Vietnam bombing runs

[nopoop]

Vietnam bombing runs.

https://youtu.be/jS3woNW_5ks

[Tig]

Pretty cool to see the jet jockeys' point of view in Vietnam! Probably looked different from the Invaders' point of view!

[Eagler]

All to bail out the French instead of giving the Vietnamese the freedom we promised to them during ww2 when they were with us against the Japanese...

Eagler

[Tig]

Yep, it's a pretty sad story. I'm half Vietnamese myself, and I have a lot of Vietnam vets on the American side of my ancestry too. But my Vietnamese grandpa was an ARVN foot soldier, he has a lot of harrowing tales from the war, and he walks with a permanent limp from grenade shrapnel.

My family still had to flee from the Communists after the war. It did nothing.

[zack1234]

Nothing cool about dropping bombs on people

[Maverick]

All to bail out the French instead of giving the Vietnamese the freedom we promised to them during ww2 when they were with us against the Japanese...

Eagler

The french were so grateful for our help too. They expressed it so well in the decades after.

[Eagler]

Another conflict we went into for all the wrong reasons and no exit plan except to kill communism globally?

We have a habit of getting into longer and longer conflicts with no real strategy to win it or an exit plan...just more profitable wars for years for some and much pain and hardship for many many more

Eagler

[RotBaron]

Seems it’s being suggested that US involvement in Vietnam wasn’t justified.

What more justification is needed than sovereignty of 15 million people being taken away and replaced with a dictatorial authoritarian regime backed by foreign nations?

A bleed over from the stalemate in Korea, probably by most considerations.

Initially involved because of the French who were trying to protect their imperial assets like rubber, yes.

However, what were we supposed to do?

[nopoop]

Not fall for tonkin flag would have been nice...

[Oldman731]

Not fall for tonkin flag would have been nice...

Heh.

Well, we were really hoping for something like that (an excuse to fight), same as we were hoping that Sadaam had WMD.  I think it's probably difficult for people today to understand that we were all so certain there was a Central Communist Mind, probably based in Moscow, directing world domination back in the 1950s and 1960s.  Better to fight them in Vietnam than in California.  Sounds funny today.  Didn't sound funny then (for old people:  Do you remember the Radio Free Europe TV ads?  No?  Try this one:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiHPvwjW4Y).

We backed ourselves into a corner with SEATO and the Diem coup, but it's not like people were opposing the fight against World Communism.  That only happened once the body bags started coming home and the draft boards said to the unwilling, "You're next!"

- oldman

[nopoop]

Yep I was 1A and had a choice. Get shot at ??  Or join the reserves.

In field medical  school (corpsman attached to the marines) only four of us were reserves. the rest of the class went over...

[redcatcherb412]

Pretty cool to see the jet jockeys' point of view in Vietnam! Probably looked different from the Invaders' point of view!

As an 'invader' with the U.S. Infantry, of course it looked different.  Watching a loaded for bear F100 bearing straight at you on a bomb run that was going to hit a few hundred feet away, there was always a pucker factor.

But always satisfying to see a skilled pilot make a hit

The ground view of CAS was something else at times. There was something hypnotic watching a MK82 with retard fins open tumbling thru the air.

Pictures from Tah Thanh hamlet a few miles South of Saigon on May 8 1968, courtesy of a platoon Sgt. on the ground calling in the drop.