Eerie similarities: US helicopters evacuating personnel from Afghan capital with Taliban closing in; just like US choppers in 1975's Fall of Saigon with N. Vietnamese tanks advancing

By HENRY FREDERICK / Headline Surfer 
Blog: People, Places & Things

LAKE MARY, Fla. -- US helicopters engaged in today's airlift in Kabul is eerily like American choppers in the even more massive exodus of US personnel and South Vietnamese desperate to flee the Viet Cong with the Fall of Saigon back in 1975.

I was the 7th grade wiz kid who corrected teachers and local politicians on the Watergate scandal and Nixon's forced resignation under threat of impeachment (ironically his giving the double peace signs with his arms crossed in the air before boarding a heliopter with his exit from the White House...

And so it should come as no surprise that the Fall of Saigon on April 29, 1975, was yet another sad chapter in the geo-political affairs of a proxy war that the US lost to the Soviets and Communist China (backing Communist North Vietnam) and America backing nationalist South Vietnam after failed imperialist aims of the British and then the French...

Two weeks after Saigon fell, I shot my hand up for the ultimate social studies project for the benefit of the class. I used pics from daily metro newspapers I had purchased the day after the helicopter floatilla - the greatest since D-Day at Normandy (ok, not quite, but you get the picture...

I also cut out images from Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Life, Bational Geographic, Reader'svDigest, what I could get my hands on... I filled up the entire right-side wall of the class and the entire back - within three days. Two days later I turned in a 300-page research paper on why the US was doomed to fail in Vietnam just as the British and FGrench since the start of the Cold Wat...

That project put me on the map with an unquenched thjirst for knowledge and quite frankly what bugling idiots wer've had running the country. I mean here was Gerald Ford burning toast - trying to pass himself off as an every-day kind of guy in the White House...

Fast forward to today and another bungling disaster by our new President. The helicopters and troops getting key personnel out of the American Embassy in Kabul anbd to the airport while others were encourage to sahelter in place in the city under siege by the advancing Taliban...

The US is the World's lone Superpower and yet we friggin' lose these prolonged and protracted wars that continue to damage the American psyche...

Yeah, Nixon (really Henry Kissinger) worked to end the Vietnam War with US combat troops withdsrawnm in 1973. But how humiliating to have the North Vietnasmese roll into Saigon as we were scrambling to get the hell out of Dodge....

SYNOPSIS: The Vietnamese civil war began in 1959. The US supported the South, while Communist China and Russia supported the North. In 1965, the United States officially entered the war in response to North Vietnam's attack on a U.S. military ship (Gulf of Tonkin - phony excuse to begin combat operations (war) that dragged on until US military engagement ended in '73. The war ended in 1975, and Vietnam was thjen one nation under communist rule...

FACT: The Vietnam War cost $168 billion or $1 trillion in today's dollars. That included $111 billion in military operations and $28.5 billion in aid to South Vietnam...

FACT: 58,220 American soldiers awere killed in combat. Another 153,303 were wounded. And yet another 1,643 were declared missing in action...

FACT: 1.1 million North Vietnam soldiers were killed. 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. More than 2 million civilians on both sides were killed...

FACT: Compensation benefits for Vietnam veterans and families still cost $22 billion a year...

Was it really worth it by blowhard politicians as far back as the Eisenhower Administration engaging in bloody combat with no end-objective. Same withn Kennedy, even worse with Johnson, cutthoroat liar Nixon with secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos), and finally, stumbling, bumbling Gerald Ford...

Lets fast forward to 2001, the single most horrific day in US history: The 9/11 Terrorist attacks... The US invaded Aghanistan and with the ferocity of the Taliban, we stayed for 20-plus years, the longest war involving the US military forces...

Again, what was the end game? The Taliban were routed, but the US let up, first with Bush for six-plus years, then Obama for eight years, and Trump for another four... And Biden for seven months...

SYNOPSIS: