Well, it's been so may years - decades! - since I watched that series that I can't in all honesty defend its POV - or criticise it either, for that matter. I might not even be remembering or representing it accurately.

I think it's totally normal and expectable that any people would react with fear and suspicion towards large numbers of foreign-looking people speaking a different language suddenly taking a foothold in their land, even if they weren't soldiers bearing arms - how would they not?! The strange thing to me is that the Americans wouldn't have anticipated this as a matter of course.

I'm aware of the implications of the statement I just made in regard to modern-day ideas about racism and immigration into western, "white" countries. I'm not siding with anti-immgrant rght-wing demagogues but acknowledging that those cynical, power-seeking mqnipulators are exloitiing a perfectly understandable human reaction that pretty much anyone would feel if placed under the right circumstances.

So it blows my mind that the Americans were surprised that the Vietnamese didn't welcome them with open arms. Did they ever stop to think how they would have felt if a Vietnamese or any other foreign armed force had suddenly shown uo on their soil to save them from, I dunno, Mexico? the Black Peril of freed slaves? Canada? OK, now I'm just getting ridiculous.

And it's the fact that all those scenarios are ridiculous that probably partly answers the question of why they were surprised: because very thought of America - as in the USA, not the American continents - being invaded, or of having large numbers of foreign forces and military bases on ts soil, even if those of allies - is totally outside their experience and therefore unthinkable.

The general consensus of the ARVN was that the leadership was poor, but that the troops would fight under good leaders. Success was better in the more specialized groups, like the Luc Luong Dac Biet, who were counter-insurgency specialists, trained directly by Special forces to mimic their role. They generally had a higher class of leadership and proved quite effective, as did the Vietnamese Ranger groups. The Montagnard peoples, who came from the mountainous regions, and were ethnically different from the Vietnamese, were well respected by US and Australian advisors. They were highly motivated; but, as an ethnic minority, they had been highly oppressed by the Vietnamese as a whole, and didn't care about South vs North, as they often saw all Vietnamese as their enemy. Same with the Nung peoples, who were ethnically of Thai and Chinese descent.

The average peasant in the villages just wanted to live in peace, raise a family, grow crops, whatever and had one group after another disrupt their lives. To them, anyone outside their village was suspect and the less they seemed like them, the less they were welcome. It's a pretty common story throughout the world. With the cities, you did have geographic differences between the people in places like Saigon and Hanoi, and North and south, in general, due to regional histories; but, the North had a more unified government that had fought a strong guerrilla war against the Japanese and then the French, while the South was often viewed as complicit, or at least complacent. Certainly, the corrupt leadership and the series of coups brought it no stature, as the people in the cities of the South were just as likely to protest the Republic of Vietnam Government as demonize the North.

One of the real strengths of the Burns documentary is the participation of people who were in the regular armies of both states, as well as those who were part of the Viet Cong cells. It illustrates well the perspectives of the groups, at those times, showing where they had been wrong and where their enemy had underestimated them.

From a military strategy standpoint, Vietnam was a clash of mindsets. the US Army was completely built around the concepts of large set piece warfare, where seizing enemy territory is the objective. They focused on high tech weapons and the ability to deliver huge amounts of ordinance on a target. The Vietnamese were used to fighting the Japanese and French in a running fight, hitting them and withdrawing, moving large amounts of men and equipment under hidden jungle trails, then popping up and surprising a garrison force in a large attack, then withdrawing. This kept their enemies under constant harassment, while they probed them for weaknesses and then exploited those weaknesses. US response was to engage the Vietnamese in force and could often win the day, but they fought for ground that they then abandoned and the North Vietnamese would re-enter when they withdrew. It was like a battlefield game of whack-a-mole. They then started looking for a way of measuring success on the battlefield and latched onto bodycounts, which became a wholly ridiculous concept, as numbers were rarely accurate and they obscured the fact that nothing was really being achieved. VC activity continued in "rear" areas, while regulars sought to isolate and attack US and allied forces, just as they had the French and Japanese. From interviews, the soldiers they really feared were the South Korean troops, the Australian special forces units and US Special Forces, as they would play the same game with the VC and North Vietnamese regulars, creating chaos in their safe havens and disrupting their leadership and supply lines. The Australians, especially, would maintain contact with VC and other enemies for extended periods of time, as they were better schooled in jungle warfare. Even US special forces units didn't pursue the VC deeply, after combat events, depending on the aggressiveness of the A-Team or other special forces presence. The Australians would track the VC movements for days, sometimes, moving in to counter-ambush and proved very effective.

The US continued to train with a World War 2 mindset up into my day, during the first Gulf War. US military strategy still hinged upon fighting a large scale war on two fronts, rather than more small scale actions in a limited region. Army units were still very much built around those large scale battles, rather than more mobile and multi-mission units. That thinking changed by the 90s, though the same groupthink of winning conflicts through technological might still clouds a lot of their strategy in regions where they are actively conducting operations. They have been more focused on urban environments, due to the fighting in Iraq; but, they are still more and more dependent on drones and satellites for intel, which can often lead to false assumptions when exploited by a cunning enemy. During the US involvement in the Balkan fighting, the Serbs used to confound NATO intel by using decoys for things like artillery, by disguising things like logs as artillery pieces, much like the deception tactics employed in North Africa and the UK, during WW2. The Russians and the Chinese militaries were quite adept at using deception to mislead their enemies into traps.

I already had The Souls of Black Folk on my to-read list but I thnk this is the first time I've heard about this one. I like reading older non-fiction books - history, science, etc - even if the info or ideas are outmoded. It's interesting to see how these things have changed over time.

What if they are wrong and it is actually a very large marble maze?

I have recently discovered the work of anarchist folk singer David Rovics. One of his songs is "Battle of Blair Mountain", which is based on a real event: the largest labor uprising in United States history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War.

Although I pride myself on having a decent knowledge of American history, I had never heard of this, so I was wondering if this event if well-known (or known at all) in the US? 'Coz in Australia, this would have become part of our national identity, like the Eureka Stockade.

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Isn't the Haymarket affair the one in which Caleb Hammer's brother was killed?

Who said comic-books aren't educational!!!