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Hobbes
philosopher chef
(99.118.244.123) on 9/18/2017 - 10:22 p.m. says: ( 37 views
, 9 likes
)
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"My introduction to Viet Nam war was on TV News:"
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Edited by Author at 9/19/2017 - 7:03 a.m.
Message Replied To ==========
Anyone watch the first episode of Ken Burn's "The Vietnam War"?
I was pleasantly surprised to see Tim O'Brien interviewed near the end.
I still remember the first time I ever read anything about the Vietnam War. It was issue 8 of Marvel's "The 'Nam." It was about tunnel rats. I picked it up at the 7-11 in my suburban Memphis neighborhood when I was in the fourth-grade. Scared teh saban out of me:
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It was 1965 or 1966 or maybe even 1967 (I doubt it was that late given what follows below). So we're watching TV news, probably Huntley Brinkley, maybe Cronkite. The news showed color footage of Americans in combat gear along with some ARVN getting fired upon. At the time I thought we were still at war with Germany, after all Combat came on every week on Channel 6 with Sarge, right?
Anyhoo I was either 6 or 7 and Aubiece and I were watching the news and they showed these American and ARVN soldiers being fired upon by what the reporter said "gorillas" and engaged in "gorilla warfare". I was like huh. And then the talking head said they were gorillas wearing the traditional black pajamas.
So I said to Aubiece "gorillas? Gorilla warfare"? If I was 5 or 6 or 7 that means Aubice was 11 or 12 or 13. So aubiece says "yeah gorillas, those are gorillas in the jungle that learned to use machine guns"
About that time the news cast cut back to the anchor in New York, either Walter or Chett, (unless it was Brinkley in DC) and there on the blue screen behind him was the Viet Cong flag.
Now I knew from my book of flags what the Arizona state flag looked like. The Viet Cong flag looked something like this:
The Arizona state flag looks like this:
So I say "that's the Arizona flag". Aubiece says "yup those gorillas are in Arizona. With machine guns. Wearing black pajamas" I was like "whoa if they're in Arizona they could come here"
Then I asked about Sarge and Combat and were we still fighting the Germans, this was very confusing. He said yes that that was the Silver War. I said I thought the Silver War was the war between the Yankees and the Rebels. He said no, Combat showed the silver war because it was in black and white an everything looked silver (Combat was B&W until its last season). I said something about I thought they had deserts in Arizona not jungles. He told me to quit being ridiculous.
So yeah I believed that we were fighting machine gun toting gorillas in the jungles of Arizona for about a year or so. Pajama wearing machine gun toting gorillas.
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PharmaTiger
dabble
J.M.
VOLMAN
BATJAC1
Flea
Ignatius J. Reilly
AUTIX
IBleedMaroonDawg
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"Man listen, everybody wants you to tell the truth unless they don't agree with you. ..." Charles Barkleyvia GIPHY
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