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Sorry to have dropped off this thread, I needed to deal with my part of today's retreating stock market...
My time was up at PhuBai not far from Hue and I didn't go off station much, to me the terrible commie enemy was almost never a person, but rather disembodied radio signals to be intercepted, given a precise directional heading from "us" and other units. The enemy was a distant transmitter, to be triangulated on and turned into map or target coordinates.
I can't really speak firsthand to the notion of the fighter by night, farmer by day. I know that's frequently told and I have no reason to doubt it. But at the time I was there the enemy at the wrong end of the radio transmissions was likely as not to be a member of regular NVA forces.
The most obvious difference to me between Iraq and Vietnam is that in Vietnam our effort seemed not to be separating roughly four sides of an ethnic civil war. I'm not saying civilians weren't ever targeted. But the goal of VC and NVA alike was unification of Vietnam, and they directed most of their effort at military forces and the government (though from the aftermath I saw, it seems police stations, railroad terminals, schools and government offices could all be "government").
In Iraq the problem is different, one week we are fighting one side and the next week we are fighting to support them. One week we are training government forces, the next we are accusing them of participating in ethnic kidnapping attacks or black marketing electronics and weapons. There seems to be increasing doubt about who is the reliably "friendly" host force we are supposed to train and support. The bad guys' are increasingly all recognizable as bad guys only because they attack civilian targets.
Consequently, although knowing who our enemy is in Iraq is a huge problem, the ambiguity of who that is isn't exactly like the farmer by day fighter by night thing associated with Vietnam.
On the otherhand, a striking domestic political similarity seems to be that the political leadership in the US administration has succumbed to the "sunk-cost" effect. This is basically a pattern wherein administrators not wanting to admit failure and ante up for another effort, another bigger bet that will result in a winning roll of the dice whose jackpot offsets the losses we've incurred by engaging in risky gambling in the first place. That hope keeps away the threat of having to admit to losing the car, the kids' college funds and the house. This is what all the escalation was in Vietnam was about after 1966 or there about. This is what the "more troops" option is, it's just upping the ante by addicted, losing, gamblers.
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