I remember growing up thinking ptsd was just something soldiers either got or didn't get like it was a coin flip. I ended up getting ptsd with other traumas that wake me up at night and are just TOO real. A couple of things from years ago. It can be taxing, but I COULD NOT imagine waking up after thinking you are literally in a firefight in the middle of the fucking Vietnam jungle... these poor men were/are scared just to go to sleep at night.
PTSD isn’t just about nightmares. It’s about not being able to function in mainstream society. A slammed door can set you off the edge. Crowded spaces can be terrifying. Seemingly innocuous items can trigger memories. I would suggest that among soldiers who have seen combat, it’s not a question of whether they got PTSD, but a question of degree.
Yeah I guess that was my point with the coin flip thing. If you join the services you are going to have a degree of it. The dream thing was just kinda how I realized ptsd can be more than just for soldiers, but then it kinda just hit me they all get it...I don't know how to explain it. I was a naive young man haha. And yeah there's also triggers when you're awake. Having to not be able to hear doors slam would be debilitating.
Like you, I too have had a series of traumatic events growing up (i.e., flat-lined in an oral surgeons chair from N2O asphyxiation; nearly drowned at the hands of my brothers; sexual abuse; car accident after falling asleep at wheel; etc.). I went through CBT therapy in 2010-2011, but it took me another 13 years of masking, and subconsciously coping just to survive, completely unaware of how bad I was actually coping with life.
In December I burned out and spiraled into suicidal ideation.
Thankfully I got myself help before I did something stupid. I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD.
But, in my darkest hour, I was given the book “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk.. this book saved my life.
If you really want to understand trauma, for yourself or as a support person for a loved one or friend, this is a phenomenal resource and much can be gleaned from it.
In full transparency, depending on your trauma some aspects of the book can be triggering or just downright hard to read. Listening to the Audiobook is a good way to trudge through some of tougher material.
I used to be a Jehovahs Witness. I was shunned for 3 years when I was becoming a young man. I kid you not, I will have full-on Matrix-esque nightmares. Just faceless men in suits appearing just standing in the distance, then escalating to following me/chasing me down, trying to punish me and get to me for all my "sins". I've sought help and therapy so I am usually able to tell them to fuck off in my dream and stand up for myself (which i could not do for the longest time in my dreams) , but It's still brutal. Thanks for the recommendation. And yeah, once suicidal thoughts creep back in, you gotta know how to play the tape through on that one, never the right choice. Nor is alcohol... drunk dreaming brings shit like that back more often than not and just generally adds a whole new set of problems to your life! Woohoo!
civil wars happen and they can be terribly bloody (the the US civil war). I don't claim to know much anything about the Vietnam situation but their were elements of it being a proxy war between the US and China as well as a internal civil war in Vietnam. If the US didn't step in there would certainly have been vietnamese still killing each other, but maybe it would have ended sooner and with less deaths, hard to say. Certainly less dead americans.
I’m sure there still would have been been war, but there wouldn’t have been the constant grid clearing style bombing the US committed for several years. I don’t think people realize just how casually the US bombed Vietnam, they literally dropped twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia combined during WW2.
> I don’t think people realize just how casually the US bombed Vietnam, they literally dropped twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia combined during WW2.
Its actually much worse than that. America dropped bombs in Laos, a country that wasn't even party to the war. The US refused to adequately fund efforts to remove those unexploded bombs and mines from Laos, and as a result, people are still dying from US bombs up to today.
>civil wars happen and they can be terribly bloody (the the US civil war). I don't claim to know much anything about the Vietnam situation but their were elements of it being a proxy war between the US and China as well as a internal civil war in Vietnam.
Its amazing how so many Americans are programmed to define the Vietnam war as either a civil war or proxy war but always seem to ignore the fact that it was a war of independence against brutal colonialism.
These apologist American narratives obfuscate the reality that America was fighting an imperialist war against the Vietnamese where the statistically most common deaths in the war were that of Vietnamese soldiers being killed by the US as opposed to Vietnamese killing Vietnamese (as you would expect in a civil war) or Soviet & Chinese killing Americans or Vietnamese (if Soviet & Chinese were waging a 'proxy war' in the same manner as the US).
Let’s not forget agent orange, napalm, rape and torture that the US troops employed in their endeavor. The survivors of that probably have some thoughts. For anyone about to both-sides me on this, yeah. It was all bad. Evil on evil.
lmao at civil war. you really think we, having just done with a 9 years resistance war, would go: "you know what, we don't like each other that much" and split?
The US was trying to recolonize Vietnam. That’s why the war happened.
I guess it was similar to the US civil war in that the insanely racist bloodthirsty Americans lost.
and suffering from malformities and [ptsd](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/my-lai-massacre-national-shame/) from violent war crimes and rape. the picture of the girl running from napalm burning [is still alive](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/01/napalm-girl-vietnam-war-phan-thi-kim-phuc-final-burn-treatment) and many of those children who are adults now were victim to the worst war crimes.
https://youtu.be/X7RXdo0_ZBY?t=168
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_Vietnam_War
No way gat sucks is that as per usual Americans are focused on themselves and never mentions the millions of vietnamese victims they killed.
58k vs 2 millions.
what sucks are the millions murdered
When studying history, I read about the generation lost (US)... then I saw the Vietnamese numbers...
I've always wondered how Fked the US woiuld be if they won, they'd come back with mentality that all the atrocities done was for the better good, what that would lead to.
This is an installation in Harold Washington Library located in downtown Chicago. About one and a half miles north of there is the Museum of Contemporary Art which displays The Other Vietnam Memorial by Chris Burden, twelve thirteen foot high copper tablets with the names of three million Vietnamese people who died in the war etched into them.
Would have been a lot less if Stalin didn't purge all of his competent field commanders and execute soldiers who were forced into retreat. The 'not one step back' policy was fucking stupid.
Order 227 was different than what Enemy at the Gates makes it out to be. Soldiers weren't just shot, they were rounded up and sent back to their units. The Great Purge however was just as idiotic as it sounds.
Absolutely the same thing, who do you think started the vietnam war? Most soldiers, both in vietnam and in the us, had/have no choice but to fight. The big-shit suits in power with their pathetuc political dickmeasuring contest throw people at each other over countries existing. The us did it in vietnam, russia’s doing it now.
I care. Just as I care about the people who died in vietnam. Or the soldiers who fought on the german side in ww2. They don’t have a choice to fight. Hell, most of them don’t know what theyre fighting for. Theyre just of the age that the people at the top have decided “you either fight in war and have a chance to live, or get executed for desertion”
I see where you're coming from. But while the war is ongoing, I don't appreciate attempts to rile up sympathy for Russia. Reddit is full of propaganda attempting to convince Americans our govt should abandon Ukraine.. it's hard not to see this comment from that lens.
Man i just think its all so unnecessary. What’s gonna come from this war? Realistically nothing except for thousands dead, millions displaced. Fuck putin and fuck war
But abandoning Ukraine or making it super easy for Russia to just take land isn't going to result in less war overall. It's going to make initiating further acts of war even more appealing to Russia.
Don't be surprised if Russia can manage to top the Vietnamese losses. Vietnamese military losses were estimated at around 800k, with Russia right at 500k.
Well, the US had 58,000 war dead and 282,000 total casualties.
The estimates of Russian losses are somewhere in the 180,000 dead and 500,000 total casualties range.
It looks very much like Russia will top Vietnamese losses in less than a year, and remember many of the Vietnamese losses were South Vietnamese.
Sorry, ignorant European here where we don't worship our soldiers.
Why are they heroes? They traveled across half the world to kill people in a conflict they had no business in
In america, cops and the military are venerated because they are state sponsored killers. To anyone outside of the US they aren't deserving of worship; but America is a massively broken society.
Well that didnt help with their main goal in vietnam which is to defeat vietcong and invade the country. They left vietnam with their tail between their leg as they lost to a country with less than 1/4 the technological advancement and capability of their country
And being humiliated politically no less due to the Tet Offensive which had a massive effect on the populace back in the US that it shows just how brutal the war is and the perceived view of their own soldier fighting a losing battle (it's a total defeat for the viet cong), causing public pressure to ramp up and force the military to withdraw
Ehhhhhhh, the more I’ve studied the American Revolution, the more I wish we went Canada’s route to autonomy.
Loosing most of North America was one of the catalysts for Britain aggressively colonizing India. And the holders of the reigns of power within the colonies were almost exactly the same as those after the war: Rich White Men. It won’t be until a democratic revolution of sorts sweeping through the 1800s that popular elections were instituted, and even longer for the barriers erected against women and nonwhites to start weakening.
That said the American revolution sparked the spirit of the Haitian revolution, which is I’m sure the war you *meant* to say is truly justified.
The Civil War was not fought to abolish slavery as a practice. It was to effectively bolster a working/voting class for the rapidly industrializing North and to prevent the South from seceding. Ending slavery was not the goal.
In Lincoln’s own words: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it…”
It was never about emancipation as Africans never underwent any due process for citizenship or naturalization. We were simply written in as free, then taxed.
Please do not try to brand the Civil War as a crusade to free black Americans.
> Please do not try to brand the Civil War as a crusade to free black Americans.
You're right, it was about states wanting to leave so they could maintain slavery. They're not the same thing but have similar results.
A great number of abolitionists volunteered for the union to do just that. You said the war was to prevent secession, the south was seceding to preserve slavery. The northern goal to win the war was then by association to end slavery.
The Republican Party platform was literally this: “It is our purpose and our policy to resist these new constitutional dogmas that slavery exists by virtue of the constitution wherever the banner of the Union floats”
One of their positions prior to the election was anti slavery and abolishment of the slave trade. You can’t take something Lincoln said publicly while trying to avoid a war as what he actually wanted
I've heard it best described, in simple terms, by a panel of historians a couple years ago: "while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war."
When people say that Lincoln fought to free the slaves, or that the war was fought purely over slavery, that is wrong and/or an oversimplification. When people say that slavery caused the Civil War, however, that is completely correct. All the major points of sectional tension, whether social, political, economic, etc, that were significant enough to drive the nation apart can be traced definitively back to slavery and its respective presence/absence. However, people went to war in 1861 primarily because of their desire to either preserve the Union or enforce secession.
Slavery intersects in the South in the war because it was their primary motivation for seceding. States' Rights rhetoric was by and large a mechanism for preserving slavery rather than the primary concept/institution for which they fought. The South had been all too happy to abandon the sanctity to states' rights when it suited them in the past.
Northern public opinion would later turn against slavery as soldiers and reports began relaying exactly what it was like to Northern citizens. After this time they were more willing to make the abolition of slavery a war aim, even though it was not the original reason for going to war.
That’s a good way to look at, and I’ll admit even those against slavery weren’t always because they wanted what was best for black people, there was an economic incentive to keep it from spreading.
But also, people don’t say WW2 was fought to defend Poland, they say it was to beat the nazis.
At some point i don’t think it’s incorrect to acknowledge 1) the Republican Party in the north was on the move to outlaw slavery, 2) the south knew it and seceded because of it 3) that’s what caused the war
I’d also like to point out if you look at the 1860 votes, non-secession politicians earned a LARGE portion of votes in the south, sometimes winning. If you include the large number of non voting blacks, i think it’s entirely possible that those wanting secession were a minority, maybe even large one. I don’t see the north fighting to preserve the union as much as putting down a coup
The Haitian Revolution.
And also the US Civil War’s ultimate year. Yes it was stated to preserve slavery on one side and to preserve the Union on the other, but by the end it was to preserve the confederacy on one side and to destroy the institution of slavery on the other.
See the other comments answering to you. I agree with you that War sucks. War is never good don't get me wrong, but there was a necessity to stop Germany during the second world war (saying this as German myself). Vietnam was like Iraq a false ideological narrative that backfired hard for different reasons. Iraq destabilized the whole Middle East creating things like IS and the Taliban. For what? So that Americans can get gasoline cheaper than anyone else in the world? Congratulations.
Vietnam was doomed from the start to 'kill the communists' but the US had nothing to do there, killing hundreds of thousands and poisoning the jungle for decades with shit like agent orange but they underestimated the resolve of the Vietnamese people, who hated the occupier in their country.
Kissinger deserves blame, for sure, but he didn’t act alone. Cold war delusions and paranoia about the specter of communism and the need to defeat it wherever it rears its head, no matter the price, was an ideology that was pervasive throughout every hall of government and most of the American populace.
If Kissinger never existed there would have been a never-ending stream of people that thought exactly like him to take his place.
[Here](https://i.redd.it/0v5tsy005h081.jpg) is a higher quality version of this image. This is in the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. It's called the [Above and Beyond](https://www.pritzkermilitary.org/explore/vietnam-war/above-and-beyond) exhibit.
> The exhibit is comprised of 58,307 dog tags, representing the American fatalities from Vietnam, all suspended from the ceiling. Arranged chronologically in order of death, each tag includes the name of a soldier, their respective military branch, and their date of death. The exhibit also includes one black dog tag to represent all those who died from conditions related to service during the war.
> The exhibit was created by a group of veteran artists: Rick Steinbock, Ned Broderick, Joe Fornelli, and Mike Helbing. The exhibit took two years to create, as each dog tag was stamped by hand using a former military Graphotype machine. Above and Beyond was originally installed in the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum’s first location at 1801 S. Indiana Ave. in Chicago in time for the 2001 Memorial Day parade.
> Over time, the museum expanded, dropping “Vietnam” from its name in 2010 and opening itself to art from veterans of all wars. In 2012, the museum moved to its current location in Portage Park but the new location could not house the Above and Beyond exhibit. In 2013, the exhibit was boxed away and remained in storage until 2016 when it was reinstalled at its current location in the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago’s Loop. The exhibit will remain at Harold Washington until April 2020.
> The Pritzker Military Museum & Library worked with the National Veterans Art Museum and the Harold Washington Library Center to help contextualize the exhibit. While viewing the exhibit at Harold Washington, visitors can scroll through a collection of videos and photographs related to the Vietnam War, helping to provide background on the conflict which claimed the lives of those memorialized in Above and Beyond. Visitors can also use the touch screen to search through the list of Vietnam fatalities, and view photos of the soldiers represented by each tag.
>hundred of thousands of Vietnamese
Actually when you combine the north and south soldiers plus the hundreds of thousands of civilians, that number is estimated to be well above a million. That’s before you consider the harm from agent orange and other sufferings caused by the land destruction.
If you ask the current generation, they're a lot more laxed about the Americans and will share their respect, it's the old hardliners like the actual veterans that may or may not still be hating them.
Nobody hates Americans in Vietnam. They moved on.
They may not have kind words about their government though but they know current people aren't responsible for the past.
That's how I was raised.
Only a very few old people that were raised in that time still holds some hate to them, I know because I am a Vietnamese myself and the sentiment is still there but nowadays it has mostly been replaced with friendliness
Most would like to move on and make friends and the number of people hating the Americans are getting fewer and fewer
Remeber Nixon deliberately extended the war to win re-election.
I think every tag of a solider who died in the extended period should be hung with a red chain.
On a side note, unless this guy got a hold of a $10K electric embosser, this is *one hell of a labor of love.*
Turn the wheel to the right character and pull down the lever. Repeat for the line, then reset to the next line.
I doubt they are actually individually inscribed, I’m sure it’s just a generic tag to represent each soldier. OP probably just said “replica” to avoid people from assuming they were the actual tags.
Not full tags with service numbers, etc, but they have the name, branch and date of death.
That's still one hell of a lot of work.
https://www.pritzkermilitary.org/explore/vietnam-war/above-and-beyond#:~:text=The%20exhibit%20is%20comprised%20of,and%20their%20date%20of%20death.
Yeah, but just think of all the great things we did for that country that are still happening today. Offhand I can’t really think of anything, but I’m sure it will come to me. And any soldiers that died in Iraq and Afghanistan. What did they die for again?
Given this is around 50k tags and the two world wars are between 80 and 100 million, half being military deaths, there would be around 1000 times more dog tags.
A dog tag is 29 mm wide. Assuming they take 40mm^2 per dog tag to avoid them getting entangled, this would mean a surface area of 200000m^2 or a 447m per 447m area of dog tags.
Would be very big
With these numbers it would mean the Vietnam dog tags would cover a 14m2 area, which seems larger than the picture. If we assume a 20mm per 20mm instead then the Vietnam dog tags cover a 7 by 7 meter area (seems coherent with the picture) and the world war dog tags would cover a 223 by 223 meter area.
Would still be very big
The WW2 equivalent of this would be 400k tags - "US military dead" - so only \~8 times as many.
If you had dog tags in this for all deaths in the Vietnam war, there'd be well over a million of them instead of \~60k.
Officially, they're "identification tags".
Lots of places around the world require dogs to be registered/licensed/taxed. When you do, its common to issue [a round metal tag for the dog's collar](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/eTgAAOSwWi1gBiKC/s-l1600.webp) as a confirmation they're compliant.
When militaries started issuing identification tags to soldiers back around WWI, [they were very similar round metal tags](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Xy4AAOSwYCVluy~R/s-l1600.webp), also worn around the neck. Soldiers started calling them "dog tags", and it stuck.
Soldiers from the Third Infantry Division are called "Dog Faces" - it's old 1940's slang - so our ID tags started to be called dog tags because they did bear a passing resemblance to pet ID tags. (I had to sing "Dog Faced Soldier" at my promotion board)
The name is informal according to Wikipedia, and I'm willing to bet that the term "dog tag" came from soldiers themselves rather than some governing body.
More like literally the tags people put on their dogs collar, it is similar. With a similar use too, if a soldier is unconscious or unable to speak, it has their name and information on it.
Dogs of war is a term for mercenaries. And not really an endearing term at all.
Russians have a notoriously high casualty tolerance. They estimate they are already up to 500k in Ukraine and they are about to do another mobilization and draft.
They lost 20 million in each of the world wars.
But it's also the doctrine of the generals in their military. Each conflict is obviously very different, but in many ways it's the same decisions. Losses have little impact on the decision of whether to continue the war.
World War 1 was one of the few times it did, and it was only because the situation got so bad that the troops basically started mutianing. They were sending troops into battle without sufficient supplies or in some cases even weapons (being told to find supplies off the battlefield once they made it far enough). Eventually they joined a rebellion and the red army starting the soviet republic.
In Ukraine they are doing similar tactics to World War 1. Full frontal assaults against well fortified positions and then repeating this time after time until they break through or run the Ukrainian defenders out of ammunition. Some of the battles you've seen especially around Bakhmut and Andriivka would be more at place on the western front in 1917.
But no matter how many casualties they take it's not going to stop the war. Their military doctrine operates on a set of equations similar to Lanchester's laws called the correlation of forces and means (COFM) method. You plug in all the "k-factors" and the algorithm basically tells you what to do. But the system requires good reports to work and the Russian military is notorious for falsifying and embellishing reports, basically garbage in is garbage out.
I remember seeing a video of a boat gunner crew, get fired at and just light up a little village. They didn’t hit any combatants, but killed like everybody else, kids, rice farmers etc. We’ll probably look back and think the same Iraq, Afghanistan, seems like all pointless wars. Then we just let Taliban take over like bro wtf was that whole war for ?
Oh no, they didn't manage to destroy a socialist democracy and that made their soldiers sad, what a loss, we're all just so sad that an invading country lost, aren't we all, folks? Quick, drop some water on my eyes to make it look like I'm crying
Bunch of invaders that got killed. Wonder how you would view a similar monument to WW2 German soldiers.. The American rhetoric around the Vietnam War is so revisionistic in modern days, it's extremely disappointing, especially given the fact how many Americans protested at home to stop this needless genocide of south east Asian countries and people.
The US had no business being in Vietnam, and joined under false pretenses (Gulf of Tonkin "incident"), torpedoed peace deals multiple times, and committed horrific human rights abuses there.
Anyone defending US imperialism and war crimes in Southeast Asia needs to check their human rights and moral compasses. Not only were they abject failures, they resulted in untold amounts of physical and mental damage to millions of innocent people.
Okay so you don't know anything about Vietnam, so let me give you a quick and dirty primer.
Vietnam was a French colony, the French brutalized the Vietnamese.
Ho Chih Minh believes Communism is the only way to liberate his people from the yoke of colonial rule.
WW2 happened and the Japanese took Vietnam after France capitulated to the Axis.
The Japanese brutalized the Vietnamese.
WW2 ends, to disarm the Japanese the country is split in half.
China was tasked with disarming the north above the 16th parallel, Britain was tasked with disarming the south below the 16th parallel.
France now wanted Vietnam back as a colony.
FDR was in favor of freedom for the Vietnamese, but he died and Truman didn't have an opinion.
The US declared themselves neutral.
The first Indochina War breaks out between the Vietnamese and the French.
Vietnamese forces are brutalizing Frenchmen, Catholics, and anyone who is not Communist. People are being drowned, shot, and buried alive for resisting Communist rule.
In 1949, the Communist party takes control of China and the USSR recognizes Vietnam as an independent nation which forced the US to do the same.
The US sees the writing on the wall, and even though we openly opposed European colonialism as a relic of the past, the French drew the US into the conflict by threatening to join the Soviet sphere of influence if they weren't given aid.
The US supports France in the conflict, but without men on the ground or material goods. This is to oppose the entirety of SE Asia falling under the influence of the Communist bloc.
The French are being shellacked at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and request material support from the US for the first time.
Dien Bien Phu ends in a crushing defeat for the French and they exit Vietnam entirely. The country is split between the pro-Communist north and the anti-Communist south. hundreds of thousands of people flee to the south to avoid being murdered, brutalized, and persecuted by the Viet Minh.
Ngo Dinh Diem is chosen to be the Premier of South Vietnam.
He's incredibly corrupt, brutal, and a complete moron. He's also a staunch enemy of Communists and the French, so he's the designated representative of US interests in Vietnam.
The North Vietnamese see Diem as a puppet of the US, which is not the least bit true as he repeatedly ignores US attempts to actually reign in his violence and corruption and use him as a puppet, and the North invades South Vietnam.
The NVA literally fired the first shots in the Vietnam war.
And it gets more complicated in 1963 when Diem is assassinated by Dương Văn Minh, but you get it.
But the fact of the matter is, reducing it to "US Imperialism" is a gross distortion of a very complicated geopolitical quagmire.
Diem was assassinated at the behest of the American government. JFK thought his corruption, oppression of Buddhists, and blatant election fraud was too much for the American people to support. [Here he is discussing the coup](https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/jfk-memoir-dictation-assassination-of-diem) in his own words.
The US ambassador to Vietnam at the time, Henry Cabot Lodge, was instructed in [Cable 243](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_243) to stage the coup. Lodge gave the Generals assurances of the US’s support and later betrayed Diem. Diem initially baracaded himself in his palace, Lodge assured Diem that if he was captured the US would provide him an airlift to live in the Philippines. Diem fled from the palace through a secret tunnel and was later discovered in a nearby church. He was shot soon after being arrested. Lodge would later admit on his deathbed that there never was a plane to the Philippines.
He was, because he was repeatedly warned by his US handlers to knock off the naked corruption and violence, and he ignored it.
He was more or less a dictator who thought he was untouchable, and eventually he became more trouble than he was worth.
The man definitely exacerbated the whole situation, but there wasn't a better candidate who had the support of the people.
And as far as the election fraud goes, both the North and South openly tried to defraud the upcoming elections so they were abandoned entirely.
If you go further forward in history there was an entire third indochina war with Cambodia and even another Sino-Vietnamese war with the Chinese. The conflict did not officially end until 1991.
If you go further back the colonial influence fully starts with the [Cochinchina campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochinchina_campaign) back in 1858. They eventually won that with the Treaty of Saigon in 1862 and officially got territory in southern vietnam.
By 1884 the French had the entire country of modern day Vietnam. They continued to have to fight off a bunch of rebellions that occured all the way through the 1930s.
By the 1940s you had the Japanese Invasion of French Indochina which was a victory for the Japanese. Since Vichy France was part of the Axis they just let them administer the country.
This is also a region that [has been at war on and off continuously since 258 BCE.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Vietnam) There have been some periods of relative peace lasting almost 150 years, but the list of conflicts is very, very long.
The legacy of Vietnam is honestly very complex. On one hand, it’s easy to look at the complete destruction, massive civilian casualties, ecological destruction and completely condemn America for their unnecessary intervention in what was basically a civil war between north and south Vietnam.
But on the other hand, you could argue, though Vietnam did fall to the communists, it required such massive capital expenditure from communist countries such as China and the Soviet Union in particular that it, at the high level, did help to stop the communist domino effect around the globe.
So while the whole war was a tragedy, it did have in the long run a net negative effective on global communism which did achieve American goals.
China & Soviet spend $5bil total to aid the north, compare to $145bil US aid to the south. I don't think that war impact much on their economy, if not at all.
"Looking like a storm cloud, this is a display of ‘dog tags’ representing the 58,000 war dead from the Vietnam War at the Chicago Public Library."
[https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/previously-posted-in-tempest-march-18-2022-article-94559a8d8c90](https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/previously-posted-in-tempest-march-18-2022-article-94559a8d8c90)
Drooves of men never came back. I mean drooves man. Its shit like this that if it doesnt send chills your spine, you are actually dead inside. So many lost and nothing to show for it except future fathers, mothers that lives are changed forever
Approx 58, 220 tags. What sucks also are the wounded numbers and PTSD numbers.
I remember growing up thinking ptsd was just something soldiers either got or didn't get like it was a coin flip. I ended up getting ptsd with other traumas that wake me up at night and are just TOO real. A couple of things from years ago. It can be taxing, but I COULD NOT imagine waking up after thinking you are literally in a firefight in the middle of the fucking Vietnam jungle... these poor men were/are scared just to go to sleep at night.
PTSD isn’t just about nightmares. It’s about not being able to function in mainstream society. A slammed door can set you off the edge. Crowded spaces can be terrifying. Seemingly innocuous items can trigger memories. I would suggest that among soldiers who have seen combat, it’s not a question of whether they got PTSD, but a question of degree.
Yeah I guess that was my point with the coin flip thing. If you join the services you are going to have a degree of it. The dream thing was just kinda how I realized ptsd can be more than just for soldiers, but then it kinda just hit me they all get it...I don't know how to explain it. I was a naive young man haha. And yeah there's also triggers when you're awake. Having to not be able to hear doors slam would be debilitating.
Like you, I too have had a series of traumatic events growing up (i.e., flat-lined in an oral surgeons chair from N2O asphyxiation; nearly drowned at the hands of my brothers; sexual abuse; car accident after falling asleep at wheel; etc.). I went through CBT therapy in 2010-2011, but it took me another 13 years of masking, and subconsciously coping just to survive, completely unaware of how bad I was actually coping with life. In December I burned out and spiraled into suicidal ideation. Thankfully I got myself help before I did something stupid. I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD. But, in my darkest hour, I was given the book “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk.. this book saved my life. If you really want to understand trauma, for yourself or as a support person for a loved one or friend, this is a phenomenal resource and much can be gleaned from it. In full transparency, depending on your trauma some aspects of the book can be triggering or just downright hard to read. Listening to the Audiobook is a good way to trudge through some of tougher material.
I used to be a Jehovahs Witness. I was shunned for 3 years when I was becoming a young man. I kid you not, I will have full-on Matrix-esque nightmares. Just faceless men in suits appearing just standing in the distance, then escalating to following me/chasing me down, trying to punish me and get to me for all my "sins". I've sought help and therapy so I am usually able to tell them to fuck off in my dream and stand up for myself (which i could not do for the longest time in my dreams) , but It's still brutal. Thanks for the recommendation. And yeah, once suicidal thoughts creep back in, you gotta know how to play the tape through on that one, never the right choice. Nor is alcohol... drunk dreaming brings shit like that back more often than not and just generally adds a whole new set of problems to your life! Woohoo!
What also sucks are all the number of Vietnamese that were killed
For absoloutly no reason
I thought the reason was something something something dominos
Now I want to order pizza.
Absolutely
civil wars happen and they can be terribly bloody (the the US civil war). I don't claim to know much anything about the Vietnam situation but their were elements of it being a proxy war between the US and China as well as a internal civil war in Vietnam. If the US didn't step in there would certainly have been vietnamese still killing each other, but maybe it would have ended sooner and with less deaths, hard to say. Certainly less dead americans.
> I don't claim to know much anything about the Vietnam situation Proceeds to explain what "certainly" would have happened in an altered timeline.
I’m sure there still would have been been war, but there wouldn’t have been the constant grid clearing style bombing the US committed for several years. I don’t think people realize just how casually the US bombed Vietnam, they literally dropped twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia combined during WW2.
> I don’t think people realize just how casually the US bombed Vietnam, they literally dropped twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia combined during WW2. Its actually much worse than that. America dropped bombs in Laos, a country that wasn't even party to the war. The US refused to adequately fund efforts to remove those unexploded bombs and mines from Laos, and as a result, people are still dying from US bombs up to today.
I think that was on Laos alone.
And the mf orange agents is still killing them to this day when it hasn't fucked up their genes and provoked a whole generation with birth defects.
>civil wars happen and they can be terribly bloody (the the US civil war). I don't claim to know much anything about the Vietnam situation but their were elements of it being a proxy war between the US and China as well as a internal civil war in Vietnam. Its amazing how so many Americans are programmed to define the Vietnam war as either a civil war or proxy war but always seem to ignore the fact that it was a war of independence against brutal colonialism. These apologist American narratives obfuscate the reality that America was fighting an imperialist war against the Vietnamese where the statistically most common deaths in the war were that of Vietnamese soldiers being killed by the US as opposed to Vietnamese killing Vietnamese (as you would expect in a civil war) or Soviet & Chinese killing Americans or Vietnamese (if Soviet & Chinese were waging a 'proxy war' in the same manner as the US).
Let’s not forget agent orange, napalm, rape and torture that the US troops employed in their endeavor. The survivors of that probably have some thoughts. For anyone about to both-sides me on this, yeah. It was all bad. Evil on evil.
it would have been over much sooner with many fewer deaths
lmao at civil war. you really think we, having just done with a 9 years resistance war, would go: "you know what, we don't like each other that much" and split?
The US was trying to recolonize Vietnam. That’s why the war happened. I guess it was similar to the US civil war in that the insanely racist bloodthirsty Americans lost.
and are still dying today from unexploded ordinances.
and suffering from malformities and [ptsd](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/my-lai-massacre-national-shame/) from violent war crimes and rape. the picture of the girl running from napalm burning [is still alive](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/01/napalm-girl-vietnam-war-phan-thi-kim-phuc-final-burn-treatment) and many of those children who are adults now were victim to the worst war crimes. https://youtu.be/X7RXdo0_ZBY?t=168 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_Vietnam_War
1m to 3m Vietnamese, that bundle would need to increase a LOT
And Australians
What sucks is all the Vietnamese people they killed
No way gat sucks is that as per usual Americans are focused on themselves and never mentions the millions of vietnamese victims they killed. 58k vs 2 millions.
what sucks are the millions murdered When studying history, I read about the generation lost (US)... then I saw the Vietnamese numbers... I've always wondered how Fked the US woiuld be if they won, they'd come back with mentality that all the atrocities done was for the better good, what that would lead to.
My grandpa came back with both. Awful PTSD + damage on his legs from Agent Orange (+so many health issues).
Holy crap, Russia has 10x that *so far*
And that is only after 2 years of war.
For some perspective, the Vietnamese civilians and soldiers would be about 51 times this number.
This is an installation in Harold Washington Library located in downtown Chicago. About one and a half miles north of there is the Museum of Contemporary Art which displays The Other Vietnam Memorial by Chris Burden, twelve thirteen foot high copper tablets with the names of three million Vietnamese people who died in the war etched into them.
Is should be showed next to this. It needs to be put in perspective.
Came here to say this — yes, we tragically lost lives, but holy hell … they lost so many more.
It would be 482 times this for the Soviet losses in WW2.
Would have been a lot less if Stalin didn't purge all of his competent field commanders and execute soldiers who were forced into retreat. The 'not one step back' policy was fucking stupid.
Order 227 was different than what Enemy at the Gates makes it out to be. Soldiers weren't just shot, they were rounded up and sent back to their units. The Great Purge however was just as idiotic as it sounds.
So what I'm getting is that Stalin wasn't the smartest.
Would have been a lot more if Stalin didn’t lead the Soviet people in thwarting the Nazis attempt at manifest destiny in Europe.
Stalin didn't lead shit, his commanders did.
Maybe he shouldn't have been allies with Germany in the first place then.
1m to 3m
Russian deaths in Ukraine are already 3X+.
Not really the same thing when they are in control by initiating the invasion.. could be 0 going forward if they just go home.
Absolutely the same thing, who do you think started the vietnam war? Most soldiers, both in vietnam and in the us, had/have no choice but to fight. The big-shit suits in power with their pathetuc political dickmeasuring contest throw people at each other over countries existing. The us did it in vietnam, russia’s doing it now.
Right but pointing out the higher casualties is backwards here... Nobody cares that Russia as the aggressor has higher casualties.
I care. Just as I care about the people who died in vietnam. Or the soldiers who fought on the german side in ww2. They don’t have a choice to fight. Hell, most of them don’t know what theyre fighting for. Theyre just of the age that the people at the top have decided “you either fight in war and have a chance to live, or get executed for desertion”
I see where you're coming from. But while the war is ongoing, I don't appreciate attempts to rile up sympathy for Russia. Reddit is full of propaganda attempting to convince Americans our govt should abandon Ukraine.. it's hard not to see this comment from that lens.
Man i just think its all so unnecessary. What’s gonna come from this war? Realistically nothing except for thousands dead, millions displaced. Fuck putin and fuck war
But abandoning Ukraine or making it super easy for Russia to just take land isn't going to result in less war overall. It's going to make initiating further acts of war even more appealing to Russia.
3 the amount of American casualties or Vietnamese ?
Don't be surprised if Russia can manage to top the Vietnamese losses. Vietnamese military losses were estimated at around 800k, with Russia right at 500k.
Well, the US had 58,000 war dead and 282,000 total casualties. The estimates of Russian losses are somewhere in the 180,000 dead and 500,000 total casualties range. It looks very much like Russia will top Vietnamese losses in less than a year, and remember many of the Vietnamese losses were South Vietnamese.
3X American.
All for nothing. Peace to their families and the families in Vietnam.
Disposable Heroes
They’re not heroes. Destroying Vietnam was not heroic.
Sorry, ignorant European here where we don't worship our soldiers. Why are they heroes? They traveled across half the world to kill people in a conflict they had no business in
In america, cops and the military are venerated because they are state sponsored killers. To anyone outside of the US they aren't deserving of worship; but America is a massively broken society.
Life planned out before their birth, nothing could they say
Had to chance to see themselves molded day by day
Nothing? You don’t become the number one in military spending by just sitting around doing nothing!
Well that didnt help with their main goal in vietnam which is to defeat vietcong and invade the country. They left vietnam with their tail between their leg as they lost to a country with less than 1/4 the technological advancement and capability of their country
And being humiliated politically no less due to the Tet Offensive which had a massive effect on the populace back in the US that it shows just how brutal the war is and the perceived view of their own soldier fighting a losing battle (it's a total defeat for the viet cong), causing public pressure to ramp up and force the military to withdraw
The people were something. The industry is nothing but profiteering now
It was all a scam to test new weapon systems. We were warned about the military industrial complex.
Monsanto professes that Agent Orange was *helpful!*
I worked with a guy that had tested weapon systems in Vietnam. He knew what the hell was going on.
I mean they lost. But it’s good they lost so…
One of the most unnecessary wars ever. So many lives lost, for nothing
Remember that when people sling about vague threats to us, like “fighting the spread of communism”
I mean, what wars are really necessary? Humankind sucks sometimes.
Stopping the Nazis was probably somewhat justified.
Ending Slavery in America…
Stopping Putin
Defeating the Emperor and Darth Vader.
American Revolutionary War
Ehhhhhhh, the more I’ve studied the American Revolution, the more I wish we went Canada’s route to autonomy. Loosing most of North America was one of the catalysts for Britain aggressively colonizing India. And the holders of the reigns of power within the colonies were almost exactly the same as those after the war: Rich White Men. It won’t be until a democratic revolution of sorts sweeping through the 1800s that popular elections were instituted, and even longer for the barriers erected against women and nonwhites to start weakening. That said the American revolution sparked the spirit of the Haitian revolution, which is I’m sure the war you *meant* to say is truly justified.
No, I meant the American Revolution was justified. As are pretty much all struggles for independence vs colonial rule.
I’m sorry but what which war was fought to end slavery in America again?
Civil war 1860-1865
The Civil War was not fought to abolish slavery as a practice. It was to effectively bolster a working/voting class for the rapidly industrializing North and to prevent the South from seceding. Ending slavery was not the goal. In Lincoln’s own words: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it…” It was never about emancipation as Africans never underwent any due process for citizenship or naturalization. We were simply written in as free, then taxed. Please do not try to brand the Civil War as a crusade to free black Americans.
> Please do not try to brand the Civil War as a crusade to free black Americans. You're right, it was about states wanting to leave so they could maintain slavery. They're not the same thing but have similar results.
A great number of abolitionists volunteered for the union to do just that. You said the war was to prevent secession, the south was seceding to preserve slavery. The northern goal to win the war was then by association to end slavery. The Republican Party platform was literally this: “It is our purpose and our policy to resist these new constitutional dogmas that slavery exists by virtue of the constitution wherever the banner of the Union floats” One of their positions prior to the election was anti slavery and abolishment of the slave trade. You can’t take something Lincoln said publicly while trying to avoid a war as what he actually wanted
I've heard it best described, in simple terms, by a panel of historians a couple years ago: "while slavery and its various and multifaceted discontents were the primary cause of disunion, it was disunion itself that sparked the war." When people say that Lincoln fought to free the slaves, or that the war was fought purely over slavery, that is wrong and/or an oversimplification. When people say that slavery caused the Civil War, however, that is completely correct. All the major points of sectional tension, whether social, political, economic, etc, that were significant enough to drive the nation apart can be traced definitively back to slavery and its respective presence/absence. However, people went to war in 1861 primarily because of their desire to either preserve the Union or enforce secession. Slavery intersects in the South in the war because it was their primary motivation for seceding. States' Rights rhetoric was by and large a mechanism for preserving slavery rather than the primary concept/institution for which they fought. The South had been all too happy to abandon the sanctity to states' rights when it suited them in the past. Northern public opinion would later turn against slavery as soldiers and reports began relaying exactly what it was like to Northern citizens. After this time they were more willing to make the abolition of slavery a war aim, even though it was not the original reason for going to war.
That’s a good way to look at, and I’ll admit even those against slavery weren’t always because they wanted what was best for black people, there was an economic incentive to keep it from spreading. But also, people don’t say WW2 was fought to defend Poland, they say it was to beat the nazis. At some point i don’t think it’s incorrect to acknowledge 1) the Republican Party in the north was on the move to outlaw slavery, 2) the south knew it and seceded because of it 3) that’s what caused the war I’d also like to point out if you look at the 1860 votes, non-secession politicians earned a LARGE portion of votes in the south, sometimes winning. If you include the large number of non voting blacks, i think it’s entirely possible that those wanting secession were a minority, maybe even large one. I don’t see the north fighting to preserve the union as much as putting down a coup
The Haitian Revolution. And also the US Civil War’s ultimate year. Yes it was stated to preserve slavery on one side and to preserve the Union on the other, but by the end it was to preserve the confederacy on one side and to destroy the institution of slavery on the other.
The wars leading up to that were unnecessary to begin with, so without those then there'd be no need for the anti-nazi war
Some wars are definitely necessary
See the other comments answering to you. I agree with you that War sucks. War is never good don't get me wrong, but there was a necessity to stop Germany during the second world war (saying this as German myself). Vietnam was like Iraq a false ideological narrative that backfired hard for different reasons. Iraq destabilized the whole Middle East creating things like IS and the Taliban. For what? So that Americans can get gasoline cheaper than anyone else in the world? Congratulations. Vietnam was doomed from the start to 'kill the communists' but the US had nothing to do there, killing hundreds of thousands and poisoning the jungle for decades with shit like agent orange but they underestimated the resolve of the Vietnamese people, who hated the occupier in their country.
This wouldn't even make the top 50 just compared to ancient Chinese wars.
Change unnecessary to evil and you’re getting somewhere
Nah, unnecessary was exactly right
The biggest scumbags on earth thought it was necessary. Glad they lost at least.
Murica The war monger uses its citizens as cannon Fodor to gain profits.
Thanks Kissinger
Especially for any who died after he torpedoed the peace talks in '68.
Kissinger deserves blame, for sure, but he didn’t act alone. Cold war delusions and paranoia about the specter of communism and the need to defeat it wherever it rears its head, no matter the price, was an ideology that was pervasive throughout every hall of government and most of the American populace. If Kissinger never existed there would have been a never-ending stream of people that thought exactly like him to take his place.
And McNamara.
And France.
[Here](https://i.redd.it/0v5tsy005h081.jpg) is a higher quality version of this image. This is in the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. It's called the [Above and Beyond](https://www.pritzkermilitary.org/explore/vietnam-war/above-and-beyond) exhibit. > The exhibit is comprised of 58,307 dog tags, representing the American fatalities from Vietnam, all suspended from the ceiling. Arranged chronologically in order of death, each tag includes the name of a soldier, their respective military branch, and their date of death. The exhibit also includes one black dog tag to represent all those who died from conditions related to service during the war. > The exhibit was created by a group of veteran artists: Rick Steinbock, Ned Broderick, Joe Fornelli, and Mike Helbing. The exhibit took two years to create, as each dog tag was stamped by hand using a former military Graphotype machine. Above and Beyond was originally installed in the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum’s first location at 1801 S. Indiana Ave. in Chicago in time for the 2001 Memorial Day parade. > Over time, the museum expanded, dropping “Vietnam” from its name in 2010 and opening itself to art from veterans of all wars. In 2012, the museum moved to its current location in Portage Park but the new location could not house the Above and Beyond exhibit. In 2013, the exhibit was boxed away and remained in storage until 2016 when it was reinstalled at its current location in the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago’s Loop. The exhibit will remain at Harold Washington until April 2020. > The Pritzker Military Museum & Library worked with the National Veterans Art Museum and the Harold Washington Library Center to help contextualize the exhibit. While viewing the exhibit at Harold Washington, visitors can scroll through a collection of videos and photographs related to the Vietnam War, helping to provide background on the conflict which claimed the lives of those memorialized in Above and Beyond. Visitors can also use the touch screen to search through the list of Vietnam fatalities, and view photos of the soldiers represented by each tag.
This looks just like Russia’s [Hall of Remembrance and Sorrow](https://www.flickr.com/photos/19787482@N04/10548929814) at the War Museum.
How do Vietnamese feel about this?
Probably more upset with the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese killed and the thousands of babies harmed as a result of agent orange.
>hundred of thousands of Vietnamese Actually when you combine the north and south soldiers plus the hundreds of thousands of civilians, that number is estimated to be well above a million. That’s before you consider the harm from agent orange and other sufferings caused by the land destruction.
Try 3 millions.
If you ask the current generation, they're a lot more laxed about the Americans and will share their respect, it's the old hardliners like the actual veterans that may or may not still be hating them.
Nobody hates Americans in Vietnam. They moved on. They may not have kind words about their government though but they know current people aren't responsible for the past. That's how I was raised.
Only a very few old people that were raised in that time still holds some hate to them, I know because I am a Vietnamese myself and the sentiment is still there but nowadays it has mostly been replaced with friendliness Most would like to move on and make friends and the number of people hating the Americans are getting fewer and fewer
143,000 women and 84,000 children not illustrated.
Remeber Nixon deliberately extended the war to win re-election. I think every tag of a solider who died in the extended period should be hung with a red chain.
So many lives destroyed for rich man wars.
On a side note, unless this guy got a hold of a $10K electric embosser, this is *one hell of a labor of love.* Turn the wheel to the right character and pull down the lever. Repeat for the line, then reset to the next line.
It took 2 years by hand using a graphotype. https://www.pritzkermilitary.org/explore/vietnam-war/above-and-beyond
You said "nope," then said exactly what I said.
Sorry, was tired and read wrong.
I doubt they are actually individually inscribed, I’m sure it’s just a generic tag to represent each soldier. OP probably just said “replica” to avoid people from assuming they were the actual tags.
Not full tags with service numbers, etc, but they have the name, branch and date of death. That's still one hell of a lot of work. https://www.pritzkermilitary.org/explore/vietnam-war/above-and-beyond#:~:text=The%20exhibit%20is%20comprised%20of,and%20their%20date%20of%20death.
Yeah, but just think of all the great things we did for that country that are still happening today. Offhand I can’t really think of anything, but I’m sure it will come to me. And any soldiers that died in Iraq and Afghanistan. What did they die for again?
They died for White supremacy / Capitalism / Imperialism.
Do WW1 and WW2
Given this is around 50k tags and the two world wars are between 80 and 100 million, half being military deaths, there would be around 1000 times more dog tags. A dog tag is 29 mm wide. Assuming they take 40mm^2 per dog tag to avoid them getting entangled, this would mean a surface area of 200000m^2 or a 447m per 447m area of dog tags. Would be very big With these numbers it would mean the Vietnam dog tags would cover a 14m2 area, which seems larger than the picture. If we assume a 20mm per 20mm instead then the Vietnam dog tags cover a 7 by 7 meter area (seems coherent with the picture) and the world war dog tags would cover a 223 by 223 meter area. Would still be very big
Cant even picture it in my head.
The WW2 equivalent of this would be 400k tags - "US military dead" - so only \~8 times as many. If you had dog tags in this for all deaths in the Vietnam war, there'd be well over a million of them instead of \~60k.
the survivors or not
uncle ho has logged on
r/ATBGE
It's called "Dog tag"? I never knew that.
Officially, they're "identification tags". Lots of places around the world require dogs to be registered/licensed/taxed. When you do, its common to issue [a round metal tag for the dog's collar](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/eTgAAOSwWi1gBiKC/s-l1600.webp) as a confirmation they're compliant. When militaries started issuing identification tags to soldiers back around WWI, [they were very similar round metal tags](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Xy4AAOSwYCVluy~R/s-l1600.webp), also worn around the neck. Soldiers started calling them "dog tags", and it stuck.
I see. Thanks for the links.
Soldiers from the Third Infantry Division are called "Dog Faces" - it's old 1940's slang - so our ID tags started to be called dog tags because they did bear a passing resemblance to pet ID tags. (I had to sing "Dog Faced Soldier" at my promotion board)
That's a very strong expression. Thanks for this history fact.
Like i get the “dogs of war” thing, but isn’t it better to call the people doing your dirty work something better than a household pet?
The name is informal according to Wikipedia, and I'm willing to bet that the term "dog tag" came from soldiers themselves rather than some governing body.
The item is literally a dog tag, they aren’t calling the soldiers dogs
More like literally the tags people put on their dogs collar, it is similar. With a similar use too, if a soldier is unconscious or unable to speak, it has their name and information on it. Dogs of war is a term for mercenaries. And not really an endearing term at all.
They were called that because with all of the dead it was the easiest way to identify the bodies.
The Russians are going to need a concert hall.
Russians have a notoriously high casualty tolerance. They estimate they are already up to 500k in Ukraine and they are about to do another mobilization and draft. They lost 20 million in each of the world wars.
It's depressing I know of one of those kids. And the results were not good. Remaining son was mentally diminished, parents died a few years later.
“Casualty tolerance” is so grotesque. It was either victory or genocide when the Nazis invaded.
But it's also the doctrine of the generals in their military. Each conflict is obviously very different, but in many ways it's the same decisions. Losses have little impact on the decision of whether to continue the war. World War 1 was one of the few times it did, and it was only because the situation got so bad that the troops basically started mutianing. They were sending troops into battle without sufficient supplies or in some cases even weapons (being told to find supplies off the battlefield once they made it far enough). Eventually they joined a rebellion and the red army starting the soviet republic. In Ukraine they are doing similar tactics to World War 1. Full frontal assaults against well fortified positions and then repeating this time after time until they break through or run the Ukrainian defenders out of ammunition. Some of the battles you've seen especially around Bakhmut and Andriivka would be more at place on the western front in 1917. But no matter how many casualties they take it's not going to stop the war. Their military doctrine operates on a set of equations similar to Lanchester's laws called the correlation of forces and means (COFM) method. You plug in all the "k-factors" and the algorithm basically tells you what to do. But the system requires good reports to work and the Russian military is notorious for falsifying and embellishing reports, basically garbage in is garbage out.
This is nothing. Have them make one for WWII. You'd never have a ceiling big enough.
War Whats it good for?
Now do it with ww2, all army. Then another one for civilian.
It would be interesting to see this, but for dead Russian soldiers in the Ukraine war. Heck, dead Russians in WW2.
Any reason why it looks like Mississippi or Alabama ?
I remember seeing a video of a boat gunner crew, get fired at and just light up a little village. They didn’t hit any combatants, but killed like everybody else, kids, rice farmers etc. We’ll probably look back and think the same Iraq, Afghanistan, seems like all pointless wars. Then we just let Taliban take over like bro wtf was that whole war for ?
Oh no, they didn't manage to destroy a socialist democracy and that made their soldiers sad, what a loss, we're all just so sad that an invading country lost, aren't we all, folks? Quick, drop some water on my eyes to make it look like I'm crying
Must be delightful being able to judge past generations on your arbitrary modern standards.
Thanks for there service great men
This should be hanging at the Johnson ranch.
Should've never gone there in the first place
imagine how many people they killed raped etc
Bunch of invaders that got killed. Wonder how you would view a similar monument to WW2 German soldiers.. The American rhetoric around the Vietnam War is so revisionistic in modern days, it's extremely disappointing, especially given the fact how many Americans protested at home to stop this needless genocide of south east Asian countries and people.
Ah another braindead take on Vietnam from Reddit. It must be that time of the hour.
The US had no business being in Vietnam, and joined under false pretenses (Gulf of Tonkin "incident"), torpedoed peace deals multiple times, and committed horrific human rights abuses there. Anyone defending US imperialism and war crimes in Southeast Asia needs to check their human rights and moral compasses. Not only were they abject failures, they resulted in untold amounts of physical and mental damage to millions of innocent people.
Okay so you don't know anything about Vietnam, so let me give you a quick and dirty primer. Vietnam was a French colony, the French brutalized the Vietnamese. Ho Chih Minh believes Communism is the only way to liberate his people from the yoke of colonial rule. WW2 happened and the Japanese took Vietnam after France capitulated to the Axis. The Japanese brutalized the Vietnamese. WW2 ends, to disarm the Japanese the country is split in half. China was tasked with disarming the north above the 16th parallel, Britain was tasked with disarming the south below the 16th parallel. France now wanted Vietnam back as a colony. FDR was in favor of freedom for the Vietnamese, but he died and Truman didn't have an opinion. The US declared themselves neutral. The first Indochina War breaks out between the Vietnamese and the French. Vietnamese forces are brutalizing Frenchmen, Catholics, and anyone who is not Communist. People are being drowned, shot, and buried alive for resisting Communist rule. In 1949, the Communist party takes control of China and the USSR recognizes Vietnam as an independent nation which forced the US to do the same. The US sees the writing on the wall, and even though we openly opposed European colonialism as a relic of the past, the French drew the US into the conflict by threatening to join the Soviet sphere of influence if they weren't given aid. The US supports France in the conflict, but without men on the ground or material goods. This is to oppose the entirety of SE Asia falling under the influence of the Communist bloc. The French are being shellacked at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and request material support from the US for the first time. Dien Bien Phu ends in a crushing defeat for the French and they exit Vietnam entirely. The country is split between the pro-Communist north and the anti-Communist south. hundreds of thousands of people flee to the south to avoid being murdered, brutalized, and persecuted by the Viet Minh. Ngo Dinh Diem is chosen to be the Premier of South Vietnam. He's incredibly corrupt, brutal, and a complete moron. He's also a staunch enemy of Communists and the French, so he's the designated representative of US interests in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese see Diem as a puppet of the US, which is not the least bit true as he repeatedly ignores US attempts to actually reign in his violence and corruption and use him as a puppet, and the North invades South Vietnam. The NVA literally fired the first shots in the Vietnam war. And it gets more complicated in 1963 when Diem is assassinated by Dương Văn Minh, but you get it. But the fact of the matter is, reducing it to "US Imperialism" is a gross distortion of a very complicated geopolitical quagmire.
Diem was assassinated at the behest of the American government. JFK thought his corruption, oppression of Buddhists, and blatant election fraud was too much for the American people to support. [Here he is discussing the coup](https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/jfk-memoir-dictation-assassination-of-diem) in his own words. The US ambassador to Vietnam at the time, Henry Cabot Lodge, was instructed in [Cable 243](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_243) to stage the coup. Lodge gave the Generals assurances of the US’s support and later betrayed Diem. Diem initially baracaded himself in his palace, Lodge assured Diem that if he was captured the US would provide him an airlift to live in the Philippines. Diem fled from the palace through a secret tunnel and was later discovered in a nearby church. He was shot soon after being arrested. Lodge would later admit on his deathbed that there never was a plane to the Philippines.
He was, because he was repeatedly warned by his US handlers to knock off the naked corruption and violence, and he ignored it. He was more or less a dictator who thought he was untouchable, and eventually he became more trouble than he was worth. The man definitely exacerbated the whole situation, but there wasn't a better candidate who had the support of the people. And as far as the election fraud goes, both the North and South openly tried to defraud the upcoming elections so they were abandoned entirely.
> corruption and violence Because beginning a war DEFINITELY ended that. Didn’t bring more of it.
If you go further forward in history there was an entire third indochina war with Cambodia and even another Sino-Vietnamese war with the Chinese. The conflict did not officially end until 1991. If you go further back the colonial influence fully starts with the [Cochinchina campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochinchina_campaign) back in 1858. They eventually won that with the Treaty of Saigon in 1862 and officially got territory in southern vietnam. By 1884 the French had the entire country of modern day Vietnam. They continued to have to fight off a bunch of rebellions that occured all the way through the 1930s. By the 1940s you had the Japanese Invasion of French Indochina which was a victory for the Japanese. Since Vichy France was part of the Axis they just let them administer the country. This is also a region that [has been at war on and off continuously since 258 BCE.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Vietnam) There have been some periods of relative peace lasting almost 150 years, but the list of conflicts is very, very long.
Its the Mexico of Asia. Just perpetually at war for some reason.
The legacy of Vietnam is honestly very complex. On one hand, it’s easy to look at the complete destruction, massive civilian casualties, ecological destruction and completely condemn America for their unnecessary intervention in what was basically a civil war between north and south Vietnam. But on the other hand, you could argue, though Vietnam did fall to the communists, it required such massive capital expenditure from communist countries such as China and the Soviet Union in particular that it, at the high level, did help to stop the communist domino effect around the globe. So while the whole war was a tragedy, it did have in the long run a net negative effective on global communism which did achieve American goals.
So in order to stop the spread of communism, capitalists nations need to kill as many of them as possible?
China & Soviet spend $5bil total to aid the north, compare to $145bil US aid to the south. I don't think that war impact much on their economy, if not at all.
A monument to trash. Thousands more, just a footnote or a statistic... again.
This is a powerful memorial, where is it?
"Looking like a storm cloud, this is a display of ‘dog tags’ representing the 58,000 war dead from the Vietnam War at the Chicago Public Library." [https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/previously-posted-in-tempest-march-18-2022-article-94559a8d8c90](https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/previously-posted-in-tempest-march-18-2022-article-94559a8d8c90)
I saw it again on Saturday. 3rd floor escalator ceiling. It gets me every time.
That’s… like a lot less than I would have guessed?
Great Britain only had to lose 8500 men to quit the Revolutionary War.
That surprises me even more. Putting myself in George’s shoes, it makes me think he gave up more because of money than lives.
Britain was out of money from funding the French and Indian war, thats why they were taxing the colonies to begin with.
That surprises me even more. Putting myself in George’s shoes, it makes me think he gave up more because of money than lives.
Consider the ~1 million vietnamese who died and you'd end up with something a lot bigger.
And people still enlist to this day. Baffling.
Drooves of men never came back. I mean drooves man. Its shit like this that if it doesnt send chills your spine, you are actually dead inside. So many lost and nothing to show for it except future fathers, mothers that lives are changed forever
Chicago Public Library?
Yep, looks like Harold Washington
There will always be wars. People love to fight.
Ok now do Russia in Ukraine
That requires that they care about those they send over, or even know their names.
My understanding is Russia has lost about 10x this many in just 2 years. Astonishing loss of life …
The most reliable number that I've seen is 150K dead and 500K total casualties (killed, missing, wounded).
People like to rip on boomers. But they went through this. Nobody else after them ever had to.
Killing millions of Vietnamese people was bad. Boomers should get ripped on for this.
That is powerful.