Perhaps the only point of such "shocking" news is to educate younger people about what America's war against Vietnam was about. The whole goal of such a war was to increase "body count," for the top brass in Washington DC had made it their mission to display statistics of "enemy killed" as the only argument they had to show that "we are winning the war in Vietnam." (There are other definitions of "winning" a war: territory secured against enemy attack, loyalties secured, etc. none of which won approval from America's paranoid anticommunist top brass. The whole thing was apparently decided at a conference in Honolulu in 1966 where LBJ pledged his undying support for the leadership of Thieu and Ky, sometime after the CIA assassinated the US puppet Diem for practically losing the "country" to the communists.) Thus, the only real policy for "winning" the war, a policy which fortunately never made it out into the open, was a policy of genocide, just "kill them all and let God sort them out," as it says on a now-popular t-shirt. It's not as if the US government INTENDED it to be this way, it's just that genocide was the reductio ad absurdum of the logic of US war-fighting policy. Even today the college libraries are crowded with books telling the American people that they didn't kill enough Vietnamese to "win the war," books written in complete obliviousness to the fact that the official definition of "winning" set their authors up for this conclusion. Thus the US walked into Vietnam, killed a whole bunch of people, declared "peace," and went home, not through any intention, but because the logic of policy led the US forces to do this.
One of the main factors contributing to US genocide in Vietnam was the poor US social construction of the "enemy." Given the state of society in that American fiction called "South Vietnam," and American ignorance of Vietnamese culture, it isn't surprising that the US couldn't tell who was friend and who was foe in Vietnam, and that statistics about the state of the "enemy" in that war were fictitious through and through. If you can find it out there in the UK, Gideon, find a copy of Loren Baritz's BACKFIRE, a book which will explain how this came to be.
Given this confusion about the "enemy," it's not surprising that US troops were pawns in an unconscious attempt at genocide, and thus it's not surprising that US troops often were sent on suicide missions to increase "body count" (and thus to increase the prestige of their commanding officers). Or that such troops often reacted to such missions with a practice called "fragging," i.e. killing your commanding officer in the dark of night when nobody was watching, to avoid going on the suicide mission. Try to find Wallace Terry's BLOODS for a good discussion of this practice, if you can, Gideon.
Well, one thing led to another, I'm sure, and thus this Operation Tailwind makes sense to me as a sort of revenge for "fragging." Doesn't it? I'm sure the top brass found out about "fragging" sooner or later, and planned a few countermeasures to secure the "loyalty" of the troops...
