40 thoughts on “Don’t Know Much About Military History”

  4. I dunno, this is pretty thin. He said “Key Sanh” instead of “Khe Sanh”. Sure, we military buffs recall the details of the Tet Offensive and the pitched battles up in I Corps, but BO was, what, 6? The sad thing is that most adult Americans recall the “war at home”, the Pentagon Papers, Chicago ’68, the SDS, etc., better than they know the details of the battles in Nam — because Vietnam was our most politicized war (at that point… I think the Iraq campaign edges it out now). Good luck finding a teenager who can find Vietnam on a globe, much less tell the Delta from Da Nang.

    1. Perhaps, but if Sarah Palin had said it, you know good and well it would be replayed endlessly as proof of her stupidity.

        1. Hey now! Bob-1 just knows that “most Americans” couldn’t find Vietnam on the map in 1968, even though just about everyone knew someone or had a kid over there, and the nightly news broadcasts (which only aired in the evening around dinner time with a recap at eleven) and the newspapers, which were the American public’s only source of official news, featured news on battles there and body counts and reports every single damn day. Including maps. I was only five years old in 1968, but one of my clearest memories was of this stuff, but hey, Bob-1 just knows how stupid and ignorant most Americans were and they had no idea where all those soldiers were going and why their neighbor’s son ran away from home and turned up a month later in Canada and where all those coffins with flags on them were coming back from. It was a total puzzlement!

          3. I was 11 in 1968. That was the year of the Tet Offensive where Walter Cronkite lied his ass off about America losing. It was the deadliest year of the war in regards to American casualties. The body counts were weekly, not nightly. Old Lying Ass Uncle Walter would somberly announce that in the previous week, we’d lost 150 Americans KIA, the South Vietnamese lost 1000 and the North lost 2000. Just about every night, there was a report from Vietnam and yes, they did show maps.

          4. Funny that Bob talks about his belief that Americans can’t find places on a map, but he still thinks Australia is a democracy. He’s definitely the wrong person to point out others and call them ignorant.

          6. You should take your own advice. And that’s twice in a week I’ve had to tell you to do so. Your pretty slow on the uptake. In the meantime, Larry, Andrea, Wodun, Der Schtumpy and others will continue to school you. Cheers!

      3. BOB-!,
        you poor, historically challenged schmuck!

        By 1968 MOST (your word, not mine) Americans had a family member, neighbor, friend or class mate IN Viet Nam! We not only knew WHERE the country was, we knew WHERE Saigon, Hanoi, Khe San, and Huế WERE on that map. We knew where the DMZ was, and we knew where the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran.

        It’s why we bombed Laos and Cambodia.

        Bob, I have no idea how old you are, or what YOU remember about the war if you were alive then, but on THIS one you blew it! If nothing else the entire country maps or partial maps of the countries in SE Asia were on the TV news and in newspapers and magazines everyday. There was no escaping it.

        And this flub is just typical of The One, he doesn’t know SH!T about anything the military does or ever did. Here’s to hoping he is GONE next year and that he is replaced with someone who IS able to read and understand OUR history.

        (not in defense of BHO or his evil minions, but I think we’ve gotten to a point where any POTUS gets treated like a King or Queen…… for instance no one says, “..uh, Mr. President, it’s pronounced NUKE-lee-ur, not nuke-YA-lur…”……it’s as if they’re afraid to be sent to the Tower of London for ‘correcting’ some royal personage……and my friends, that’s some foolish BS given that we fought to get away from having a King)

        1. Calm down. Of course maps of Vietnam showing battles were shown on TV, but could most Americans easily find Vietnam when shown a map of the world? Not a map of South-East Asia, but a map of the world?

          1. And for that matter, do you think that most Americans could find Afghanistan on a map of the world at any time after Sept 11, 2001. Obviously far fewer US troops were involved, but in the days and months after 9/11, maps depicting Afghanistan itself were shown on TV quite a bit.

            I don’t think they could or can, but data beyond personal impressions is useful. Here’s some:
            http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2002/11/27/13geography.h22.html
            http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/0502_060502_geography.html
            Note this is for the 18-24 year old bracket – I didn’t find any surveys for older adults.

          2. Yes, Bob. Those big scary “world” maps are confusing. All those weird countries all different colors! Why, when I went to Europe in 1981 with my ma, I was so sure England would be pale blue and Germany would be yellow, because those were the colors they were on the map we looked at in the library! Of course, before we went we made sure that we asked the nice library lady where the countries were, so we wouldn’t make the mistake of trying to drive there.

            Seriously. Your link to the eduweek.org article is to a “subscription only” article. The first paragraph that is all that is offered for free says something about Afghanistan, and I do believe (not that I’m going to bother to subscribe to read the whole thing) that it is referring to students in the CURRENT CENTURY, as it was written (as per the url) in 2002, and it refers to some survey going back to 1988. That’s TWENTY YEARS after 1968. Math is hard, but not that hard.

            Then I checked out the National Geographic link. It was written in 2006, and is talking about the Iraq war, and refers to “since 2003” — by which I, using my admittedly feeble conservative brain powers (gosh I wish I were a liberal so I could have a BIG BRAIN that can do all that THINKY STUFF better), figured out means “from 2003 up to the time this article was uploaded to the NatGeog site, that is, 2006.”

            To conclude, neither of the articles you linked to have FUCK ALL to do with what Americans knew about Vietnam — its location on the Earth, what was going on there, why Aunt Charlene kept crying whenever someone would mention Uncle Fred, what that stuff the Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were talking about on the black and white tv screen and why mom and dad had such serious faces when they watched — none of it. It’s a non sequitur of a special kind that only Bob-1 tends to upload here. The fact that some Americans NOW have trouble reading maps doesn’t mean they didn’t THEN. It illustrates NOTHING except that you are being a pissant. Again.

          5. Bob,

            You’d do better not telling others what to do, particularly when you are unable to follow your own instructions. Its rude, but it also gives no incentive for others to listen to you.

  5. I’m not defending Obama per se, but I’ve become curious:

    a) If you are not a native Vietnamese speaker, are you sure you are pronouncing Khe Sanh correctly? I thought Vietnamese vowels were particularly tricky for native English speakers because Vietnamese is a tonal language, while English allows its speaker to be morel loose, which is good, because as American, I enjoy my ability to partially understand Australians.

    b) Speaking of Australians and Khe Sanh, there was this bizarre on-air conversation about the pronunciation of Khe Sanh which should seem suitably foreign to American ears: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUukb_slRY

    1. Sooo, are you saying that it unlikely that anyone would pronounce it like a native and therefore how Obama pronounces it is irrelevant?

      Ever notice how stupid people look when they try and slip into a foreign dialect for a single word in a sentence?

      1. No, that is not what I’m saying. I’m saying it would be worth considering whether you are calling Obama out for mispronouncing a word that you yourself are mispronouncing.

        And no, I don’t think people necessarily look stupid for using a single foreign word (or pronouncing it in a foreign way) when speaking English, but I do think it sometimes works out that way — it really depends on the context.

        I’m reminded of the Eich bin ein Berliner speech. It is widely believed in America that Kennedy said “I’m a jelly doughnut”. My understanding is that this is, in fact, not the case, but whether he did or he didn’t, that speech had tidbits of Latin and German and everyone thought it was a great speech.

        1. “And no, I don’t think people necessarily look stupid for using a single foreign word (or pronouncing it in a foreign way) when speaking English”

          But that’s the way to bet. Remember “NEE-cah-RAH-goo-ah” in the 80s?

          I noticed that in the clip you provided of the Aussie news team, neither of the pronunciations involved the sound “Key”.

    3. Tonal vowels are hard for non-native speakers to distinguish, but not too bad to pronounce. But Obama’s flub wasn’t between two different tonally accented versions of the same vowel, it was between two different vowel sounds that are distinct in English too.

      Actually, the hard bit is getting that “Kh” sound right. Dialect might vary from place to place (with my in-laws the “k” sound seems a bit stronger; with the language lessons I’ve taken the “h” does), but regardless native speakers sound as if two completely different English consonants are being spoken simultaneously. It’s like an auditory version of one of those “is it two faces? is it a vase?” pictures.

  6. File this in the “what if a Republican had done this” bin. But I think Ace’s is spot on that stuff like this just highlights the fact that Obama is a “Stuttering Clusterfuck of a Miserable Failure”.

  7. “Key” Sanh is no big deal. Neither was the line he said in a speech in Europe congratulating the Sarkos on their new child and saying that the kid is lucky in that it looks like Carla and not Sarko.

    “Pock-E-Stahn” annoys me no end as do the “tuh”s

    The only real solution is:

    High speed rail!!!!!

    Or a NASA-built heavy lifter

  8. Well, I think it should sound more like “Hey son,” but pronouncing it both wrong and completely different from the way any veterans, war correspondents, historians, or the general public pronounces it shows that he’d never heard of the place he was mentioning in his speech. It makes his whole speech hollow, just empty words and platitudes strung together by some junior staffer.

    But I’m sure he can correctly pronounce “dialectic”, “bourgeoisie”, “commodification”, and “proletariat.”

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