This is my post from last year.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall-Hu Totya via Wikimedia, [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
One of the things I love most about writing this blog is finding out when I’m wrong. Yes, I know that’s a well with no bottom, but I’ll describe it thusly: The Boy and I were sitting out in the hot tub tonight talking. He brought up how angry he was that there had to be a Federal law passed to prevent discrimination against Vietnam veterans.
We don’t live in a “safe” house. Any opinion is open for challenge. Any opinion.
“Do you want to know what I think about that?”
He paused. He wasn’t looking for the “right” answer. That’s a recipe for being intellectually and emotionally gutted and left to dry in our house. “I guess so.”
“Why do you hesitate?”
“Well, now I know that after we discuss it, I’m going to look at all of it through different eyes. You’ll bring a perspective to it that I hadn’t thought about.” I could see on his face that he both liked and hated it. It was like an itch. It sucks being itchy, but it feels so good when you scratch, unless you’re like my Uncle Harold and are itchy because the Moon Men were talking to him through the television. Again.
I’m not sure I messed with The Boy’s mind too much during this particular conversation. We had a discussion that the Vietnam War certainly wasn’t lost by the military. I described the Tet Offensive to The Boy. During the Tet Offensive an all-out assault was launched in multiple locations in South Vietnam against both American and South Vietnamese targets. The Tet Offensive was a military disaster for the enemy (Viet Cong and NVA) as they were soundly defeated by a factor of at least ten to one and failed to achieve any useful military objective.
Back during the Vietnam War, the only real sources of information were: word of mouth, the local paper and the television news – websites with unapproved thoughts simply didn’t exist. Leftist propaganda on the Tet Offensive and was poured into the minds of the American public by a willfully complicit media, led by Walter Cronkite. I’d call him a Leftist prostitute, but they didn’t have to pay him extra. Let’s just call him, “easy,” since apparently he’d do his duty for the Left for a coke and a burger.
What Walter said just wasn’t so, but there was no voice to contradict him. That being said, this post isn’t a defense of the Vietnam War as an appropriate policy, and it isn’t attacking it, either – I’m not opening that particular bag of angry housecats tonight, and it’s not important for the point of this post.
Rather, tonight’s post is an example of just that conversation that I had with The Boy – I started writing on a completely different topic, and, after research, decided I was either wrong or more research would be necessary to make sure I was right. Maybe that topic will show up as a future post, but it won’t be today. Too many inconvenient facts that have (once again) made me rethink what I was going to say.
The world is funny that way – facts don’t always match preconceived notions. Honestly, that’s one of the joys of writing this blog – finding out things that I think, that just aren’t so, and finding out more about the way the world really works.
Back in the day, The Mrs. did the news on a radio network, she wrote her own copy, and selected stories, and put it all together for broadcast at the top and bottom of every hour. Even though we lived in a state where basketball was popular, The Mrs. didn’t cover it on the news – at all. She covered football and hockey, but never ran news about basketball. This was on a radio network, listened to by (probably) hundreds of thousands of people, daily.
Subtle? Certainly. Probably nobody noticed that there were no basketball scores on the radio – heck, if they were basketball fans they probably knew the scores already. But it impacted me – someone controls what stories made the radio news. Therefore, someone controls the stories that make the national news.
Did The Mrs. have a political agenda? Not really. Did Walter Cronkite? Certainly. If there was any doubt, his later quotes (you can look them up) showed him to be firmly on the Left, and firmly in the camp of a one-world government.
When you watch the news, ask yourself two questions about every story: “Why are they showing me this now?” and, “What are they not telling me?”
It was intentional that I brought up Tet on Memorial Day weekend when talking with The Boy. I had an agenda. He needs to know the sacrifices that were made by our troops and others, and to know, certainly, that there are forces that actively oppose freedom. Thankfully, there have been plenty of brave men who fought on the side of freedom.
But far too many died. This our day to remember them.
There have been over 1.2 million Americans who have fallen to the ground on a battlefield far from home as their life faded away. Each and every one of them had a name.
American Revolution (1775-1783)
Battle Deaths: 4,435
War of 1812 (1812-1815)
Battle Deaths: 2,260
Indian Wars (approx. 1817-1898)
Battle Deaths (VA estimate): 1,000
Mexican War (1846-1848)
Battle Deaths: 1,733
Other Deaths (In Theater): 11,550
Civil War (1861-1865)
Battle Deaths (Union): 140,414
Other Deaths (In Theater)(Union): 224,097
Battle Deaths (Confederate): 74,524
Other Deaths (In Theater)(Confederate): 59,297
Spanish-American War (1898-1902)
Battle Deaths: 385
Other Deaths in Service (Non-Theater): 2,061
Philippine-American War (1899 to 1902)
Battle Deaths: 4,200
World War I (1917-1918)
Battle Deaths: 53,402
Other Deaths in Service (Non-Theater): 63,114
World War II (1941 –1945)
Battle Deaths: 291,557
Other Deaths in Service (Non-Theater): 113,842
Korean War (1950-1953)
Battle Deaths: 33,739
Other Deaths (In Theater): 2,835
Other Deaths in Service (Non-Theater): 17,672
Vietnam War (1964-1975)
Battle Deaths: 47,434
Other Deaths (In Theater): 10,786
Other Deaths in Service (Non-Theater): 32,000
(These cover period 11/1/55 to 5/15/75)
Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-1991)
Battle Deaths: 148
Other Deaths (In Theater): 235
Other Deaths in Service (Non-Theater): 1,565
Global War on Terror, including Iraq and Afghanistan (Oct 2001 – present)
Total Deaths: 7,047
https://www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf
Excellent summary. It would be nice to take a century or so off . . .
As for Walter Cronkite and Vietnam, here’s his February 1968 broadcast after the Tet Offensive. If nothing else, a jarring contrast between what was considered journalism then and now.
https://youtu.be/3Toy2wFBkmg
As a kid, I did not see the CBS broadcast above. My family watched NBC News and I do remember seeing this Tet broadcast instead:
https://youtu.be/wA8n114eYXc
It is difficult to overstate the importance to the American people of the news desks of the three TV networks in the 1960s and 1970s. Everybody watched the Tet coverage, very shocking. I vividly remember my mother literally crying when she heard that Frank McGee, the anchor in the clip above, had died of cancer a few years after that broadcast. I was fond of him too, he anchored the Apollo coverage that I watched. I particularly remember a special broadcast he did the night before the Apollo 11 launch called “The Threshhold”.
And in reading this again to my shame, I see how easily I slip into reminiscing about news personalities from the Tet era and allow my focus to be drawn away from the 250+ anonymous American soldiers who died that day. A lesson to us all.
No shame.
It’s truly another era . . .
I wasn’t alive during the 60s but my parents had a deep revulsion toward Walter.
One of the most important things I have learned over the last few years is that quite literally I can’t trust anything I have been told for my entire life. It is both jarring and freeing.
It is. Just the other day I found new (to me) information about a historical event, and I read a LOT of history. So much hidden . . .
When I found out that employers got a tax break if they hired us Vietnam era vets , like we were crippled or such, I stopped putting down on job applications my veterans status.
A good response to a problem that never should have been . . . .
IMHO the best way to respect the troops is to bring warmongers to justice.
I wrote a long screed but what’s the point? We don’t even know who is in charge of everything because it sure as heck ‘aint Trump.
Indeed. Bring our troops home. Too many for too long.