Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Vietnam Scenarios: Real and Speculative

Hahahahahahaha!...ahhhhhhhhahahahahaha! Conservatives expected relief from the courts! No standing for election fraud and the US Attorney for Southern New York gets Trump's tax returns. But judges, right Mitch? Excuse this blog while it hits the laugh track once again. Sorry, I can't stop. Because we're a naïve fool we'll just go ahead and assume the Dems won't steal everything in 2022. Reader(s) just go ahead and hit that laugh track button again. Anyway, if GOP candidates aren't promising to impeach Biden and prosecute Hunter, then we're not interested.

William Westmoreland was the Mitt Romney of generals. Outwardly impressive, and good at certain things, but not cut out for the top slot in the corporation.* That President Johnson left Westmoreland at MACV for four years is one of his great failings. Lewis Sorely suspects that Johnson kept him in there throughout '68 because he was worried Westmorland had political ambitions. This wouldn't be the first time that happened. President Polk cast a weary eye toward General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War. 

Anyway we're also a hundred pages into James S. Robins' This Time we Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive. This is an excellent revision of the Tet Offensive conventional wisdom. Two things we've learned. The American public was impatient and generally disapproved of the handling of the war even before Tet. A huge chunk of the public wanted to escalate and win**. Second, Hanoi was impatient, wanted to get on with things and felt that the war in the South was becoming a, what's the word, oh yes, quagmire.

The Confederate Contingent brings up nuking Hanoi in The Great Nuclear War of 1975. This is an interesting point. When hostilities break out it's only been a few months since the fall of Saigon and Pnohm Pehn. We make an oblique reference in the opening, but we can't pretend these events didn't happen and don't matter. Maybe the US decided hell with it? Nuking 'everything red' was in the Pentagon's DNA and was the plan till Kennedy told Air Force to come up with some other options. 

We read several Salvation '76 scenes yesterday and touched them up. Overall the first part of the chapter with the Americans getting pushed south moves very fast, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It might benefit from a few additional scenes, maybe one involving the air force. Overall we pronounce ourselves pleased, which just means today should be a bear [Oh my, the knobhead learns-Ed]. See, in anticipating the ironic wrath of the literary gods one can forestall them. [Idiot, don't say that outload!-Ed]. Ed's Never taunt the gods. [I am always right-Ed]

*If you don't know that's a reference you shouldn't be reading this blog. 

**Why don't we just nuke that bastards?

No comments:

Post a Comment