Yuli Blog

When we look back over the span of centuries that represents American history, it is easy to call out major military engagements which represent the major wars of this country.  From World War II to the Civil War to Korea to World War I, America has been involved in many military engagements and emerged victorious in all but a few of them.  But one of the strangest, longest lasting wars that America has entered into was the one that was called “The Cold War”. For many Americas living today, The Cold War was a fact of life for decades.  The reason it was a cold war was that there was no battlefield, no armies on deployment, no body counts and no major engagements to report.  Instead it was a long period of silent animosity between the United States and the Soviet Union that lasted from the end of World War II up to the early 1990s.  The strange thing was that the cold war grew out of our relationship with the Soviet Union during World War II which was a relationship of friendship. 

In the annals of American history, there may be no other country name that evokes such emotion as the country of Vietnam.  The history of this conflict is more than just a military struggle.  The impact that the Vietnam conflict had on American culture and foreign policy for many decades to come makes it a truly watershed war in the life of a relatively young country. Vietnam was not, on the surface as clearly a moral battleground as World War II or the Civil War had been.  That in itself made it more difficult for Americans to understand and become patriotic about as they had been in prior wars.  Yes, as in past conflicts, we found ourselves defending our allies, the South Vietnamese against the attacks of a communist neighbor to the north.  And in that way, it became a struggle to assist an ally, a military objective that America had long embraced. But the war was not just with the North Vietnamese.  To a very large extent, the war was against the Chinese and the Russians who we

America remembers many great battles that represent a turning point in a conflict that helped shaped our history.  We think of D-Day in World War II that turned the tide of victory toward the allies despite horrific losses.  But it is a unique battle that is remembered with pride and patriotism but is also a battle that was lost and almost everybody on our side brutally killed.  But that was the case in the battle for the Alamo in 1863. The battle for the Alamo was not a conventional battle in the sense of two equally matched armies fighting back and forth to retain property.  It was, to put it bluntly, a slaughter.  But the brave stand of those few hundred Texans against thousands of Mexican soldiers continues to inspire us today because it was a stand against impossible odds but it was a stand that reflected the American ethic of never giving up or surrendering when there is a principle to be defended. The siege at the Alamo actually lasted thirteen days.  It began on February 23