LinkedIn Groups
Group: Military History and Strategy
Discussion: Air Power Studies
Gordon Fowkes now stands revealed not merely as a Cold Warrior, but a would-be revisionist of history -- and a man with no sense of history or his place in it, which he now trumpets and which can be seen to be extremely exaggerated. Not to mention culpatory. He's one of the men who was charged with promoting the false story of American involvement in Vietnam and by God he's still doing it.
He is also a man without a sense of honor, or he would not have tried to lump me in with Communists and tried to dismiss me as merely a tool of the Bolsheviks. No, sorry, Gordon, the time has come for me to explain to you that you have caught a Tartar. And that I not only reject your calumny, but demand a retraction and an apology. You have crossed a line I defend with blood and iron.
Get this straight: My family fought the Russians nearly a century before it was popular here. My great-grandfather was slain in a cavalry charge against the Czar during the Revolt of 1863. I have no love for the Russian Empire nor for the bloody and imperialist Bolsheviks that succeeded them, in power and in ambition. Your suggestion that my intellect is so weak and ill-disposed as to be vulnerable to their lies and fabrications I reject absolutely, with contempt and spit. If you were physically present you'd get the back of my hand, and then my challenge for a duel with sabers. On foot, face to face. I would take your hands at the wrists for such an insult.
Your insipid and tiresome defenses of the indefensible -- a failed military and COIN strategy based on a faulty and deliberately short-sighted reading of the terrain and the people -- shows that you are not merely repeating the absurd lies of the failed leaders of that war, but that you were instrumental in creating and promoting the misunderstanding long after the conflict.
In essence, you have described yourself as a person deliberately engaged in the falsification of history and the distortion of its lessons. I might find your personal attacks to be enraging, but your deliberate assault upon history in the name of a failed misperception of the Vietnam War is odious and corrosive to the study of history itself. I reject you and all your works and demand this group expel you for these crimes.
You are committing crimes against Truth. You have woven lies out of whole cloth and tried to buttress them with your supposed authority as a person actively engaged in the creation and promulgation of these lies as if this alone could make them true. I had taken you for being merely addled and confused. Now I see that you are fighting a rearguard action against facts and the very solid result that the United States did not triumph in Vietnam in any way. You want to rewrite history and make it sound as if the Americans did win, but the Communists successfully convinced a generation of college kids that it didn't happen.
That's no longer being merely wrong. That's agitprop, a Communist tool, and I reject it, its use, and your use of it in particular absolutely. You can't rewrite history like that in the face of the facts and in the face of contemporaries who weren't professionally engaged in promoting Pentagon lies.
I was a hawk in those days. You may not believe it but I was. I believed we could win in Vietnam with the proper application of military force in the proper districts. We had only to identify the objectives of control and take power away from those Viet Cong cadres in possession in the field. The problem was not insoluble. Or so I thought.
Posted by Peter Rogan
LinkedIn Groups
Group: Military History and Strategy
Discussion: Air Power Studies
But the deeper I went into the actual numbers of hamlets, districts, forces and people involved, the more I realized that even American strength could not counter an enemy in place among their own people and in control of the ground and the night. An actual occupation of Vietnam was needed, with a force on the ground sufficient not just to physically protect every hamlet, but to begin to build a true democratic government in Vietnam, something no South Vietnamese President from Diem to Ky wanted or actively sought.
My estimate was that it would take an infantry force of ten million US soldiers to hold and keep Vietnam and reverse Communist infiltration and influence. It could still be done. But it would take an effort five to ten times greater than what we had in place, and it would take more than the military to accomplish it. Had anybody in Washington looked at the figures the military was bandying about and taken their own look at the corruption and weakness of the post-Diem governments, they would have seen that the military was fighting the wrong war against an enemy they didn't understand with tactics that were not suited to the objective which they had not defined -- and which no US political leader would or could define, right up to the end.
By the time I had figured out the puzzle, it was too late to recast the war in Vietnam as a political struggle democracy had to win -- one that paradoxically required more troops but less fighting. There was no will in Washington, and no will in the American people to continue so expensive and deadly a folly. By 1973 we had no other options, though there had been more than enough time beforehand to change circumstances.
One of the things that prevented that reassessment by Washington and by the American people was people like you, Gordon. In fact, I lay fifty thousand dead Americans at your feet and say you killed them. You killed them, because you defended a faulty assessment of the war, its actual political and military needs, and defended instead a bureaucracy striving for its survival against the American government, the American people, and, at the last, against the verdict of History itself. And you are doing it today, fighting a rearguard only important to others like you, whose crimes would bring down the nation, just to keep you in your job.
J'accuse!
Now, if you want to meet me on the field of honor, I will be more than happy to take your teeth and anything else I can from you with naked steel, hand-to-hand. But you stand revealed as one of the architects of the labyrinth of lies that deceived America and led it to dishonor and failure in Vietnam. Your teachings, indeed your every publication here, continues those lies and is contributing to the same failure of vision that's going to make Afghanistan a failure for the US as well. You've exposed yourself as an enemy of the American people, of democracy, and of history itself. That's something for which no pain I can inflict on you personally can atone. The monstrosity you have perpetrated requires a response from all historians, indeed all Americans.
You are a liar and a traitor to America and to the truth. Your continuing violations of the sacred trust of study, reflection, history and honor are violations of civilization. I reject you. But I think every historian, every American, needs to repudiate you and your lies. I speak now as an historian and as an American: You are vile and evil and in the name of decency deserve to be publicly punished for your willful crimes against America. I think hanging is too good for you. I would urge impalement.
How dare you? HOW DARE YOU?
Posted by Peter Rogan
Group: Military History and Strategy
Discussion: Air Power Studies
Gordon Fowkes now stands revealed not merely as a Cold Warrior, but a would-be revisionist of history -- and a man with no sense of history or his place in it, which he now trumpets and which can be seen to be extremely exaggerated. Not to mention culpatory. He's one of the men who was charged with promoting the false story of American involvement in Vietnam and by God he's still doing it.
 |
| Of me with 2/2 Mech Infantry Bn, Ist ID in War Zone D Summer 1968 |
He is also a man without a sense of honor, or he would not have tried to lump me in with Communists and tried to dismiss me as merely a tool of the Bolsheviks. No, sorry, Gordon, the time has come for me to explain to you that you have caught a Tartar. And that I not only reject your calumny, but demand a retraction and an apology. You have crossed a line I defend with blood and iron.
Get this straight: My family fought the Russians nearly a century before it was popular here. My great-grandfather was slain in a cavalry charge against the Czar during the Revolt of 1863. I have no love for the Russian Empire nor for the bloody and imperialist Bolsheviks that succeeded them, in power and in ambition. Your suggestion that my intellect is so weak and ill-disposed as to be vulnerable to their lies and fabrications I reject absolutely, with contempt and spit. If you were physically present you'd get the back of my hand, and then my challenge for a duel with sabers. On foot, face to face. I would take your hands at the wrists for such an insult.
 |
| Landing at "Holiday Inn III in area called the "Bowling Alley" July 1968 on my return from 1st ID G2 |
Your insipid and tiresome defenses of the indefensible -- a failed military and COIN strategy based on a faulty and deliberately short-sighted reading of the terrain and the people -- shows that you are not merely repeating the absurd lies of the failed leaders of that war, but that you were instrumental in creating and promoting the misunderstanding long after the conflict.
 |
| Copied from articles the "anti war" pro VC traitors |
In essence, you have described yourself as a person deliberately engaged in the falsification of history and the distortion of its lessons. I might find your personal attacks to be enraging, but your deliberate assault upon history in the name of a failed misperception of the Vietnam War is odious and corrosive to the study of history itself. I reject you and all your works and demand this group expel you for these crimes.
 |
| Taken by me in June 1968 (approx) with 2/2 Mech inside the Trapezoid after VC attack. F100 delivers airstrike on enemy positions in contact. |
You are committing crimes against Truth. You have woven lies out of whole cloth and tried to buttress them with your supposed authority as a person actively engaged in the creation and promulgation of these lies as if this alone could make them true. I had taken you for being merely addled and confused. Now I see that you are fighting a rearguard action against facts and the very solid result that the United States did not triumph in Vietnam in any way. You want to rewrite history and make it sound as if the Americans did win, but the Communists successfully convinced a generation of college kids that it didn't happen.
That's no longer being merely wrong. That's agitprop, a Communist tool, and I reject it, its use, and your use of it in particular absolutely. You can't rewrite history like that in the face of the facts and in the face of contemporaries who weren't professionally engaged in promoting Pentagon lies.
 |
| Taken in Late Summer on a "coolaid" run to Hue 1968. |
I was a hawk in those days. You may not believe it but I was. I believed we could win in Vietnam with the proper application of military force in the proper districts. We had only to identify the objectives of control and take power away from those Viet Cong cadres in possession in the field. The problem was not insoluble. Or so I thought.
Posted by Peter Rogan
LinkedIn Groups
Group: Military History and Strategy
Discussion: Air Power Studies
But the deeper I went into the actual numbers of hamlets, districts, forces and people involved, the more I realized that even American strength could not counter an enemy in place among their own people and in control of the ground and the night. An actual occupation of Vietnam was needed, with a force on the ground sufficient not just to physically protect every hamlet, but to begin to build a true democratic government in Vietnam, something no South Vietnamese President from Diem to Ky wanted or actively sought.
 |
| Peter Sellers as Dr Strangelove in Dr Stranglove, the movie as the German cum US scientist |
My estimate was that it would take an infantry force of ten million US soldiers to hold and keep Vietnam and reverse Communist infiltration and influence. It could still be done. But it would take an effort five to ten times greater than what we had in place, and it would take more than the military to accomplish it. Had anybody in Washington looked at the figures the military was bandying about and taken their own look at the corruption and weakness of the post-Diem governments, they would have seen that the military was fighting the wrong war against an enemy they didn't understand with tactics that were not suited to the objective which they had not defined -- and which no US political leader would or could define, right up to the end.
 |
| Dr Strangelove calculating length of radio activtiy post mutual nuclear exchange |
By the time I had figured out the puzzle, it was too late to recast the war in Vietnam as a political struggle democracy had to win -- one that paradoxically required more troops but less fighting. There was no will in Washington, and no will in the American people to continue so expensive and deadly a folly. By 1973 we had no other options, though there had been more than enough time beforehand to change circumstances.
 |
| VC activists on Mall in DC (note VC flags) |
One of the things that prevented that reassessment by Washington and by the American people was people like you, Gordon. In fact, I lay fifty thousand dead Americans at your feet and say you killed them. You killed them, because you defended a faulty assessment of the war, its actual political and military needs, and defended instead a bureaucracy striving for its survival against the American government, the American people, and, at the last, against the verdict of History itself. And you are doing it today, fighting a rearguard only important to others like you, whose crimes would bring down the nation, just to keep you in your job.
J'accuse!
 |
| VC flag on T-54 Tank in Saigon |
Now, if you want to meet me on the field of honor, I will be more than happy to take your teeth and anything else I can from you with naked steel, hand-to-hand. But you stand revealed as one of the architects of the labyrinth of lies that deceived America and led it to dishonor and failure in Vietnam. Your teachings, indeed your every publication here, continues those lies and is contributing to the same failure of vision that's going to make Afghanistan a failure for the US as well. You've exposed yourself as an enemy of the American people, of democracy, and of history itself. That's something for which no pain I can inflict on you personally can atone. The monstrosity you have perpetrated requires a response from all historians, indeed all Americans.
 |
| M113 in front of mine entering into boonies adjacent to the Michelon Plantation, June 68 |
You are a liar and a traitor to America and to the truth. Your continuing violations of the sacred trust of study, reflection, history and honor are violations of civilization. I reject you. But I think every historian, every American, needs to repudiate you and your lies. I speak now as an historian and as an American: You are vile and evil and in the name of decency deserve to be publicly punished for your willful crimes against America. I think hanging is too good for you. I would urge impalement.
How dare you? HOW DARE YOU?
Posted by Peter Rogan
 |
| Same M113 getting to thick of the "jungle" heading into Michelon Plantation area |
