. Regarding America’s commitment to South Vietnam, Bobby said in early 1965, “I’m in favor of keeping that commitment and taking whatever steps are necessary.” (New York Times, February 24, 1965) On May 15, 1967, in a joint television appearance on CBS with then-Governor Ronald Reagan, Bobby was confronted by a radicalized student who declared, “I believe the war in Vietnam is illegal, immoral, politically unjustifiable, and economically motivated.” Bobby disagreed: I don’t agree with that. I have some reservations as I’ve stated them before about some aspects of the war, but I think that the United States is making every effort to try to make it possible for the people of South Vietnam to determine their own destiny . . . The fact is that the insurgency against—that’s taking place in South Vietnam is being supported by North Vietnam. If both of us withdraw and let the people of South Vietnam determine and decide what they want . . . that’s all we’re interested in, that’s all we’re interested in accomplishing. (VIDEO LINK) As late as March 1968, just three months before his death, although by then he supported a halt to American bombing in Vietnam and was advocating negotiations with the Viet Cong, Bobby opposed a unilateral withdrawal and called the idea "unacceptable": I do not want, and I do believe that most Americans do not want, to sell out America's interest to simply withdraw - to raise the white flag of surrender in Vietnam - that would be unacceptable to us as a people, and unacceptable to us as a country. (https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/remarks-at-the-university-of-kansas-march-18-1968) Many in the anti-war movement were not happy with such comments. Indeed, when Bobby appeared the following month at the University of San Francisco, anti-war students shouted him down, calling him a "fascist pig" and yelling "victory for the Viet Cong" (David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, p. 358). (It is too bad we could not have grabbed those brainwashed students and dropped them into a village that had recently been freed from Viet Cong control to let them see firsthand what the Viet Cong were all about.) It is crucial to note that RFK never, ever, ever claimed that JFK told him he was going to abandon South Vietnam after the election. Even when Bobby became strident in his criticism of LBJ's handling of the war, he never claimed that JFK intended to pull the plug on the war effort after the election. Nor did any of JFK's aides who served under LBJ ever make any such claim in any White House meeting--no such claim is heard on the LBJ White House tapes, nor is such a claim found in any of the meeting minutes or memos or even in any diaries composed during that period. Finally, as for Jim's attacks on Diem, they are a repetition of attacks he has made several times, and that I have answered several times, in this forum. Clearly, he has not read any of the sources that I have recommended to get the other side of the story on Diem, such as Canadian historian Dr. Geoffrey Shaw's book The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem. It is not "moonshine" to argue that Diem was a good, effective leader, especially when compared to Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan or to Malaya's leaders during the successful British counterinsurgency effort in Malaya from 1948-1960. Jim never, ever talks about the brutal repression imposed by Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan, repression that far exceeded anything Diem imposed.

Well, as I said, you would never hear a WC apologist say the things that Gunn said in that lecture. If a newcomer to the JFK case asked Gerald Posner or David Von Pein or Max Holland to recommend videos they should watch on the case, they would never recommend Gunn's lecture. An educated person who strongly distrusts all conspiracy theories and who knows nothing about the JFK assassination would be more likely to have their mind opened to the possibility of conspiracy in the JFK case by watching Gunn's lecture or Blakey's debate with Howard Willens or Blakey's presentation at the 2014 AARC conference than they would by watching a presentation by James Douglass or Monika Wiesak or Robert Groden.

"Sheesh" is right. You do nothing but repeat liberal talking points about the war. Will you ever address the evidence that supports the point that we did indeed effectively have the war won in 1970 (and 1971) in South Vietnam? Has it occurred to you that Hanoi launched the 1972 Easter Offensive as another desperate gamble, ala the disastrous Tet Offensive, precisely because the war was going so badly for them in 1970 and 1971? Fraggings again? 170 fraggings in 1970? That number constituted less than 1% of the American troops in South Vietnam at the time. You still have not read any source that challenges the liberal spin on fraggings, have you? Are you aware that the NVA was experiencing worse morale problems among its troops at the time? Massive desertions. Massive draft dodging. Armed uprisings in North Vietnam that the NVA had to crush. BTW, there were fraggings even during WW II (indeed, also during WW I). Turning North Vietnam "into a desert" and calling it victory??? More far-left falsehood. Do you know anything about the 1972 Linebacker I and II bombing campaigns? No one would equate their results with turnings North Vietnam into a desert. Even Stanley Karnow was honest enough to admit that the wild North Vietnamese descriptions of the bombing damage were false. Yet, Linebacker II alone proved that we could have decimated North Vietnam's ability to wage war and ended the war years earlier, and at a far smaller cost in blood and treasure. In less than two weeks of bombing, we virtually shut down much of North Vietnam, exhausted Hanoi's air defenses, and drastically reduced Hanoi's ability to receive supplies and to send supplies to the south. Imagine what would have happened if we had carried out a similar bombing operation for a longer period, especially earlier in the war? As Admiral Sharp noted, North Vietnam would have been rendered impotent and prostrate in a matter of months. As for the article about Army officer Donald Duncan, who quit after serving in Vietnam, Duncan is part of a very small minority of Vietnam veterans who have denigrated the war effort. The vast majority of Vietnam vets, when polled repeatedly, have said they view the war as honorable and are proud of their service, and a large majority of that vast majority have said they believe the war was winnable and that misguided restrictions from Washington prevented victory. But, of course, you choose to believe the small minority over the vast majority of Vietnam vets. All you do is repeat timeworn liberal talking points about the war, and you refuse to read anything that refutes those talking points, not even by non-revisionist historians such as Lien-Hang Nguyen, Max Hastings, Harry Rothmann, and Michael Lind, much less the works of scholars who defend the war, such as Moyar, Kort, Sorley, Veith, Davidson, Turner, Robbins, Hunt, Palmer, Scruggs, Ross, Jennings, Weiner, etc., etc.

One, it is not certain that the Soviets would have moved on West Berlin if we had toppled Castro, especially if we had done so quickly. If anything, a powerful show of force in Cuba may have made Khruschev even more hesitant to move against West Berlin. Two, JFK could have made the case to any concerned European leaders that West Berlin was tactically meaningless whereas Cuba, 90 miles from our coast, was tactically crucial. Three, freeing Cuba in April 1961 would have avoided the Cuban Missile Crisis and would have avoided all the expensive efforts to sabotage and topple Castro's regime that followed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

We must abandon this all-or-nothing approach to judging people such as Jeremy Gunn. Go watch Gunn's 2013 presentation at the UNE CGH (LINK). No WC apologist would ever say the things he said in that lecture. In his lecture, Gunn clearly questioned the single-bullet theory. He noted that the WC's own wound ballistics tests contradicted the SBT. He discussed Saundra Spencer's testimony, including the fact that she said that the extant autopsy photos are not the photos she processed and that the photos she processed showed a large rear head wound. He pointed out that the paper of the extant autopsy photos does not match the paper that Spencer used. He implied that the autopsy photos that show the back of the head intact were taken after the autopsy, after the head had been reconstructed. He discussed Humes's lies about the autopsy report. He talked about the WC's misrepresentation of the Zapruder film. He discussed the CIA's lies about Oswald in Mexico City. He said it is a reasonable possibility that someone was impersonating Oswald in Mexico City. He slammed the WC, saying the Commission did a "profound disservice" to the country and failed to conduct a serious, comprehensive investigation. But, for some folks, nope, this is not good enough. They make all kinds of accusations against him because he is not an avowed conspiracy theorist and/or because he does not believe every single thing they believe and/or because he failed to do certain things while working for the ARRB. They ignore all the good work that Gunn did with the ARRB and focus on his failings. They ignore the many things he has said that support our view and focus on other things he has said. We see a similarly counter-productive, hyper-critical attitude exhibited by some people toward G. Robert Blakey. This all-or-nothing, our-way-or-the-highway attitude alienates people, especially influential people, and pushes them toward the other side.

Jeremy Gunn did a lot of good work with the ARRB, but not as much as Doug Horne did.

I think RFK Jr. is out to lunch on Putin and Ukraine. I think Hannity is out to breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the JFK case. He buys the lone-gunman theory hook, line, and sinker.

For anyone who might be interested, I have fixed the broken links on the page of articles on the unnecessary nuking of Japan. Half the links worked, but the other half were not linked (now they are). The Pacific War and the Atomic Bomb unnecessary.pdf - Google Drive

As I said earlier, so what if the Soviets had grabbed West Berlin in response to our toppling Castro? So what? West Berlin was tactically insignificant and was deep inside East Germany anyway. I doubt that losing one part of a city deep inside East Germany would have cost JFK the '64 election if he had lost it in exchange for freeing Cuba and ending Castro's meddling in Latin America. Also, I am not certain that the Soviets would have moved on Berlin, especially if Castro surrendered quickly. But, even if they had, it would have been a trade worth making: losing part of a city in East Germany in exchange for freeing an entire country 90 miles from Florida.