Everybody in my churches loves this song, and this whole album...

Quattro wrote:
What's going on here? Lots of ^&#!*$heads who have no idea about war or military service, making comments they shouldn't.

One of my all-time favorites, too. 10.

10 'nuf said.

wow, what the hell is going on in this thread? Thought I stumbled into a politics forum - lol

GREAT song - one of my all time favorites. 10.

This is, without a shadow of a doubt, a 10.

Never gets old.
10.

This song took on a much more poignant meaning for me after reading James Webb's "Born Fighting".

Polish listeners have good taste.

Plus the lyrics must reach more than a few given the history with violent conflict.

In my country one of the most popular radio stations (Trójka) did a big listener's poll for the best song of all times played on that radio's Top10 over the past 30 years.

This song won.

The first few seconds always turns me to Elton's Funeral for a Friend. Are they virtually identical or just cousins?

PDXDude wrote:
I agree. Wonderful.

10 isn't enough!!

rdo, my post was, quite clearly, in response to your bizarre and inaccurate claim that " US conduct in the Vietnam War was no different from the conduct of the British in WW II against Germany." I detailed several objections to this claim. You do not answer my objections.

You then attempt to engage me in a discussion about the war as a whole. You seem to insinuate that I have claimed that various US actions were US policy. I never mentioned it being policy. I never even used the word 'policy'. I don't claim massacre and rape were policy, but they certainly happened. Your statement referred to 'conduct', not 'policy'. Please don't try to draw me into a wider discussion when you aren't prepared to properly answer the points I raised. Your original statement is bizarre and inaccurate - do you still stand by it?

Let’s start with moral equivalency. They call our troops “baby killers”. Well. The North Vietnamese were the aggressors in the Vietnam war, for the most part. They were invading what was essentially a separatist country in the south. The North Vietnamese would not hesitate to murder the entire family, women and children, the elderly, of any peasant family that dared oppose the communist regime, or stay neutral . They did this en masse . It is not disputed. Ho Chi Mihn was NOT really a true Marxist who cared about social justice (none of them ever were, not that being a Marxist is anything to be overly proud of anyway). He was your typical thug opportunist. Read about him. He was seeking US backing in the 50s before he sought communist backing (we opted for the lesser of evils, we have no choice in these matters).

baythtayth – US policy was not to “massacre and rape” civilians. My Lai and other incidents are awful, but they were not policy . Do you know of any American who would support a policy like this? These things happen in the fog of war. Some are crimes. Most are when the enemy blurs the line intentionally between civilians and combatants. They use human shields, for example. It’s absurd to suggest our soldier were there on the one hand fighting to liberate a country while at the same time to murder them. In Laos and Cambodia they were supplying the VC, it was the main supply route. Are you kidding? Your scruples are such that we’d respect that and not try to stop it? You focus on the questionable means of war. Again, the VC were the agressors. Why don’t you blame them? They could have stopped the whole thing. And if they did? What? What is the worst case? Vietnam would be like Japan today. Or South Korea. Or Singapore. Or Thailand. Or Indonesia. Or Philipines. Wow, how horrible to be them.

Kingart – Vietnam is a shithole. I am not going to defend US policy when it comes to how we asked our own troops to go and fight a war the public did not support. It is unforgivable. I agree. As for how we fought it....well, we should have fought it to win. In winning, we were fighting to free the people of that country. I don’t think there is any credible argument on that point. We were not fighting for oil or colonies.

Oldsaxon – USA fights for democracy, not “capitalism”. No one ever died for “capitalism”. Reductive in the extreme.

Hasan – the VC did not believe in freedom of any kind. Are you serious? Can you provide an example to such an outrageous claim? Do we need to define freedom in a way that explains the killing fields? No serious historian would agree with that claim.

Kcar - you make the best points. That is why we lost and why we should not have fought it. But that does not make our conduct immoral in the least, except towards our own troops.

rdo wrote:
Heaven knows why I'm writing this on the comments page to a D.S. song, but that's one of the more laughably disingenuous comments I've ever read. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe:
- Britain (actually, the UK) was threatened with invasion by Germany. The USA wasn't by North Vietnam.
- The UK didn't use chemical weapons against Germany in WWII (although it was proposed). The USA did against North Vietnam.
- Alarmingly high numbers of Germans were not born with birth defects in the decades after WWII. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were born with severe defects, as a result of chemical warfare (Agent Orange), in subsequent decades.
- The UK didn't drop millions of tonnes of bombs on ostensibly neutral neighbouring countries. The USA did (Laos, Cambodia).
- British bombs are not still maiming and killing several decades after the end of WWII. Unexploded bombs dropped by the USA in Laos and Cambodia still maim and kill hundreds of peasants every year.
- Germany was committing genocide during WWII. North Vietnam was not.
- British armed forces did not massacre and rape unarmed civilians. The USA did, at My Lai, on 16 Mar 1968, for example.
I could go on...
I do not claim that everything the UK did in WWII was honourable, and would not claim the opposite of the USA in the Vietnam war. I just wanted to bring some perspective to your comment, rdo.

rdo wrote:
<What gets lost in these debates is just what the US was fighting in Vietnam, namely totalitarian dictatorship.>

Not that this statement is the total story — not even close, given the total geopolitical and strategic 1950s - 60s cold war situation, and it's always a good excuse to paint oneself as the hero fighting evil — but even if it were true,

it's hard to make the case that this justifies the heaviest bombing in world history, Agent Orange poisoning, a million dead citizens and soldiers, unexploded bombs still being found and detonating under civilians, 55,000 thousands of our own dead, several times that wounded or disabled, and shoving Cambodia into the arms of a cadre of genocidal psychotics who annihilated a significant portion of their own population.

Besides, Vietnam is hardly a 21st century Communist totalitarian shithole. They feed their people respectably, it is a tourist destination, and the nation has about as normal relations with the U.S. as it could have given the devastation of 40 years ago. The willful, brutish, self-interested, arrogant nation called the United States injected itself into a civil war. It would have been far, far wiser to leave them to their own fate.

An Air Force colonel (who saw combat in Vietnam) once said to me that one of the primary reasons for the proxy war in Vietnam was to foster a real-world war zone test for new weapons systems. This hardly squares with the claim of fighting a totalitarian dictatorship.

I suppose it's inevitable that talk of war will ensue during this song. Truth is that America will fight war against any economy that is not pure and simple capitalism because they have invested so heavily in that plan. Being the huge money machine it is, it can hope that even if it doesn't win the war (see Viet Nam) it can destroy by financial means. They fight the war on other fronts as well. The IMF, the world bank, embargos. Cuba is a good example of how this might not work without clear forthought. If they wanted to really destroy Cuba, they would simply open a McDonald's in Havana.

greatness! and too, too short

rdo wrote:
What north Vietnam was going to invade the USA? What about all the bombs you dropped on Laos which was a neutral country.

Just simply a perfect song. 11.