Stories From Vietnam

What was that song's name again?

>>1778737
Are you referring to, "It Ain't Me" by CCR? It's in like every Vietnam Movie

>>1778748
...Fortunate Son?

The name isn't It Ain't Me, lol

>>1778939
>come into thread where some douchebag thinks it's not "It ain't me"
>it ain't me starts playing

>>1778723
>Side Quest: How do you fight Guerrilla Warfare? Especially when the enemy has the people's support?


The first thing you have to remember is that guerilla warfare is a tactical/operational method. It doesn't fundamentally change the fact that you're at war and the ultra basics, that you're trying to accomplish some political goal or set of goals at the minimum possible cost; still exists.

In some ways, it gets easier if you're the counter-guerilla force. At least in the modern context, guerillas can't really contest with regular armies directly, they lose, and lose hard when they go up head to head. Rather, they attempt to drive the costs of the war/occupation past what the other side is willing to bear, often by denial of area control to everywhere not under the guns of the regular force.

So for starters, you can always go the "grit your teeth and bear it" route. As long as you're willing to pay whatever the cost involved is, the guerillas have very little chance of winning. See the war against the LTTE, or China's reaction to the Uighur and Tibetan insurgencies.

But, usually that's not the case. No polity is completely divorced from costs, and some are very sensitive to time and money and blood being spent for some irrelevant shithole. So to minimize said costs, what you usually need is some method of establishing control over areas once your troops leave it, as actually defeating the guerillas in battle usually isn't the problem.
To do that, you need to create some sort of local governance that the people there can at least tolerate, even if they're not actively for it. In practice, this often involves splitting away some of that popular support, as again, putting a guy with a rifle at every street corner usually isn't an option if there's a guerilla movement in the first place.

tl;dr get half of the locals to support you in occupying the other half, and make sure that you can protect the organs of whatever local governments you set up.

>>1779914
classic

I get that this is a Vietnam thread but I have a grandpa who served in the pacific of anyone is interested.

>>1778723
>I get that this is a Vietnam thread but I have a grandpa who served in the pacific of anyone is interested.

>anon tries to derail thread
>slap a jap starts playing

>helicopter gets shot down
>two guys get out
>a third guy is trapped in the cockpit
>start banging on the screen trying to get him out
>realize the explosives they were carrying are still there in the fire
>stagger to a safe distance and watch him burn to death shortly before it explodes
>rescue chopper shows up
>it gets shot down
>after a couple hours South Vietnamese patrol rescues them
>carry them to the base, hand out water while another medevac is coming
>one guy dies, the Vietnamese carry him off
>sun comes up
>survivor sees his reflection
>realizes his face was burnt off

>>1778723
>taking vietnam course at uni right now
>student that is a vietnam vet with serious PTSD is coming to talk to our class
>last time he did this he had a mental breakdown in front of the class
>entirely expecting to walk into class tomorrow and have it ain't me start playing

>>1779914
hehe tbt

>when the enemy has the peoples support.
They did ocassionally, but i can tell from this statement that you havnt read up on the war very much. We were paying a coastal clan of tribes to fight the north.

Side quest:

Insurgencies are like gangrene, you don't get it without a problem with the body itself.

If you can develop a government that can tell its head from its ass, you can typically begin to separate the insurgents from the civilian population and marginalize them politically.

>>1778723
>edgelord comes in and say kill them all.

>>1779980
>>1779999 (nice digits)

I get that this is a Vietnam thread but I have an uncle who got in a bar fight in Belfast if anyone is interested.

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Fucking gooks

They just had to fight us

>>1778723
My psych teacher in undergrad was a grunt in 'Nam and he told us this story about how he was in a firefight in some village and he was bellycrawling around this hut and when he turned the corner he came face to face with a VC who was also crawling around. They were both scared shitless to encounter each other and he explained how without saying a word they reached an understanding where they would each turn around and go back the way they came and that is exactly what they did. He told this story to illustrate how much of human communication is non-verbal.

>>1780320
nice

did he tell you more 'nam stories?

I have stories about shit you wouldn't believe but I have been told to never repeat them or things could happen.

>>1780327
No unfortunately. I don't think he liked talking about it and that story just happened to apply to the class.

>>1780371
quit being a fucking pussy you're on an anonymous chinese cartoon forum.

>>1780372
oh fair enough yeah, I know most vets don't like to talk about their time in the wars

>>1780376
Uh, no.
My ISP could easily flag me and Hiro could be selling data to third parties.

>>1778723
>Side Quest: How do you fight Guerrilla Warfare? Especially when the enemy has the people's support?
Winning the people is key to defeat a guerrilla. Strengthening the local and national economy helps a lot with it.
To me, also close air support is decisive to make the guerrillas retreat to the wilderness and have a though time doing their fight. I cannot understand why the USA still wastes resources building fighters like the F-35 while modern warfrare tends to become more guerrilla oriented. The science-engineering-tech-military effort should be directed towards creating versatile planes that help the job

>>1780371
>>1780425
>roleplaying as a vietnam vet with top-secret info on a laotian puppetry forum
>4030÷2+1

if you had that info there would be literally no point to your first post

"i know something you don't know but i'm not gonna tell you, na na na booboo!"

go back to /b/, kiddo. heh. nothing personal. thought i'd tell you to get outta dodge before the /his/torians give you a piece of their mind. *vanishes into smoke*

>>1778723
>How do you fight Guerrilla Warfare?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWJ0y6oiot8

>>1780468

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Force

>>1778723
>grandparents
>vietnam
pffft millenials

>>1779940
WOAH! Op here thank you so much! This will help me in my future conquest for Equatorial Guinea.

>>1778723

https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1475638430243.webm

>>1780524

https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1475638616981.webm

>>1778737
So, what are the biggest misconceptions people have about the vietnam war? I mean, it's interesting to see even in /k/ when people discuss the subject it's everytime the it ain't me and then people start describing movie scenes.

I mean it feels that the movies/pop cultural representations have affected people's popular conception about this conflict quite a lot

>>1780491
I know. My uncles fought in nam and one was special forces. He told me how a friend of his was ripped in half when they were evacuated from combat in a cage tethered to a helicopter. I guess the poor guy wasn't harnessed correctly and the lift off killed him. My other uncle was a private as he was recruited by the draft. He never said much, but neither of them did actually.

>>1779914
>be in vietnam
>get sent back in time
>quia non est mihi starts playing

https://youtu.be/M_JVaMuZZBQ

>>1780575

Underestimating the war with the NVA, especially around the DMZ. Most only think of the search and destroy patrols and the guerrilla war with the VC and are ignorant of the conventional warfare further North and extend of urban fighting.

Also the true origins of body count doctrine and the significance the latter battles of the Pacific Theater during WW2 had on it.

>>1780575
Well, the big one is the idea that the insurgency wasn't defeated.

The VC got absolutely wrecked in between 1969 and 1971. It's just that the US had given up on the conflict by then, and the North could still send regular NVA units down to die.

>>1780253
It's also important to note that the rank and file are usually in it for simpler reasons than ideology. During the huk rebellion the Filipino president of the time put up free land outside of Luzon, the main area of the insurgency, and from there insurgent manpower plummeted.

>>1780575

How bad it got inside some of the military

https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/heinl.html

>>1780615
>"Discipline," George Washington once remarked, "is the soul of an army."

>Washington should know. In January 1781, all the Pennsylvania and New Jersey troops in the Continental Army mutinied. Washington only quelled the outbreaks by disarming the Jersey mutineers and having their leaders shot in hollow square – by a firing squad made up of fellow mutineers.

Fuck me that's hardcore.

I've nothing from Nam to tag to this thread, though I might leave you with stories from the Algerian war from my grand-father if that interests anyone(?), which boils down to being the Vietnam war from France, and about fighting an insurgency too.

More entertaining though because it revolved around killing Muslims.

>>1778723

>How do you fight Guerrilla Warfare?

The British in Malaya is the most successful example I can think of, but a lot of the methods used would be frowned upon today.

>A British battalion was assigned to the area. Food control was achieved through a system of rationing, convoys, gate checks and searches. One company began operations in the swamp, about 21 December. On 9 January 1955, full-scale tactical operations began; artillery, mortars and aircraft began harassing fires in the South Swamp. Originally, the plan was to bomb and shell the swamp day and night so that the terrorists would be driven out into ambushes; but the terrorists were well prepared to stay indefinitely. Food parties came out occasionally, but the civil population was too afraid to report them.

>Plans were modified; harassing fires were reduced to night-time only. Ambushes continued and patrolling inside the swamp was intensified. Finally on 21 March, an ambush party, after forty-five hours of waiting, succeeded in killing two of eight terrorists. The first two red pins, signifying kills, appeared on the operations map, and local morale rose a little.

>A few days later, after four fruitless days of patrolling, one platoon en route to camp accounted for two more terrorists. The No. 3 terrorist in the area surrendered and stated that food control was so effective that one terrorist had been murdered in a quarrel over food.

>On 7 July, two additional companies were assigned to the area; patrolling and harassing fires were intensified. Three terrorists surrendered and one of them led a platoon patrol to the terrorist leader's camp. The patrol attacked the camp, killing four, including the leader. Other patrols accounted for four more; by the end of July, twenty-three terrorists remained in the swamp with no food or communications with the outside world...

>>1778723

https://youtu.be/D4WAUmyKDq0

>>1778939
it's /tv/ cancer like nearly every flogged dead meme

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>>1780524
>>1780531
>unironically posting the movie so biased that even the anti-nam crowd called it out for what it was when it was released in 1974

>>1780575
Literally everything. Vietnam is so mythologized that unless you talk to people who have actually read the primary source material then you will be talking to someone that has no fucking clue.

holllly shit how young is /his/ that they have grandfathers who fought in Nam?

I'm 24 and both of my grandfathers fought in WWII

>>1780524
>tfw no jive talking vietnam serving '70s black bf

>>1779980
YES

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>>1778723
>Anyone has any grandparents who served in Vietnam?
>Vietnam
>grandparents
I wanted to say underage b&, but by the gods, I keep forgetting how old I am...

To put that in perspective, my dad served in Korea.

...but my folk's had me late in life - my friend's dad, on the other hand, has tons of Vietnam stories and leftover memorabilia to boot.

Long story short, get the support of the people. Get the enemy to slay as many as the wrong natives as possible, or at least make it sound and look as if he is doing so. So long as the enemy's goal isn't to wipe out your entire population, once a significant portion of the local populous has turned against foreign invader, the invader absolutely cannot win. Unlike the native populous, the foreign invader eventually has to go home.

Drag nearly any guerrilla war out long enough, and this will almost inevitably be the case. In their attempts to route you out, the invader will make the lives of the common man increasingly more difficult, more frightening, and more complex. At the very least, the invader will be forced to parlay with you and make you part of any new government it intends to form.

There's really only two ways the invader can win, and that is if a) he wipes you out very quickly, while causing minimal disruption to society, or b) he manages to turn the general opinion of the native populous against you.

Suffice to say, in Vietnam, neither of these things happened. Before the war was even half over, there were as many Vietnamese, with no connection to the VC, shooting at the American s, as there were actual VC shooting at them, and most of the time, the Americans could no longer really tell the difference.

Blood cries out for blood.

Said father would go on and on about how he was amazed that the politicians were willing to drag that on, when it was so long past the point where there was obviously no longer a military solution. (It would have ended a lot sooner, if not for a resurgence of hard-liners.)

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Grandfather recently starts opening up about the war

>chinook helicopter taking off
>grandfather is on the ground watching
>logistical fuck up, a jet swipes the helicopter mid-air
>helicopter starts to plunge back towards earth
>you could hear the crew chief scream all the way down to the ground

another story

>kids running up pretending to be friendly
>one drops a grenade in a vehicle (I think it was the fuel tank)
>CO sees this, pulls out his sidearm and shoots the kid's jaw off
>kid ends up being set to America to have it fixed

Gramps was a Seabee, hopefully he'll tell more stories for posterity's sake

>>1783652
The only two clips he chose were in regards to friendly fire, and statistically speaking, we lost nearly as many Americans to friendly fire as to the gooks, so there's nothing really bias about that bit, in and of itself.

Granted, that seems to be par for the course for American military operations.

>>1778723
Personally I like Korea war stories better because they are more rare than WW2 or Vietnam stories.

>>1778723
Col. Kurtz told you. You have to embrace the horror.

My Dad served in Vietnam from '69-'70. His unit was at An Khe and Phan Thiet.

He was there for this:
http://www.ichiban1.org/html/stories/story_35.htm

From what I remember, this was his most exciting experience.
>chilling around, repairing some vehicle
>shtf
>welp, some guys are running ammo to the fight in trucks
>hop in one of the trucks
>truck stops, in the middle of the shit
>grab a couple of ammo boxes and book it towards the nearest group of friendlies in cover
>stay with them until everything calms down

>>1783792
Meh, while my dad served during Korea, he didn't actually see any action. Really, they just taught him Mandarin and had him marching about for awhile. Oddly, he volunteered for the war to avoid the draft, and it worked out for him - all of the benefits and none of the PTSD.

On the other side, my grandfather was nearly too old to draft for WW2, but he was also the VP of a... Major airplane manufacturer - and they needed those planes more than they needed those soldiers. So, between that and the fact that he had kids, he wasn't draft material.

He did have a lot of interesting stories about false-alarm air raids in California, and of the celebrations during VJ day though. He complained a lot at how Hollywood made it look like VE day was such a big deal, when VJ day was a much bigger hoopla in comparison. (Though he still got a kick out of it when I showcased him Mafia II's V-day celebration, and was impressed with the accuracy of the cars.)

My great great uncle, on the other hand... Well... We don't talk about "Uncle Rudolf".

>>1783831
Well of course VJ was a bigger deal to Americans at the time.

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Maybe a long shot but does anyone remember that one doc where they interview Vietnam Veterans and one of them has that particularly brutal story about how his M113 platoon was nearly knocked out and how an explosion sent bone fragments of his buddy into his face and neck?

Not Vietnam because Britbong but fuck it, this thread is interesting.

>doing handywork with this trader guy I know, cash in hand, pretty fun
>go to his lock up to resupply, notice army uniform on the wall
>he fought in the Falklands, got bayoneted from the groin to the knee by some Argie kid as his best friend was killed, guy had to go Rambo to get out of there alive
>sounds like bullshit maybe
>shows me the scar
>shows me a newspaper clipping
>its legit

feels weird knowing you are working for a war hero

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>>1778723
>tfw youve been estranged from your trucker grandfather your whole life
>tfw visted only once at thanksgiving when you were 8
>tfw he saves a runaway girl and gets a truck stop named after him
>tfw you find out from the article he has 51 air medals as a Huey chopper pilot in Vietnam and flew Walter Mondale as an escort something your mom didnt even know
>tfw get a letter when graduating high school about being your own man

I want to go reread it guys

>>1783875
He still kicking?

>>1783652

>interviews with veterans
>biased

lol

>>1783865
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0m573MxXXw
I think it's in this one. If it isn't, it's worth a watch anyway

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucmDbv-Ck60

>>1778723
>step-grandpa is Haida
>Gets into crime
>Ends up in a car chase and shoots out a police car's tires
>Gets caught
>Judge tells him he can go to jail or go to vietnam
>Some years later he ends up a green beret
>Has to collect ears from his kills to show his commander

That's all I got out of him

>>1783928
You realize that Hearts and Minds is regularly shown in film schools as an example of biased documentary right? Even Roger Ebert, a man very outspoken about Vietnam, called it out for its bias. I don't know who you're trying to fool here.

>>1784022
Thats a good one but Its not that one, the one I'm talking about looks like it was filmed in the late 80s.

Since we're talking a out docs, what are some docs that are some real tear jerkers?

>>1783891
yah met him 2nd time in my life about 2 years ago. He told a story how they used to dip those rats in the jungle in flamable jelly and let them go into the woods.

>>1784087
Damn, I know which one you're talking about and I can't find it. Can't help with the tear jerkers either, nothing is coming to mind

>>1784075

Posting two interviews of vets retelling personal experiences in thier own words is not biased, regardless of the source. The documentary wasnt posted and youre the only one even naming it.

>>1784087

This one is great, about the Aussies in Vietnam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gUSq7pxux4

Is this a trick question?

Because the answer is you don't.

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/k/ has some bready gud stories

>>1784274
;_;7 Craig was a real human bean

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>>1784274
>>1784479

Craig is very lucky hes not remembered like Bud Holland.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Fairchild_Air_Force_Base_B-52_crash

>>1784683

>The co-pilot on Holland's aircraft testified that he grabbed the controls to prevent Holland from flying the aircraft into the ridge while the aircraft's other two aircrew members repeatedly screamed at Holland: "Climb! Climb!" Holland responded by laughing and calling one of the crew members "a pussy".

>>1780312
I wanna hear it

>>1780984
Washington is hardcore as fuck, a nickname given to him by two different tribes of Indians was Conotocarious, meaning town destroyer. The first Indian who gave him the nickname was an ally who gave it to him b/c one of Washington's ancestors had earned that nickname and the Iroquois gave it to him after the Revolution for being a town destroyer.

>>1781416
Yes please, I love hearing about the Algerian War.

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>grandfather is an officer in U.S. Army doing an advisory tour with MAC-V
>NCO's working with him adopt a monkey as a mascot and keep it in the American hootch
>monkey bites the shit out of grandfather who demands monkey is removed from said hootch
>shitbag A.R.V.N. commanding officer that nobody likes comes in U.S. hootch with his entourage wearing a pristine white uniform
>monkey sees white uniform and goes berserk
>monkey proceeds to start flinging shit at said white uniform
>shitbag A.R.V.N. officer runs out of American hootch covered in monkey shit
>monkey is hailed as a hero by all, including grandad
>monkey survives tour and is passed on to next team as a good luck token

>>1780014
film the breakdown

>>1778723
I had a geography professor who was a Vietnam vet.

He joked about it a lot but you could tell that it still made him uncomfortable to talk about. Sometimes he would make some joke or remark about "the gooks" and laugh it off, only to just stare blankly for a couple minutes before continuing the lecture.

He mostly told stories that were relevant to geography, like "never use a map while you're in the open, cause then the gooks will know you're the guy in charge"

He volunteered for the war, but said that when he read the new of the Kent State massacre he became disgusted with the military and left the military.

There any numbers of deaths attributed to the ealry performance issues of the M16?