I certainly do.

Posted on: October 22, 2024 at 09:54:32 CT

When my father was deploying for his second tour in Vietnam in the late 1960s, I had a cousin that was coming of age for the draft. He was loudly proclaiming that if his number came up, he would go to Canada. As a naïve child, I told him that would be a cowardly act.

As I grew up, I looked back on that event and called my cousin to apologize for my ignorant statement to him. I told him that I would like to think if I was in his situation, I would still have reported for induction. I also told him I didn’t really know if I would have reported, headed to Canada or injured myself. That conflict was prosecuted poorly by the politicians in DC and many of the senior officers in country. Young men died for no known reason.

Many years after the war, the Naval Institute published in article admitting that the Tonkin Gulf Incident was a work of fiction that never took place. LBJ simply use this made up event as an excuse to expand the US presence in Southeast Asia and kill 50,000 US military.

Edited by Spanky at 09:55:10 on 10/22/24