I was stunned. I don’t often watch the talking heads, but I had never seen Chris so one-sided and rude. He did not allow Oneill to make a point or finish a sentence. In fact, it appeared that he intentionally called a commercial break to interrupt a salient point.

Oneill was calm and unflappable. I left with the impression that Chris was biased, the guy from Veterans for Kerry was condescending, and Oneill probably had a point.

Is this how it has gone with the other talking head types?

I know a lot of people who believed as you did…commies bad…but we can’t win. They didn’t go off a march under the sponsorship of pro-Hanoi groups. If they went, it was for the music or more imporantly, loose women. As you know Republican leaning girls were much more “traditional” when it came to their relationships with men.

Ambi: I was homeported out of the sub base. USS Trout.

Graduated from college in January of 1971. Served in the Navy from February 1971 through June 1975. Spent an entire 3 weeks in theater submerged between 60′ and 250′

I do not NOW believe it was unwinnable. I take FULL responsibility for the sad consequences of my actions. Even though my personal role in it was small, I did play a role, and I fully own up to it, and am resolved to not be taken in by the MSM this time as I was last time. In recent years I am much more well-informed than I was then. I have since done a lot of reading on the Vietnam war and particularly the role of the press in shaping public opinion, and also on the early 70s, the horrors in Cambodia, and the role of Congress in pulling the financial plug, and thus paving the way for the Communist takeover.

I’m not in denial about this at all, although I’m sure many people are. I wonder what you would have me to do meet your exacting standards of not being in denial? The purpose of all of my posts in this particular thread is merely to try to distinguish someone like myself from someone who thought Ho Chi Minh was a wonderful guy and the Communist takeover would be a love-in. I think there is a clear distinction. I thought the Communist takeover would be a terrible, although inevitable, tragedy. I still think it was a terrible tragedy; I no longer think it was an inevitable one.

I wonder how old you were during that time. Perhaps you, like me, were a young adult–or perhaps you weren’t even born. I was seventeen when I went to college in 1965; I was nineteen when my boyfriend was drafted, and twenty when he went to war. I was frightened, and could hardly bear to even read about the war, although I did follow it on the mainstream news and newspapers. I trusted them to tell me the truth–mea culpa!!

The wounds of that time are clearly not healed, and the current situation is bringing that out in a new way. Perhaps you are a person who feel you saw everything clearly at the time and that subsequent events have borne you out, so perhaps that’s why you seem to have a barely-disguised contempt for those of us who have had to wrestle with how we felt, what we did, and why. For many of us who lived through it one way or the other–either on the sidelines like me, or in combat like my boyfriend–it was an incredibly confusing time, and good people made mistakes. But I don’t think I’m in denial about anything. Please actually read what I’m writing and try to understand what I’m actually saying.

If the United States pulled out then the Communist win by default at least before the successful Vietnamization of the war, which concluded by the Spring of 1972. The reason the South Vietnamese government fell was because a Democratic Congress prohibited the support required for South Vietnam to survive. As it was it took 3 years of unmolested activity for the NVA to mount an offense that could topple the South. You cannot argue that we should cut and run, without acknowledging the obvious fact that North Vietnam would defeat the South. You are merely in denial about your complicity in the victory of an evil Communist regime.

However, it was indeed the underlying assumption of a certain percentage of the demonstrators. But by no means all of them–just the most vocal, obnoxious, strident–and dangerous ones. So people tend to remember those Jane Fonda types best.

One should not be ashamed of abandoning repugnant political views when you grow up. One of the great heroes of the Conservative movement is Whitakker Chambers. As a young man he was a dedicated Communist but once he realized the Communism/Socialism is merely another form of Fascism he abandoned his faith in its ideology. That said, when you oppose a policy you have ask yourself is there a better alternative. The underlying assumption of anti-Vietnam demonstrators was that the Communists were better then the Government we supported. You can come to realize that your views were terribly wrong but you cannot claim that you didn’t support the Communist cause. It is one of the hypocrisies of Western Radicalism that if you are wrong somebody else pays.

Off topic. I just returned from a lunch hour visit to Borders. The number Bush-hating book titles from mainstream liberal/left writers far exceed the number of crazy Clinton hating books from the rightwing fringe at the height of Clinton’s presidency. What struck me is that ever one of these authors was pretty much proud of their cold war era pro-Soviet politics. It is as if there hatred of Bush stems from their allegiance to a discredited ideology. They remind me of the neo-Nazis in Chicago during the 60ís who used to stand outside of a Department Store in the German part of town passing out their handbills. However, our society still honors communists as noble idealists trying to make a better world.