They built a machinery of systematic lying and called it a war.
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2036016406622552256
The U.S. military has a concept called "body count."
During Vietnam, success was measured not by territory held, not by political goals achieved, but by how many enemy combatants were killed.
Commanders were pressured to produce numbers.
Careers depended on the numbers being high.
So the numbers were made high.
"If it's dead and Vietnamese, it's VC."
This was not a fringe attitude.
Veterans testified to it.
Any dead Vietnamese body, combatant or civilian, man, woman, child, counted as an enemy kill if the unit needed the number.
Entire villages were entered into the body count column.
Farmers. Grandmothers. Children.
All classified as enemy combatants after the fact so the numbers looked good for headquarters.
This is what "winning" looked like in Vietnam.
Numbers on a spreadsheet.
Disconnected from any military or political reality.
A bureaucracy of death that generated reports that went up the chain of command to generals who knew they were false but passed them on anyway to politicians who knew they were false but cited them in press conferences anyway.
They built a machinery of systematic lying and called it a war.
And then they lost to the people the machine was designed to erase.
posted by Satish Sharma at
15:24
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home