When Vietnam veterans speak, I listen. Here is a note I received today that I am posting with permission:

Though being ex-military with two combat tours in Vietnam (5th Special Forces Gp) and having a 60% VA disability to show for it) and two sons as military combat pilots I’ve belatedly come to the conclusion that no war we’ve ever engaged in ever settled anything for the better.

The Civil War left this nation with psychic which persist to this day. WW I brought about the successful birth of Russian communism, which begat WW II, Red China, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Cold War, the idiotic Gulf War (which allowed us to congratulate ourselves over our ability to beat the hell out of a bunch of helpless camel-jockeys), and gave birth to the state of Israel, which has been stirring up trouble in the Middle East ever since and might well precipitate WW III.

Our nation had long periods of no significant standing armies at all – from our own revolution to the Civil War, and thereafter until WW I the US had nothing but Western frontier troops, and after WW I until WW II we had little but underfunded nominal military forces. It wasn’t until the Korean War that we began maintaining a permanent standing military, which allowed us to leap into Vietnam, a bottomless quagmire, which we finally left, disillusioned, exhausted, and finally humiliated by a bunch of bandy-legged little rice-farmers, a ridiculous war in which success or failure was tallied by the “body-count.”