^We won't- VietNam is not a nation of weaklings.

Around that time, the French seized Hue from the 40000 Imperial troops that were defending it with just 400 soldiers. I don't want us to experience that kind of humiliation ever again.

^That's true, but fortunately those Royal losers are no longer around.

I guess its up to the new leaders of VietNam to be creative.

that was pretty embarrassing, but heh, look at the chinese, their Emperess and 300,000 soldiers ran out of Beijing due to 1000 British Soldiers

I have no idea how Chinese and Vietnamese had firearms first (Chinese transferred firearms to Vietnam) and somehow Europe got the edge in gun technology and was able to colonize those countries.

that was pretty embarrassing, but heh, look at the chinese, their Emperess and 300,000 soldiers ran out of Beijing due to 1000 British Soldiers

that was pretty embarrassing, but heh, look at the chinese, their Emperess and 300,000 soldiers ran out of Beijing due to 1000 British Soldiers

Around that time, the French seized Hue from the 40000 Imperial troops that were defending it with just 400 soldiers. I don't want us to experience that kind of humiliation ever again.

Out of 40000, how many have guns/rifles? Prolly, not too many or very few. The French had machine guns and tanks/armor cars.

This shows modernizing and catching up with the rest of the world are important!

Not in this day and age. We now have the UN. There's been plenty of times when the UN has intervened on behalf of weak countries who can't fight for squat.

Out of 40000, how many have guns/rifles? Prolly, not too many or very few. The French had machine guns and tanks/armor cars.

Revise your conjecture.

The French attack on the Citadel of Hue took place in July 1885. The Imperial troops had the advantage of holding a fortified position, and while not many had muzzle loading muskets, they should have had bows and crossbows. The French troops were very aggressive, very well led, and armed with repeating, breech loading, cartridge holding rifles with a bayonet point.

The French performance at Hue convinced virtually all Vietnamese freedom fighters of that period not to rely on fortifications for safety, and instead to apply guerrilla tactics in the face of conventional assaults.

How Vietnamese is the Black Flag Army? Aren't they Zhuangs, former Taipei rebels? And isn't Bắc-Ninh Battle part of Sino-French War?

How Vietnamese is the Black Flag Army? Aren't they Zhuangs, former Taipei rebels? And isn't Bắc-Ninh Battle part of Sino-French War?

Those pix were taken in 1884-5 and the Black Flag Army was there fighting the French along with the Vietnamese.

Liu held official position from the Vietnamese court, who initially depended upon him to control the Hmong (Miao) around Cao Bang. In 1867 he was awarded the rank of Battalion Commander of the Seventh Grade, and continually promoted thereafter, by both the Vietnamese and Chinese governments.[31]

... And if they are not creative, they should listen to those who are. During the French assault on VN, the Court received hundreds of sound memos from officials in the line of fire that outlined how to resist effectively - And the Court ignored every single one of them. Some people just get a kick out of ignoring their subordinates.

The leader of the Black Flag (Hei Qi), Liu Yong Fu (Lưu Vĩnh Phúc), did work with the Vietnamese Court.
http://journals.iranscience.net:800/mcel.p...ng/Zhuang18.htm

As the war in Somalia demonstrated, a highly motivated force can inflict damage even on the mighty military forces of the Western civilisation.

^hey can you blame them? After Vietnam, American interference in world affairs were drastically reduced. Their confidence didn't kick back up until 9/11, and they invaded Iraq.

They could have invaded Iran during the hostage crisis in the 1970s as well but, America was too scared to go to war after Vietnam.

^hey can you blame them? After Vietnam, American interference in world affairs were drastically reduced. Their confidence didn't kick back up until 9/11, and they invaded Iraq.

They could have invaded Iran during the hostage crisis in the 1970s as well but, America was too scared to go to war after Vietnam.

It would be unfortunate if fear of another Vietnam, which appears to be haunting Colin Powell, hampered the Americans from doing what they have to do to stop the Islamist revolution from spreading, and thus leading to even greater wars. The endless bombing is part of this fear, for it is often a substitute for other forms of combat. US policy has been warped for more than 20 years by the Vietnam syndrome. The last thing the world needs now is an Afghan syndrome to shape the next 20.

^ You're wrong. Americans avoided lots of conflicts due to the Vietnam War like the Iranian Hostage crisis.

After WW2 Americans weren't careful about going into war, but Vietnam changed their attitutes.

Americans call this the "Vietnam Syndrome" and this affected them for 20 years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/stor...,588494,00.html

Analysis: Parallels between Iraq, Vietnam

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The silhouettes that roar through the Baghdad twilight are sleeker than the helicopters of an earlier time. The wind brings dust, not drenching monsoons. The river snaking seaward is called Tigris, not Mekong. And this war's not fought to the wail of Jimi Hendrix's guitar.

But half a world away and half a lifetime later, a long shadow from a long-ago conflict hangs over the U.S. war in Iraq - in its "body counts" and "turning points," its Claymore mines and Kalashnikovs, its "hearts and minds" and "search and destroy," its antiwar voices rising back home.

Steve Budnick felt the "deja vu" when mortar rounds fell as he settled into a civilian job with the U.S. reconstruction agency here.

"That's what took me back, the mortars," the 60-year-old ex-infantryman said. "But these Iraqis can't aim worth a damn!"

"These guys are nothing compared with the North Vietnamese," said Jack Holley, now a U.S. logistics chief, then a young Marine officer. "The NVA would have had us marked and crosshaired."

Unlike the single-minded foe in Vietnam, the anti-U.S. resistance here is fragmented, without a political program. That war was bigger - 543,000 U.S. troops in 1969, facing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fighters, compared with 130,000 Americans here, versus perhaps 20,000 insurgents. It was a disgruntled, draftee U.S. Army then, unlike today's all-volunteer force. And U.S. casualty rates were much higher: an average 19 Americans killed a day over eight years in Vietnam, compared with two a day here.

But for all the contrasts in scale, this U.S. military operation - far from American shores, bent on shaping the political future of another land, facing a resourceful resistance, trying to hand off the fight to local allies, and fast losing support at home - shows important parallels to Vietnam, the last counterinsurgency war fought by U.S. forces.

The parallels are obvious enough to prompt war veterans like the retired colonel Holley to look for lessons from Vietnam. His: U.S. soldiers should fight shoulder to shoulder with Iraqi allies, something he said worked for Marines in Vietnam before all was lost.

Veteran scholars, too, find striking similarities between then and now.

Faulty intelligence helped to justify both wars - the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, during which two U.S. warships off Vietnam mistakenly reported that they'd been fired upon, and Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

Even a mirror image of the old "domino theory" is at work in Iraq. In Vietnam, U.S. leaders warned that other Southeast Asian states would fall, one by one, to communism if Vietnam was lost. The Bush administration now presents Iraq as the first in a series of Arab dominoes that will fall to democracy.

Specialists at the U.S. Army War College hear the echoes.

"The two aspects of Vietnam and Iraq that show the most similarities involve an effort at state-building in an alien culture that is poorly understood by the United States, and the attempt to sustain U.S. domestic support for a prolonged war against an irregular enemy," the war college's W. Andrew Terrill and Conrad C. Crane wrote in a study of the Iraq war.

As with Vietnam, approval for the Iraq operation has plunged as U.S. casualties mount.

"Casualty for casualty, support has declined far more quickly than it did during either the Korean War or the Vietnam War," says political scientist John Mueller of Ohio State University, an expert on wars and U.S. public opinion.

An ABC News-Washington Post poll in early May, three years after the Iraq invasion, found that 59 percent of Americans now view it as a mistake. It took six years after the major U.S. troop commitment to Vietnam before a similar majority - 61 percent in 1971 - called that war a mistake.

"If history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline," Mueller adds.

What the Americans are trying to do is "Iraqization," training a new Iraqi army to move into the front line against the largely Sunni Arab insurgents, so U.S. troops can pull back.

"As the Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down," Bush says.

It's an eerie refrain of another presidential voice. "As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater," Richard M. Nixon said in announcing "Vietnamization" in 1969. Four years later, the American withdrawal was complete, and two years after that, in 1975, so was the failure, as triumphant communist forces rolled into Saigon.

A dwindling number of upbeat observers see a potential turning point for Iraq, if the new, elected Iraqi government and growing Iraqi army begin pacifying the country. But Stephen Biddle, a national security specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, contends that "Iraqization" is one lesson that shouldn't be taken from Vietnam.

"In a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire," he writes in the journal Foreign Affairs.

In the worsening civil conflict among Iraq's Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds, the new army is viewed by Sunni Arabs as a Shiite and Kurdish force and its deployment deepens their hostility. Biddle's solution: Maintain a strong U.S. military presence while Iraq's factions work out a balanced, durable constitutional agreement.

The United States, more and more, is in a Vietnam-like bind in Iraq, many commentators say. It cannot stay; it cannot go.

"The most tragic comparison is becoming more real: In for a dime, in for a dollar," says Gordon Adams, a veteran defense scholar at George Washington University.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who was wounded as an Army sergeant in Vietnam, once favored a further U.S. buildup here. But last year he concluded: "We're locked into a bogged-down problem not dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam. The longer we stay, the more problems we're going to have."

Veterans sense one difference, in the way the troops are viewed back home, and hope that doesn't change.

Bruce Oliver served three tours in Vietnam, a 20-year-old Marine when he landed there, now a 58-year-old Army National Guard sergeant who just returned home to Georgia after a year's duty in Iraq.

"It's not like Vietnam. When you came home from there people asked you, 'How many people did you kill?'" Oliver recalled. "They treated you like second-class citizens."

For him and other soldiers, the shadow of war is a personal thing, whether old or new, Danang or Diyala, Fallujah or Phu Bai. Budnick turns bitter at the memory.

"We were 'baby killers,' 'drug addicts,' et cetera," the Baghdad-based accountant told a reporter.

Now if things drag on in Iraq, if "negative press" persists, if "push comes to shove," then "it wouldn't take much to turn against the soldiers," he said.

"Like Vietnam."

I think that the Black Flags and the Yellow Flags were more than happy to serve the Vietnamese Emperor, because there was nothing for them to expect in China from the Qings except the Death of the Thousand Cuts. Given their personal circumstances, service to the Vietnamese emperor was the ticket to their survival as individuals and a long, "happy" (who among us is truly happy?) life with any kind of a future for themselves and their descendants. I'll note that Vietnam has taken in Chinese refugees over the centuries, with plenty of beneficial results to Vietnamese society.

but the 1991 Gulf War was the turning point. U.S. forces stroke Iraq and the whole world watched in fears of the awesome U.S. mlitary power.

its quick and decisive 1st Gulf War was the message from the U.S. to the world that its stragety has changed and it's here to stay and become the dominant world power. i dont think 9/11 was the turning point. it was the 1st Gulf War.

Well your right about that. But Vietnam Syndrom affected them for 20 years. So that's like from the 1970s to the 1990s which is when the Gulf War started.

I personally still believe the Vietnam Syndrome is in the American mentality today. Look at Iraq it only took 3 years for public opinion to turn against that war even though they suffered much less casualities than in Vietnam, which took them 6 years to turn against the war. It's a result of Vietnam Syndrome.

I found these cool pictures

wow. our ancestors looked really really short compare to an average Viet today. they must had averaged around 5 feet. now, i think Viets averaged around 5'4"

Short yes but they are good fighters.

wow. our ancestors looked really really short compare to an average Viet today. they must had averaged around 5 feet. now, i think Viets averaged around 5'4"

wow...vietnamese ppl must be really short back then. such gigantic heads and little/super skinny bodies. doesn't look right. not to mention not being very handsome too doesn't help either.