The War Remnants museum in Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon preserves these tiger cages where prisoners were put out in hot sun for days under barbed wire barely big enough to fit a body into, let alone slightly larger ones for several people.
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War related museums feature pictures of mutilated or dead bodies and children deformed by Agent Orange. Deformed children are still being born 40 years later. Royalties for one of the books I read, Laura Lam's, Late Blossom, go to an orphanage for these children.

Her book says this about why the U.S. failed: U.S. soldiers were fighting against a concept - communism. The Vietnamese just wanted their country back. Guess which was more motivational. How many 18-year-old draftees knew about or thought much about communism, anyway? The domino theory maintained that all of southeast Asia would go communist if Vietnam did.

After 58,000+ dead American soldiers and six to seven times that many Vietnamese civilians, what is Vietnam today? Communist – albeit free-market communist (whatever that means) since 1986.

I'm sorta glad I won't be around to see if Americans can go as tourists to Iraq in 30 years and get a friendly welcome.

By the way, Monsanto, this time along with Dow chemicals, wants to reintroduce the use of herbicide 2, 4-D, half of the infamous defoliant Agent Orange. Salesmen and lobbyists are all over the world. More text below.

Why do we go to war when we know so little about the so-called threats and so little about the people? Other than fund war-dependant corporations, I have no idea.

Frances Fitzgerald cites American errors in Vietnam in her 1972 Pulitzer prize-winning book, Fire in the Lake.

  • Supplying so much aid that farmers went out of business,. When the U.S. pulled out, famine ensued with the side effect of overhunting that did away with many forms of wildlife. Plus there was the ongoing contamination from Agent Orange
  • Trying to change the centuries-old social structure of villages and ancestor worship to top-down bureaucracy
  • Aiding and abetting corruption both in government and the private sector because of the co-dependency that developed
  • Skewing statistics to maintain support for the war

Even then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said in his book, In Retrospect, “We were wrong, terribly wrong.” Yet these errors keep being repeated. After 11 years of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, breakdowns cause soldiers to burn Korans, get photographed urinating on dead Afghans and shooting 17 civilians at a whack. Violence generates violence. A UK Guardian writer had this to say about the latest atrocity: "Massacres are common in wars, they flow from the very nature of foreign occupations. Brutalized soldiers, pumped up with racial and cultural superiority, sent on imperial missions to subdue people they don't understand, take revenge for resistance, real or imagined."

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