Vietnam

Why do people generally picture the Vietnam war as a bunch of GIs getting sniped in the jungle by pajama wearing peasants when 80% of that war were air campaigns? Is it because of movies?

Yes

Oui

Da

Da

Ja

>open a Vietnam war thread
>it ain't me starts playing

Jawohl

I wouldn't dispute that air warfare made up considerably more of the American military campaign than is held in the general imagination.

I am fascinated in the methodology behind your 80% figure, though. 80% of what?

80% of military action.

In what terms are you measuring military action though?

Casualties are actually a pretty good method. Operation Rolling Thunder alone accounted for slightly less than half of North Vietnamese casualties.

Because it's more dramatic for a movie to follow soldiers on the ground in a Scary Hungry Angry Jungle than it is to watch airplanes carpet bomb yet another North Vietnamese factory, or spray Monsanto Juice all over the jungle.

I mean, the air campaign got interesting when fighters had to take out the AIM missile batteries, and you could make a movie out of that. But most war movies tell stories of the infantry because you can do more with soldiers than airplanes.

Sure, but my problem isn't with the movies themselves, but with the fact that these movies completely distorted public view of what actually happened during that war.

That's not a bad shout.

Why do people generally picture World War I as soldiers scrambling into the trenches and having nightmares about gas attacks when only 2% of casualties were from gas?

It's because when it comes to depicting things, it's more dramatic/empathetic to focus on the most psychologically salient parts of the war. Why minimize the horrors that ground infantry went through?

The movies and the public perception were both the result of the unprecedented level of news coverage of the ground troops. Media can't get much pathos out of raw B roll of planes dropping bombs in to an opaque jungle

Sí.

Most WW1 depictions don't even involve gas, just general trench warfare.

But it's in the cultural consciousness. Ask someone to say the first three words that come to mind when I say WW1, and "gas" will probably be one of them.

Not really.

Cuz even if 80% of the war was somehow air campaigns, I'll pull a number out of my ass, similarly, and guess that said air campaigns made up about 1% of the 58,220 American casualties (maybe 2%-3%, if you include friendly fire from air support).

It'd be interesting to see an American made war film told from the other side's point of view though. Not that it'd happen... But I suspect a lot of the VC and SV have some interesting stories to tell.

I asked two coworkers.
First one:
>Hitler
>Korea
Too busy to give me a third one. Also evidently retarded

Second one:
>trenches
>France
>gas

But American casualties were like 3% of the total war casualties.

You just made that up.

You can't measure military deaths from air. A lot of those were civilians, as latest research is turning up. 70 percent of bombing victims are generally civilians, while 30 percent are military related.

You have to remember that the Vietnamese werent native to the Jungle either, it would be like america fighting a guerrilla war in Arizona. A lot of deaths in the NVA were attrition and disease.

Rolling Thunder, furthermore, was a pretty stupid initiative.

>haha! I know! I'll make up two instances of anecdotal evidence to trounce some random faggot on a Siamese pottery forum

Not him, but in fairness OP's question was about the perception of the American public. The American public didn't give a shit, in general, about Vietnamese casualties and experienced the war from their perspective rather than the Vietnamese one.