by: CSM William Edge
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Many years ago, in a mystic land far away, a group of men were sent
by their government to train and help other men protect their country.
This is now known as the Vietnam War. Many people have forgotten
what occurred there, more never knew or cared.
For those men I refer to were all members of one small US Army unit. The Army called them Special Forces, the media called them “Green Berets”. That was and is, a misnomer. The green beret is a piece of headgear and not a very good one, at that. It will not keep the sun from your eyes, nor shield you from the rain. It does have two good features: it has a sexy European look and can be folded up and carried in a pocket without damage. Otherwise, it has no redeeming quality. It came to be Army headgear when it was awarded by President John F. Kennedy to the Special Forces units. Naturally, this caused a firestorm of protest from the multitude of other units who were denied the damn thing. A lot of protests came from Army officers; the same ones who tried to veto a new rifle, the M16, because it too had a foreign look. It was all black and had - God forbid - a pistol grip rather than the traditional stock of previous military rifles! At any rate, certain elements of the Army staff had begun to deploy Special Forces to foreign lands to aid the local military forces in resisting the encroaching threat of Communism. This was the era of the “DOMINO THEORY”, and it appeared that the Communist form of Government rule was about to dominate the Far East area. With no fanfare, the Army deployed small units of Special Forces to both Laos and it’s neighbor, South Vietnam. The mission was solely to train, equip, and offer guidance to the Countries’ own troops. As all too often happens when someone comes in to do a job that you ought to do for yourself, the attitude quickly became “Let the Americans do it for us”. And, gradually that is what began to happen. Before very long , in order to achieve any results at all, the Americans found themselves actually leading and fighting alongside the native troops. It became a self fulfilling prophecy, the more they did, the more they were expected to do. Within a very short time, it had suddenly become America’s war. And, as Uncle Remus told us long ago, once you grab that tar baby, it’s hard to let go. Well, we kicked the tar baby and could not get free of it for 11 very long years. We would end up with over 50,000 dead, billions of dollars wasted and all without any tangible result. Unless you call splitting the entire country politically and rioting
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