Hi shoz,
Glad to hear from you. We closed US HIghway One, We had armed National Guard troops on campus for 6 weeks. Protesting was serious in those days.
I was at the first Earth Day at the Washington Monument. I had a career as an environmental consultant. After a degree in Physical Geography at UM, I went West and got a Master’s in Forestry from the University of Washington.
Heroin was how a lot of guys got through the war. Drug use during combat was rampant.
You’re wrong about almost everything you said about Vietnam, including your castigation of those of us who opposed the war. You’re also dead wrong about your contention that “economic wars haven’t been a thing since colonial times”.
Our wars are all about the money, just like all of our “interventions” in South America, or Iran, where we “engineered” the coup that installed the Shah. If not directly in support of business interests, then we go to war on trumped up reasons simply because there’s a lot of money to be made. See Bush & Cheney re Iraq and Afghanistan.
As far as fighting the “commies”, the Domino Theory was completely bogus, and get this: no sooner was the ink dry on the Paris Peace Accords than that old commie-hating, cold warrior Nixon was off to China on Air Force One with the blessing of every big corporation in America that stood to profit by either taking advantage of the cheap labor there or by selling shit to the Chinese. They didn’t ever care about communism per se - other than the threat it posed to capitalism’s exploitation of the working class. Again, economics. As long as the Chinese were willing to “do business” with us, no American CEO cared what political system the country embraced.
If you care to learn about the true history of the Vietnam War, I suggest reading the Pentagon Papers. If that’s too much, give Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize winning book a try: A Bright Shining Lie. Not like you seem to be a thoughtful, objective man who reads, but it’s never too late to start.
It’s not like we didn’t have a choice in the matter. Ho Chi Minh practically begged us for support against the brutal colonial French occupation of his country. He was a student of history and drew the parallel with our own “war of liberation” against the British. We blew him off. So where did Ho go? Well, being a practical man, he went to China, where he got the support that he needed. That’s how Vietnam “became” a communist country.
We had the anarchist types at the Vietnam War protests too. The vast majority of the protesters were practitioners of non-violence but there often seemed to be a very small minority of bad actors who would toss Molotov cocktails or damage property. Like today, amoral politicians with their own agendas would seize upon those actions to demonize the entire antiwar movement - exactly the way they’ve done with the BLM protests. History repeats itself, and since few people know anything about history, it’s easy to use the same sleazy tactics over and over and over again.
Time to take this topic off line as it has nothing to do with paddling. Apologies for not knowing the link to Bicker and Banter.