Vipers Vietnam Veterans Page, A Vietnam Veteran & Proud Web Site is dedicated to those who served in Vietnam and returned home, and to those who are still waiting to return, and to those who will never return. God bless, and thank you for your service and sacrifice.
About Vietnam
The Vietnam war was the longest in our nation's history. Two American advisors were killed on July 8, 1959. Although 1959 is marked as the beginning of the war on Panel 1, East wall, The first American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr. He is listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as having a casualty date of June 8, 1956. His name was added to the Wall on Memorial Day 1999. The last casualties in connection with the war occurred on May 15, 1975, during the Mayaquez incident. With the addition of six names in 2011 the total is now 58,272 names listed on the Memorial Wall.
Approximately 2.7 million Americans served in the war zone; 300,000 were wounded and approximately 75,000 permanently disabled.
Officially there are still 1,870 Americans unaccounted for from SE Asia. Approximately 1200 of these are listed as missing (MIA's, POW's, and others).
Vietnam was a savage, in your face war where death could and did strike from anywhere with absolutely no warning. The brave young men and women who fought that war paid an awful price of blood, pain and suffering. As it is said:
"ALL GAVE SOME ... SOME GAVE ALL"
The Vietnam war was not lost on the battlefield. No American force in ANY other conflict fought with more determination or sheer courage than the Vietnam Veteran. For the first time in our history America sent it's young men and women into a war run by inept politicians who had no grasp of military strategies and no moral will to win.
These young soldiers were led by "top brass" who were concerned mainly with furthering their own careers, "getting their tickets punched" just close enough to combat, to become a medal wearing hero. As the Late Col David Hackworth called them, "the perfumed Princes." Most of these officers neither understood the nature of the war nor had a clue about the impossible mission with which they had tasked their soldiers.
Even more importantly than our Government's mishandling of the war was the misreporting by the press. A self serving Media that penned stories filled with inaccuracies, deliberate omissions, biased presentations and blatant distorted interpretations. ( Television's Vietnam, The Impact of Media ) The Vietnam War became more about journalists (Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather) than about a war for the survival of liberal democracy in Southeast Asia. If only they loved their country's young and willing warriors as much as they loved their own children. The welfare of the troops and the TRUTH took a back seat to the press' sense of its own importance. Walter Cronkite and the other left wing journalists who were to swept up in their own danse macabre to even notice the murderous consequences of their own malfeasance -- or to hear the demands of simple decency. Even to this day some in the MSM have disregarded their responsibility to truth that comes with freedom of press.
We never lost a battle in Vietnam but we lost the war at home under color of the coward and liar. Thanks to John Kerry the "Opportunist" and Jane Fonda the "Communist"
Thirty years ago we watched a spectacle of John Kerry and the Winter Soldier bunch - composed of largely fraudulent "veterans" and overt traitors financed by Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden -- indelibly stain the honor of every legitimate Vietnam vet. Kerry's Senate testimony paved the way for a parasitic political career constructed on the heroism, sacrifice, and dedication of men and women whose reputations are tarnished to this day by his reprehensible behavior.
It was Kerry and Fonda and their fellow protestors who were directly responsible for creating the false image of Vietnam veterans as a "barbarian horde" which raped and murdered innocent civilians daily as a matter of policy.
It's that mythology, first popularized in the testimony of Lt. Kerry and repeated for more than three decades by the media and the popular culture, that continues to haunt our young men and women serving in the military today, propaganda that threatens current U.S. foreign policy and our national security.
"....Recent scholarship on the military aspects of the war argue persuasively that the military situation on the ground following the battles of 1968 made military victory in the south a possibility and this seems confirmed by the relatively peaceful years of 1970 and 1971. This poses the interesting question of whether it is possible to win a war, if no one believes it, do you really win the war?"
It can be debated that we should never have fought that war. It can also be argued that the young Americans who fought so courageously, never losing a single major battle, helped in a huge way to WIN THE COLD WAR.
This site is dedicated to those brave Vietnam Veterans, men and women, living and dead who did their duty to the fullest in war of attrition we were not ALLOWED to win. We never ran, never abandoned our wounded, never stopped loving America even when America abandoned us ... and still abandons our POW/MIA's. We, the Vietnam Veterans ... shall never forget!
Welcome home Bro's and Sisters it's been a long time coming========
Welcome home weary soldiers welcome home!
Vipers Vietnam Veterans Page
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