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Originally Posted by schwarzwagen
sounds like you would like to when you make excuses for jane fonda.
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I've seen replays of Jane Fonda's speeches back then and she was just a tad self righteous and obnoxious. You have to look at what she did with an eye on the whole shebang which was practically a national meltdown of emotion, conflict, whatever. It was tough on me. I'd grown up believing we were the guys in the white hats, always and forever and it was hard to square our high-tech bludgeoning of a bunch of farmers with that image.
I saw a picture once of a North Vietnamese woman, up to her knees in mud, handing off an armload of mud up the bucket brigade line, trying desperately to repair a bombed out dike. She looked so hot and so fragile. I'm sorry, but I wasn't real proud of the USA at that moment.
At some point, I felt that we'd gone off the deep end, that our obsession with communism had led us into utterly unsupportable behavior.
A whole bunch of us believed that this had to stop and everything got a little crazy. Fonda went over the top, no doubt about it. I think she's realized that. Conservatives are so proud of their profound Christian faith but I don't see a lot of the corny old forgiveness or compassion coming out for anyone during that time except the ones pushing for more bombs.
Hawks will probably say we could've won the war if not for the damn hippies til their dying days. I'm probably a fool for trying to convince them otherwise. They'll say that Fonda cost a lot of good men their lives. I'm thinking that if we'd pushed harder to win it, we would have lost another 10,20, 50 thousand men and still not have had anything resembling a clear victory. So maybe Fonda, Kerry and the damn hippies saved a lot of lives. We'll never know. I do know I didn't meet a single returned Vietnam vet who urged me to join up and stop them commies. Just the opposite. I had a guy on my dorm room floor in 1970, I was 18, he was about 24, going to school on his GI bill. His eyes had a sunken, haunted look, and he said, "Man don't go over there....stay out no matter what it takes," or something about like that. This is not as simple as the hawks want us to believe. We are not endowed with divine correctness no matter what we do.
If any of the hawks bother to read this, I've got no doubt they'll be thinking "Shut up you @%$%$#* weeney!" You know what? I'm tired -- I don't care.