Reply #20: I'm not dismissing them outright [View All]

[Selatius]

When I said, "take it with a grain of salt," I did not intend it to mean to dismiss them outright and not believe anything coming out there. If I had said, "I can't tell how many are dead but will just keep an open mind to the numbers," would you have posted the same thing you did?

If I came off as a bit skeptical, then I'm not sorry because there is spin going both ways in this war. No, I did not dismiss the numbers outright. Yes, I try to keep an open mind, but I don't know who to believe anymore, so I try not to get into the specifics except to say that everyday some poor soul is dying over there. I take nearly all the numbers coming out of there with a bit of salt because I know for every soldier that dies outright over there, there's some more who are wounded and show up as simply "wounded" but to expect that all "wounded" soldiers survive their wounds would be naivete on my part. Yes, that would naturally lead me to say the numbers are higher than what the Pentagon would have us believe, but the question in my mind is how high that number really goes.

Frankly, I'm a bit upset with you bringing in Vietnam and Cambodia into this, given that I'm Vietnamese, and that damn war is a sore spot with me. I don't believe what I did amounted to that level of derision and ridicule the US news media tossed about with respect to war casualties in that war. It's one thing to be a little bit skeptical, but it's another to outright dismiss the evidence and debase it as propaganda in the opposite direction like the US media did 40 years ago, and I don't think I did such thing, so I think it's unfair.