The Vietnam war was the war of helicoptors and heroin. It didnt matter to the deepstate that America lost; they were only in there to control the drug trade, anyway.
The Golden Triangle - The Golden Triangle was an Opium network controlled by
the US under Operation Paper while Paul Helliwell was chief of the Far East Division of the War Department's Strategic Service Unit.
Heroin moved from the KMT in Burma's rural Shan state, through Thailand under Plaek Phibunsongkhram, to refineries in Laos, practacly down the block from Ted Shackly's station, from where he supervised Operation Momentum, backing Vang Pao's poppy farming Hmong tribesmen (also a source of herion) against the Pathet Lao and Viet Cong, with the help of Air America, (formerly CAT) who sent them food and weapons. From Laos, the product ended up at troop export hubs in South Vietnam, if it hadnt already been moved directly from Laos by Air America. In 1967 CIA agent Russell Bintliff told the Washington Star in 1976 that PepsiCo had set up a bottling plan in Loas in the early 60s that converted opium into heroin. (william manchester, death of a president, 2013)
Helicopters - Plus Bell helicopter made a killing producing UH-1 Iroquois for the army.
Vietnam
Diệm and South Vietnam - After the French were defeated on the battlefield, a Geneva conference split Vietnam in two and created the country of South Vietnam. The U.S. handpicked an exile named Ngô Đình Diệm and import him directly from the United States. Despite the Geneva conference's guidelines for a national election to be held in 1956, Diệm and his American handlers blocked democratic elections. Diệm introduced the public meetings law, which banned assembly, and the bill for the protection of morality, banning free speech, causing total censorship of press and the 1059 edict, which made infringements on the national security punishable by death with no appeal. His special police was secretly managed by the CIA, who did so through a contract with Michigan State University. From 1955, MSU spent $15 million of US taxpayer money building up South Vietnam's security services. By the end of 1959, Diệm's secret police had imprisoned 50,000 people. Between 1957 and 1961, nearly 70,000 people were killed by Diệm's secret police.
JFK saw a huge escalation of the war, authorizing napalm, chemical weapons, and in violation of troop limits set at Geneva, the deployment of thousands of so-called "advisors," eventually 12,000 US troops, to the country by 1962.
The Americans drove 8 million Vietnamese into concentration camps, or "strategic hamlets". Upon arrival, civilians were made to dig ditches and wrap barbed wire around the perimeter of the camps, and build a wall of sharpened bamboo stakes. A report on a strategic hamlet from the US General Accounting Office concluded: "During our inspection, we observed there were no latrines, no usable wells, no classrooms, and no medical facilities. The shelters were crudely constructed from a variety of waste material, such as empty ammunition boxes and cardboard." The American refugee advisor stated that there were ''no plans to improve the living conditions at this site.'' By 1963, these camps held 67% of the rural population by 1933, when they were liberated by the North Vietnamese Liberation Front, what the Americans called the Viet Cong, an abreviation of Vietnamese Communist (Việt Nam Cộng-sản).
The US went on to kill between 200,000 to 500,000 civilians out of the 1.5 to 2 million civilian deaths of the war. This was the result of heavy firepower and widespread bombing and famine caused by the intentional destruction of crops with Agent Blue, as part of Operation Ranch Hand, and of course Napalm, a petrolium jelly which sticks to people, forming a black crust, and makes their skin flake off. The 1st Cavalry Division even wrote a song about it called Napalm Sticks to Kids.
Agent Orange, which the US dropped 72 million liters of over Vietnam to strip leeves from trees, contains a dioxin contaminant called TCDD, which enters human DNA and cells, causing severe immune system damage, vital organ destruction, and hormonal disruptions that lead to a wide array of cancers, neurological disorders, and devastating birth defects. Dioxin breaks down very slowly in the environment, contaminating the food chain in former US airbases. This, coupled with epigenetic alterations, is causing people to be born with birth defects to this day.
In their pacification campaign, the French arrested nationalist leaders and executed them via guillotine, even displaying their severed heads publicly to terrorize would-be revolutionaries.
My Lai Massacre - In the My Lai Massacre, between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. Army troops.
Lt. William Calley at his court-martial: ''Well, I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men women and children. They were all classified the same and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers.''
Private, Paul Meadlo: ''I was ordered to and I was emotionally upset and we were order to get satisfaction from this Village for all the men we'd lost. They were all VC and VC sympathizers and I still believe they were all Viet Kong and Viet Cong sympathizers.''
Private Dennis Conti: ''The people screamed and yelled and fell. I guess they tried to get up too. They couldn't. That was it. The people were pretty well messed up. Lots of heads were shot off. Pieces of head heads and pieces of Flesh flew off the sides and arms. They were all messed up.''
Tiger Force - Tiger Force was an elite long-range reconnaissance platoon of the 101st Airborne Division, known for indiscriminately killing for sport, South Vietnamese civilians they were stationed there to protect.
Cambodia
Operation Menu - Operation Menu was the covert bombing campaign of Cambodia by the Nixon administration, hidden from Congress and the American public. They did this by utilizing falsified reporting systems, logging the strikes as if they occurred in South Vietnam.
Five minutes after a call with Nixon, in 1970, Kissinger called General Alexander Haig to relay the new orders from the president: ''He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything. It's an order. It's to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?''
2,756,941 tons worth of ordinance were dropped on Cambodia, more than what the allies dropped throughout all of WWII. Between 1.5 and 3 million civilians were killed.
Laos
Because of the Geneva convention, which forbid foreign military presence in Laos as a neutral country, the US conducted it's campeign covertly, leading to the conflict being known as the secret war. The Objective was to cut off supply lines to the North Vietnamese supress the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao in favor of the monarchy, while also farming and synthacizing poppy seeds with the help of the Hmong tribesmen.
The Americans killed 50,000 to 200,000 civilians in bombing campaigns. Laos remains the most bombed country by square kilometer in history. From 1964-73, Laos was subjected to, on average, one load of plane bombs every 8 minutes. In 2021 there were 63 accidents related to unexploaded ordinances.
Indonesia
After a coup wrested power from the post-colonial leader Sukarno, the Indonesian military under General Suharto would lead the country into the 1990s. As Cathy Cadane reported in 1990, the US State Department and CIA officials furnished the Indonesian army with lists of thousands of names of suspected communists. As many as 5,000 names were furnished over a period of months to the army there, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured. According to a research study conducted by the CIA and declassified in 2007, in terms of the numbers killed, the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century. Estimates vary, but it's widely held that up to 1 million people were killed in the purge. In December 1975, Suharto began Operasi Siroja, (Operation Lotus) invading the tiny nation of East Timor, Frejilin, the left-wing party in power at the time, declared war. In response, the Indonesians probably killed 200,000 people. Beginning under Gerald Ford and continuing under Jimmy Carter the Humanitarian, the United States provided steady support. In a White House memo, Carter's national security advisors, Zbigniew Brzezinski, called to ''Expand U.S. economic assistance to Indonesia...'' and also to ''Ease up on human rights pressures...''
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By: GDF, Eyes Wide Open...
Edited by: Otto Heckel
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