in dollars and lives and the long term effects
uh-huh
well uh
you ready i i'll hit it if you're ready to start okay
oh i'm ready yeah sure
my name's Karen by the way what what's your name
Karen my name's John Benyak where do you live
San Francisco
oh i live in Dallas
oh nice to meet you
just outside of Dallas
nice talking to you
what's that mean we're ready to go
ready to go
okay well it uh the way it turned out it wasn't worth anything really i just don't think i've always thought that uh
it just wasn't carried on the way it should have been it wasn't carried on like a war i mean if we were in there to fight a war regardless of the reason we were there it should have been fought like a war it just uh
what would that how would that have been different if it had been fought like a war
we
well i think we'd uh we'd uh beat them i don't think uh
i don't know what would have happened twenty years later down the road with the country within and with us but uh i think if we'd uh had allowed the military people to conduct it like a war
instead of letting the politicians and the
and the peace and people like that dictate the terms of the way we fought i think things would have turned out a lot differently
you you think it was a winnable war then
oh yes yeah i mean it was just a two bit country always was and always will be and uh or at least it is now and there's no way
that if we'd uh been able to take uh
use the capacity that we had the potential we had to fight a war against a country like that we would have uh what would have lost it as a war the long term effects well
uh-huh
uh i don't know that's that's a little tougher to answer i think uh
depends i guess on who's in office but uh i think Bush used that uh last year in the Persian Gulf uh by taking some stronger stronger measures and when the war started
you mean the effects of of Vietnam being to encourage him to to be more defensive in his posture and go for
be more or be more offensive well once the war started once they decided
i meant offensive i'm sorry uh-huh
once they decided to fight the thing we take a take a much uh
run in there and do it as quickly as possible rather than let the thing drag on i guess what happened back in Vietnam is that uh they we escalated and uh just you know on a gradual basis and gave the
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong time to adjust to our uh
increases in uh personnel and so forth they just didn't go in there if they'd a sent five hundred thousand troops in there at one time initially uh i think things would have been would have been differently but different but it they went from
having the advisors uh up to that four hundred to five hundred thousand troops over a period of time a long a long number of years and as i said i think the uh
uh-huh
the enemy just gradually adjusted to that
um
and they didn't uh the people the country the people here didn't want the war the way it turned out they didn't want it
i do think one of the effects was that the uh people involved in that kind of an um activity were surprised at the power that the media had on um intervening and probably
uh-huh
set the tone for medias involved then in future whether it was a war activity or
right
something along those lines that are going to involve a number of people
really
right well there are
everything changed after that in terms of media
well there were every every night you'd come home from work and uh or school or whatever and see it on the uh the news i
imagine that wasn't the case during World War Two or any of the other wars uh people just didn't feel like they had the involvement in it and there were a lot of
uh-huh
a lot of
well you remember in the Gulf War they made a specific effort not to repeat the mistakes that the media they felt the media made in
uh-huh
Vietnam war they weren't about to have people in there reporting
right
right yeah but uh i just uh
i i guess i was in my let's see
my twenties during during most of that war and i i never did think that they were were doing it right i'm just not a uh a fan of Jane Fonda and people like her i mean that she'd go around speaking on different campuses and
uh-huh
getting people uh aroused about the whole thing and of course uh they always talked about the vocal minority and i guess that's what it was the solid majority and the vocal minority
um
people were listening to to her and i guess politicians were too but i just felt
i was in the service at that time i wasn't over there but i just felt that they fought the thing i mean they just didn't fight it like they should have and it's a war whether a war is right or wrong you i mean if you're over there and
uh-huh
people or young people men or women are dying they ought to fight it as a war and
either win or lose based on the fact that it's a war and not just uh uh mealy mouth their their way through the thing and try to get the other side to give up on the basis of what they thought we had in terms of power and so forth
that approach probably would have shortened the time that we were over there too at least
oh yeah it would sure shorten the time and reduce the number of casualties and so forth we might have lost i i i just don't think we could have lost
uh-huh uh-huh
