Glad to know that you are enjoying these.
You know, I really don't recall seeing or even hearing of any NV fighter jets over S Nam. I may recall hearing that sometimes they'd fly during the night. I do know that the NVA had gliders which was also used by night.
I may be wrong, but I thought by 1968 that the US had total air superiority over South Vietnam.
In other words, the US had effectively eliminated the threat of North Vietnam flying jets into South Vietnam's air space to do combat with our airborne elements of the Army and Marine Corps.
I was reading something the other day about the number of jets that the North Vietnamese had at the beginning of 1969 when Nixon took over managing the Vietnam war, and how the North Vietnamese tried to use their jets only for defensive purposes over airspace in North Vietnam after the horrific bombing raids Nixon had ordered into North Vietnam.
One of the comments made in MacNamara's study was that the geniuses in Washington couldn't figure out how a 3rd-world country like North Vietnam could possibly hold out against a country with the behemoth military might of the US.
I don't think Washington, or America for that matter, learned the lessons of the Vietnam war.
Might does not make right.
And no matter how many bombs we drop on a country, we can not kill every single person who hates America that lives in that country.
Those people do not only hate America for us bombing them now, but they hate America for what we do to countries like theirs in proxy wars like the Iraq War - we leave after a decade or so and leave 10s of 1000s of unexploded bombs laying around their country for their children and their grandchildren to find later, maybe even 3 or 4 decades later.
If the cost of going to war included cleaning up after ourselves, we would never invade another country.
Iraq is the most polluted country in the world right now, I'd bet.
Judging from the number of unexploded bombs and artillery shells that were left there from our time in the Persian Gulf War clear up until the present day.
We use depleted uranium now in many of our munitions, and if anyone thinks those bullets are safe to live with, then I suggest they go live in an uranium mine for just 6 months and see how well they feel then.
I enjoy seeing your pictures because of your personal history with your involvement in that war.
It is important today, in that you were there, back then.
You were a witness to that clusterfuck, and it is important since you are willing to talk about it a little, so that others may see that it is not a taboo subject to avoid talking about.
If our leaders that lead us into the Iraq War would have held conversations with Vietnam veterans before they invaded Iraq, they would have known that it could not turn out any better than the Vietnam War did.
As long as the pictures don't get gory, I'll keep coming back to see more.
But, to be honest with you, I don't need to see anymore pictures of dead people.
Or people scarred with napalm.
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