Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for August 18, 2021

I hope 20 years from now some veteran doesn’t do this to a young Afghani.

But what unintentionally ironic timing…

Why do we constantly follow the same patterns…

If only we had ‘won’ in Viet Nam. General Ky could have reigned over the Viet Nam ‘democracy’ for decades.

Along with both his loyal followers.

Nixon ordered massive bombing of the North and the American Left went berserk, convinced he had gone insane. In one day we destroyed Hanoi’s airport control tower, railroad yards, and water pumping station. What I’ve asked for decades is how could we have been at war with a nation for eight years and they still had three targets left? (Nonetheless, no Russian ship in Haiphong harbor was ever touched.)

The Americans are one in a long line of invaders who failed to defeat Vietnam (including the Chinese, Mongols, Manchus, Japanese and French).

They’ve swapped seats from yesterday’s strip.

Wasn’t BD on the other side yesterday? He sure is antsy!!!

Why did they switch seats?

Sad that the more comfortable we get with strangers the easier it is to pick a fight with them.

Why is the view reversed? Yesterday, BD was on the left. Oh, I get it: yesterday BD was a Dem and today he’s a a Repub.

Interesting how they magically switched seats from yesterday.

The trifecta of American screw-ups: Vietnam, Iraq, and Trump. All done with eyes wide open.

That’s ‘won’ the way we ‘won’ the Spanish-American War. (See William Graham Sumner’s “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”).

My Vietnam vet DH, wants to know why the Taliban aren’t suffering from the Covid epidemic?

B.D. can afford to fly first class? The Vietnamese guy looks older than 20.

They switched seats.

Why does this “Vietnamese” kid look like Roland Headley’s half-brother?

No we never could have won in Vietnam. In Guerrilla wars the invader always loses

After the war Ho Chi Minh said that they would have quit if our liberals hadn’t convinced him that we would give up.

The Generation Gap has no language barrier.

Well our record is perfect, we haven’t won a war since WW 2. Remind me again why we are paying for a military that cannot perform it’s most basic function?

Last time someone said that to me about Vietnam, I almost got into a fight.

He’s reading the paper, Tiger.

In WWII Europe the insurgents were on our side, so were the Commies. It took nukes in Japan. In Nam the insurgents were Viet Cong. From Afghanistan south & west borders were drawn by clueless colonials, & insurgents are whoever’s not in charge lately. MacArthur said never fight a land war in Asia. Gates has expanded to say Asia, the Middle East & Africa.

‘Liberation’? That’s not what my fellow Vietnamese college students in the late ’70’s called it. They were all part of the ‘boat people’ refugees with some rather scary stories to tell. In terms of the ‘lessons’ of Vietnam, we clearly didn’t learn a thing as the Afghanistan debacle clearly demonstrated. But why would the lessons sink in for a bunch of chicken hawks who got their college deferments or had daddy pull strings to keep them ‘out of class’.

They swapped seats?

They Traded Seats from Yesterday?

Yesterday, B.D. was in a window seat. Today, he is on the aisle. Musical chairs, anyone?

Oh, B.D.

If this was 20 years after the war, and he said he wasn’t born then, then shouldn’t he be at most a college student and not some high level business man flying from LA to Vietnam on a regular basis?

One possibility is the Taliban letting Islamist groups use Afghanistan as a base to support the Uighurs in China.

“But those damn peacenik Democrats wouldn’t let us! How’s it going with the Agent Orange mutations?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth

One stuck in the past, the other thinking of his future.