Well it’s Veterans Day (11 November). It was good for a free cup of coffee at Rusty’s. I think it’s worth republishing an old post about yet another disaster inflicted on the lower classes by our foreign policy elites. It brackets half a century of misadventures.
Who lost Afghanistan ?
Who lost Afghanistan? No one. We were never winning, despite being told so. It is not worth one more American life. It is Vietnam all over again.
Here I speak with some authority, being an Air Force Officer and physician taking care of maimed US soldiers from Vietnam from ’68 – ’70 at Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver. The Army was short of neurologists, so I was assigned there for two years despite being an Air Force Officer and despite having only a year of residency under my belt. Only fully trained neurologists were sent to Vietnam.
Vietnam is like Chile, a long strip of a country along a coast. As a result, no wounded soldier was more than 20 minutes away by chopper from a fully equipped surgical field hospital, so the people surviving were far more gravely injured than those in world war II.
The tour of duty in Vietnam was 1 year, but the term of service for docs was two. (Back then I asked one of my uncles what the term of service was in WWII — what do you think it was? Answer — until the war was over). The doctors coming back after one year pretty much had their pick of the best places, and many wound up at Fitzsimons. I talked (and worked with) a lot of them. These were not career military with an axe to grind. Not one of them thought we were winning.
They spoke of the corruption of our so-called allies, selling American military equipment to the Viet Cong, etc. etc. The collapse when it came was swift, just as it is today in Afghanistan.
The only positive thing about Vietnam is that the country picked up a lot of smart Vietnamese. One son went to Cornell with several children of Vietnamese boat people who came here with nothing. Hopefully we’ll do the same with some of the Afghans.
We were never winning in Afghanistan despite the propaganda we’ve been fed. The equally sudden collapse of our ‘allies’ in both countries is typical.
Although most conservative websites are unhappy, not all are. The following is written by a vet who actually was over there
This is from “The Federalist” a conservative website.
Chemiotics II 