I am looking to make contact with any Vietnam veterans who were serving in Company D, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division in early 1971 when that Company was deployed near Duc Pho.
Tag: Vietnam
Vietnam Casualties
This weblog is rightly criticizing Washington Times columnist Jack Kelly for Kelly’s racist dig at Arabs,
The North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies were bright, skilled, resourceful, well-led, and very brave.
In Iraq, we’re fighting Arabs.
Kelly is also one of many people who do not appear to understand commonly touted statistics about deaths in the Vietnam theater,
In Vietnam, more than 58,000 Americans lost their lives. At the height of the war, 500 soldiers were being killed each week.
In the Iraq war and the subsequent occupation, we have lost fewer men to hostile fire than in a single terrorist attack in Lebanon in 1983. We’ve been losing about a soldier a day since the first of June. At this rate, we’ll reach the Vietnam total in about 158 years.
Sorry, but no. The 58,000 figure is of combat and non-combat deaths in the Vietnam theater. If you’re going to use that statistic, then you need to compare it with total combat and non-combat deaths in Iraq (which, the last time I checked, sat at about two deaths per day).
The level of violence in Iraq is still extremely low — I get the feeling that your average L.A. street gang would be more vicious than these rather ineffective holdout Saddam loyalists. As Kelly points out in another part of his colum, the suicide bombers who attacked the Marine compound in Lebanon killed more Americans in one fell swoop than these jokers in Iraq have been able to do since the beginning of the war.
Not very impressive, except perhaps to the media who seem to find a annual death rate of less than 1 per 100,000 in a war zone to be indicative of enormous problems.
World Bank: Vietnam Must Reform to Continue Economic Growth
This paraphrase of a World Bank officials pronouncement about the future of Vietnam’s economy should win some form of award for understatement,
The bank’s vice president for East Asia and the Pacific, Jemal-ud-din Kassum, says without a modern legal and public administration system in place, Vietnam’s transition to a market economy will run into trouble.
No kidding. And here I thought it was capitalism and globalism that was causing all of the problems in the developing world.
Source:
World Bank warns of hurdles to economic growth in Vietnam. Radio Australia, July 15, 2003.
He Had to Make Up the Quote to Save It!
Salon.Com’s Scott Rosenberg had his usual all-over-the-map weblog post the other day which concluded thusly,
Vietnam bequeathed us the bitter remark, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Every day the Iraq war continues we march a little closer to playing out that paradox on the scale of an entire nation.
Vietnam did not bequeath us this bitter remark. Rather this quote came from a story filed by Peter Arnett who made his career on the back of his Vietnam-era reporting.
But the quote has always had a questionable provenance, with its authenticity only becoming more in question as Arnett has thrown away his career on stories and methods that could charitably be called lousy and uncharitably called fraudulent.
Mona Charen and B.G. Burkett claim that Arnett’s reporting on this remark were wrong on a number of accounts.
First, the village in question that was destroyed — Ben Tre — was destroyed by Viet Cong forces rather than by Americans.
Second, Charen reports that the officer who supposedly made the infamous statement denies ever saying it, adding that he simply remembers telling Arnett, “It was a shame the town was destroyed.”
Given Arnett’s behavior in the Tailwind scandal, and his reporting in both of the Persian Gulf Wars, I think it is the soldier rather than Arnett that deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Wacky Proposal for a Rice Cartel
Sometimes there are stories which are so self-refuting that it’s hard to provide further commentary. Such is the announcement that China, India, Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam are investigating ways to cartelize world rice markets. They want to do for rice what OPEC has done for oil.
Rice prices have been in free fall since 1997, losing more than a third of their value in just 5 years. World projections show rice production continuing to increase, so the price of rice is likely to fall even further over the next few years while global consumption is projected to decline.
Under those conditions a cartel is a great idea for producers, but how do they ever expect to enforce cartel agreements? OPEC has had a nightmare enforcing its cartel agreements on oil which is a relatively easy commodity to track and exclude potential competitors (not to mention monitor violators). Since rice can be grown throughout most of the world, there is almost no way cartel efforts can succeed.
Ironically, each of the governments involved has had disastrous experience with state subsidies and internal control of food markets. Apparently they believe that if they simply try the same failed policies on a bigger scale that they might finally work. Don’t bet on it.
Source:
Rice producers in ‘cartel’ talks. The BBC, October 9, 2002.
China Leads World in Imprisoning Journalists
A new report by the Committe to Protect Journalists says that China leads the world in imprisoning journalists. China accounted for 22 of the 87 journalists imprisoned worldwide.
The CPJ report noted that China seems to have hardened its stance against journalists over the past couple years, likely in response to the chaos created by rapid Internet adoption.
In previous years, the Chinese government made concessions to international public opinion by carefully stage-managing the release of prominent dissidents, including journalists, at critical moments. Authorities took a harder line in 2000, when not a single journalist was released.
Other countries which had jailed journalists as of December 2000 were,
|
Country
|
Imprisoned
|
| Algeria |
2
|
| Burma |
8
|
| Central African Republic |
1
|
| China |
22
|
| Comoros |
1
|
| Cuba |
3
|
| Democratic Republic of Congo |
4
|
| Egypt |
1
|
| Ethiopia |
7
|
| Iran |
6
|
| Kuwait |
2
|
| Nepal |
1
|
| Niger |
1
|
| Syria |
1
|
| Tunisia |
2
|
| Turkey |
14
|
| Uzbekistan |
3
|
| Vietnam |
2
|
The number of imprisoned journalists has fallen dramatically since 1998, when 118 journalists were imprisoned, but these numbers do underestimate the problem since they only count journalists who were still in prison at the end of 2000. A much larger number of journalists were imprisoned for at least part of 2000 but released before the end of the year.
Of course arrest isn’t the only way of intimidating journalists. Last year 24 journalists were killed around the world either in the act of reporting on a story or in retaliation because of their reporting or affiliation with a news organization. The murder of journalists breaks down like this,
|
Country
|
Journalists
|
|
Bangladesh
|
2 |
|
Brazil
|
1 |
|
Colombia
|
3 |
|
Guatemala
|
1 |
|
Haiti
|
1 |
|
India
|
1 |
|
Mozambique
|
1 |
|
Pakistan
|
1 |
|
Philippines
|
2 |
|
Russia
|
3 |
|
Sierra Leone
|
3 |
|
Somalia
|
1 |
|
Spain
|
1 |
|
Sri Lanka
|
1 |
|
Ukraine
|
1 |
|
Uruguay
|
1 |
Additionally another 20 journalists were murdered worldwide, but the motive for those murders remains unclear.
Source:
Attack on the Press in 2000. Committee to Protect Journalists, 2000.
China: ‘Leading jailer’ of journalists. The BBC, March 19, 2001.