Vietnam Rant II: Kent State

You ever want to hear somebody go fricking ballistic, ask my dad about Kent State. I believe he was not in Vietnam yet. Even worse, he was in Georgia. He's gotta spend a year of his life in the mud being bored out of his mind, having to wear pants while he sleeps, eating Chungking-brand chow mein every day because he doesn't want to get hepatitis from what the cook is serving. Meanwhile there's a bunch of rich f-slur kids with political connections who dodged the draft by joining the National Guard. That was one of the loopholes that the rich used. Unlike Iraq & Afghanistan & every other war, the National Guard was never sent to Vietnam, so it's where the able-bodied rich went. (George Bush II among them.)

My dad wasn't some special elite war hero, but he'd see guys go on LRRPs in the jungle behind enemy lines and come back and toss their shit-stained clothes into the burn pit because it's not worth trying to clean them. He saw guys going out in LOACHes flying around at low level. Their job was to try to get guys on the ground to shoot at them so the Cobras could come in and kill them. He knew guys who were at Hamburger Hill. What I'm trying to show is the different levels of commitment here, where my dad everything his country expected of him. Some guys went way above and beyond that. And then you got the National Guard...

In 1967 there was a race riot in Detroit. The National Guard was called in to end it. You can guess how well that worked. They were utterly terrified that somebody was shooting at them! Eventually they sent in guys from the 101st Airborne who had just finished a tour in Vietnam and were not going to put up with any shit. They go up to guardsmen who are cowering behind cars and whatever cover they can find. The paratroopers show up. Their officer asks what happened to the streetlights. These tards explain that they had to shoot them all out because they were under "sniper fire" from an apartment building and shooting machine guns into it didn't make it stop.

So the paratroopers says something to the effect of "If any one of you f-slurs shoots a gun my men are going to kill all of you." He then walks up to the apartment building, talks to the people there (the vast majority of whom were not involved in rioting), and resolves the situation quickly without violence.

Kent State: This same kind of rich coddled f-slur gets a gun and a helmet and goes out to confront... a bunch of fricking 19-year old girls. There's guys out there in Vietnam getting hit by mines, booby traps, automatic weapons, rockets, mortars, heavy artillery, radar-controlled antiaircraft guns (these got 2 helicopters in his battalion during Lam Son 719.) Etc. Some little girl throws a bottle at these f-slurs and they panic and start shooting.

So anyway, that's why real soldiers don't hold up Kent State as a great victory in American military history.