Originally posted by OzWeatherman

Originally posted by esecallum


learn to read.i said this law applies only after 1945.

Your examples don't count as were before 1945.

understood?

[edit on 19-8-2009 by esecallum]

Oh yeah very good......your twisting it so it fits in with your own ideals and point of view

NO.

You think the world is a continuous path of history where as the reality it is punctuated by blips which separate it into distinct eras.Your attempts to compare apples and oranges makes your thought processes invalid.

reply to post by esecallum[/url]

I am sorry to have offended your sensativities but hey, body counts existed LONG before 1945.

They were the reason kings, queens, princes and popes left the battlefield;
they could no longer afford the body count.

Whilst I do understand the reasoning behind your post, I fail to see what arrogance, ineptitude and a slim grasp of world history, brings to your argument.

For your information my friend,World War One was about body counts. Had your country been in it from day one, you would not be putting forward your somewhat cock-eyed theories.

Ever heard of a place called Verdun? This is where the Imperial German Army under Kaiser Wilhelm tried to bleed the French Army dry.

Over a seven month period, the French lost approximately 550,000 men whilst the Germans lost approximately 434,000.

If THAT is not a body count, I don't know what the hell is!

The OP is an idiot to say the least. I'm at a loss for words if this person is actually serious and actually a fellow citizen.

Aren't wars about meeting objectives, Having some sort of results? Wasn't our objective liberating South Vietnam from a Communists North?

When we went into Vietnam we greatly under estimated our enemies will to fight. On top of that we greatly under estimated how widespread and popular the movement was. At the same time, support for the war, on our end, was eroding as time went on.

I am aware how ever that our body count to there's was vastly uneven, but in this case, our objectives were not met and killing millions did not win the war.

Secrets of War: Vietnam Special Operations

Google Video Link

[edit on 21-8-2009 by oconnection]

Originally posted by esecallum
We won that war.the figures prove that.in every single encounter we came out on top.

THAT WAR SPURRED A HUGE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCE in out military capability.

I guess the history books and experts definition of who won the war are very different than yours. By your definition we lost the Revolutionary War because our looses were greater.

Winning a war is not about how much death you inflict on the opposing side. Winning war is meeting your objective. Our objective was not met with Vietnam.

The other sides objective when it comes to Vietnam was met in throwing out the invaders of there country and reuniting the south with north.

So by definition and simply examining the outcome one can easily conclude that we did not meet our objective and we did loose that war.

On the matter of technological advance, what's your point? If you study any war you will find that war there is always technological advances as a result. Look at the bow and arrow, the Gatling gun, gun powder, the tank, ect.

While the vietnamese hid in the bushes for 10 years our scientists were making huge advances.

Isn't it sad, with all our technological advantages we couldn't beat a person hiding in the bush.

It's a matter of determination. We had a draft, many on our side were simply trying to make it through there tour of duty. There was no sense of defending there country. There was no war declared. It was a very unpopular war. We as a country did not have the will power or support to continue fighting.

On the other hand the Vietnamese did. They saw it as fighting and dieing for there country, most in our country did not.

It was an unconventional war and 3/4ths of it we fought it conventionally. In the beginning we had the right idea. We were fighting fire with fire. We sent in the Green Berets, the Navy Seals, the Delta Force.

These are the lessons that our military leaders learned from Vietnam and in fact if you bother to study was one of the positive out comes for us from a military stand point.

In irak we showed that advance when the irakis ran from kuwait.our helicopters did a turkey shoot on that iraki military convoy killing 50000 in one fell swoop without a single loss.

Google spell check will help you greatly, sir.

Again we can apply the Vietnam model to this war. Iraq had no standing army that could confront us directly. So what kind of war we/are facing. An unconventional one.

You see, you are viewing winning a war in a purely numerical form when winning a war is not that simple.

If war was that simply, why not lob nukes at a country and call it day?

[edit on 21-8-2009 by oconnection]

reply to post by esecallum[/url]

What a pity the funding does not run to equipping you with a dictionary.

If it did, I'm sure you would have spelt Iraq correctly, as I have done.

They saw it as fighting and dieing for there country

If they were so glad to be dying for their country then why did we find charred bodies chained to their seats in destroyed tanks during the 1972 Easter Offensive? Why did they chain truck drivers to their seats during the trips along the Ho Chi Minh Trail?

The North Vietnamese "People's Army" was broken by 1972, entire battalions were being wiped out in a matter of minutes by B-52 Arc-Lite strikes. The Vietcong/National "Liberation" Front ceased to be an effective fighting force after they were annihilated in the 1968 Tet Offensive.

Originally posted by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi

Originally posted by esecallum
I was thinking about the Vietnam war when suddenly it struck me that we Americans had actually won that war ALTHOUGH HISTORY BOOKS CLAIM WE LOST.

I think the only thing that struck you was a dumb stick. What are you, 12 years old and a pro at online first person shooters?

Sounds a bit like Brandon Crisp.
in any case this is the most convoluted explanation of winning a war ever.
It's comparing war to a school shooting. And that's pretty disgusting. At least you expect people to die in a war. You almost never expect a school shooting. and at least there is more thought needed in war, at least by tacticians.

Aye, that be a famous picture of the "Fall of Saigon", showing the last of the Americans being evacuated from a rooftop while Communist forces converge on the city.

America pulled out of Vietnam and failed in preventing the communist government from taking over that is a failure. It doesn't matter if they killed a billion people.

Originally posted by dooper

If you have no stated objective, you can have no failure.

And you can't state the objective, because we had none.

Thus, we couldn't have failed.

58,159 American boys, many of whom were drafted against their will, died for no reason.

Oh, but because we didn't have an objective, we couldn't have failed.

Nice logic there.

Losing a single life without just cause is failure. Taking a single life without just cause is failure. How any rational person with intelligence enough to read or write could fail to understand that is... beyond me.