World War II:
America lost 408,306 Killed-In-Action, and 670,846 wounded. More than 78,000 American, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines were listed as "Missing In Action".
Over 20,000 were left behind in the hands of the Soviets, as the ruthless Stalin's Armies over-ran German lines seizing POW camps holding Americans. These Americans would never be heard from again as they disappeared into Stalin's Gulags.
The Korean War
54,246 Americans were Killed-In-Action, 103,284 were wounded. Over 8,000 Americans were left behind by the U.S.government in the hands of the Communist North Koreans never to return.
The Vietnam War
58,219 American were Killed-In-Action, 153,356 wounded. After ten years of warfare, America signed a Peace Accord with North Vietnam. In return for America's withdrawl , North Vietnam agreed to return 549 American POW's. Over 2500 Americans are listed as Missing-In-Action.........
These American's fought, bled and died in far off lands, arid deserts, sweltering jungles, frigid plains and ghostly cities. They were sent off to war by men in Ivory towers whom too often denied our warriors true victory with their gamesmenships of rules costing countless losses of the lives and torn bodies of our precious Americans, and today those same men, under both new names and old, continue to tie the hands of the warriors they send to do their bidding in the wars of today........
The 1960's Southeast Asia, the nexus of geo-political conflict between the ruthless iron rule of Soviet and Chinese Marxist Communist expansion, guised in the cloak of nationalist Communist movements, and the policy of "containment" by the United States to push back the quest of hegonomic Communist expansion around the globe, became a blood letting of epic proportions. The seeds for these killing fields began long before, under the occupation of Imperial France that turned Vietnam and Laos into fiefdoms for France's inglorious Imperial system. These lands were steeped in ancient cultures torn apart from their roots between servitude for the occupying master, and religious prosthelzing to conversion to Catholicism from its traditional Buddhist and indigenous religions. There were years of brutal occupation by Japanese armies during WW II displacing Colonial France, only to be replaced at the end of that conflict again by French occupation that would make these lands breeding grounds for the wave of Communist idealogy at the tip of a bayonet.
With the defeat and withdrawl of France by the Viet Minh, later to be known as the infamous Viet Cong, and after the partition of Vietnam between the North and South; with the North ruled under the banner of Communist Nationalist where desent and freedom meant death or imprisonment to those who would dare defy the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Unitied States became sucked into a swamp of death. Its leadership with niether the will nor stomach to crush the North Vietnamese Communist and Viet Cong in a decisive systematic campaign, cowed into fear of the puppet masters, the Soviet Union and Communist China, instead blindly fed Americans into a slow meat grinder of death, with neither a plan for victory or cause to win, tied the hands of our men with their rules and forever denied our warriors victory. Not until 1970, with ten of thousands of Americans dead, unrest and riots gripping the American homeland, was a final campaign of systematic bombing of North Vietnam launched to drive the Communist leadership to the bargaining table where American leaders abandoned the South Vietnamese people to an inevitable strangulation by North Vietnam and withdrew its forces from Vietnam. The world soon again saw the face of Communism as it swept at the barrel of a gun crushing the South, enslaving a people, and its effects reverberated as the "killing fields" of Cambodia would see millions slaughtered again under a brutal banner of Communism.