2010/04/20

Vietnam "Deja-Vu"?

Are we really condemned to repeat the mistakes our army suffered in the Vietnam War, in which I served? On 7 June, 1971, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr. wrote a very revealing analysis of the dismal state of our Armed Forces, which was included in my own analysis, from my perspective as Advisory Team Leader in Ngo Trang and Trung Lap: "By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous. Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, etc., etc. I can personally attest the veracity of Colonel Heinl's statements, when my boss, Major Kurbow, decided to move my team from Trung Lap, to a supposedly "safe" area in Cu Chi, right next to the huge base of our 25th Infantry Division. Though the American soldiers from one of the 25th Division were outstanding, when they moved to their assigned ambushes, the drunk and stoned assholes from the bunkers tried to shoot the soldiers from their own base camps, until I used the land line I had one of the Division's helicopters lay from the American bunker, only a few hundred feet from my outside wire, advising these assholes. that in case of any additional fire from their position, I would use my stash of Communist B-40 Ammunition to blow these stoned bastards up. They seemed to understand my logic, and we had no additional problems from these idiotic base camp warriors.

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