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Message: <blockquote data-quote="haakon1" data-source="post: 5597158" data-attributes="member: 25619">According to the National Guard, only 8700 guardsmen served in Vietnam.  That's out of a total of ~2.5 million Vietnam veterans (from all services) who served in country (going by Wikipedia for this figure).  That's significantly less than the 30,000 Canadians who volunteered to serve in the US military in Vietnam.  I believe only one USANG served in Vietnam -- a Kentucky artillery battalion attached to the 101st Airborne.  There might be a few others, but I can't find them on the web.My point is, dissing the National Guard about Vietnam is nonsense, since very, very few of them were there, for political reasons -- at the time, using the National Guard was seen as more controversial than using draftees (it doesn't make sense to me, but it's what happened).As for dissing the regular US Army, they did go on the offensive regularly.  In general, US forces were allocated to border/infiltration regions, and were heavily involved in combat in the jungles, highlands, and delta, while the South Vietnamese had a larger portion of urban garrison units -- for political reasons, it was better to have the ARVN be the army the average Vietnamese urban dweller saw day-to-day, while the Americans were off in the bush doing the heavy fighting.You don't lose 58,000 dead and 150,000 wounded by not fighting.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties" target="_blank">Vietnam War casualties - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</a>As for the idea that US Army in Vietnam were mostly draftees, I can't give you a figure on that, but it doesn't ring true -- and of the casualties, about 70% were volunteers, not draftees.</blockquote>

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