Vietnam War

"Ironically, the North Vietnamese victory could have come much sooner. In view of the increasing commitment of American troops in the mid- and late 1960s, General Giap would have been well advised to abandon the big-unit war, pull in his horns to take away the visible threat to South Vietnam's survival, and thereby delude the Americans that they had already achieved their goal of making the South Vietnamese self-sufficient. President Johnson had given Giap that chance at the Manila conference of 1966 when he had announced that once "the level of violence subsides," American and other foreign troops would withdraw within six months. That would have been eight years before the eventual South Vietnamese defeat, long before the South Vietnamese armed forces would have had any claim to self-sufficiency. Making that offer at the Manila conference may well have been an effort by President Johnson to rid himself of the albatross of South Vietnam, whatever the long-range consequences. For once the United States had pulled out under those circumstances and Giap had come back, what American President would have dared risk the political pitfalls involved in putting American troops back in?"

"Dating from the days of the Geneva Accords of 1954, the refugees always flowed south, not north, and even those Americans who long maintained that the refugees were not fleeing the enemy but American shelling and bombing would have to admit that even after American shelling and bombing stopped, the flow was still always southward. So it was until the final deplorable end. How could anyone genuinely believe that the South Vietnamese people had no desire to forestall the march of totalitarianism, to maintain their freedom- however imperfect- when for years upon years they bore incredible hardships and their soldiers fought with courage and determination to do just that? They carried on the fight under a government that many Americans labeled unrepresentative, repressive, and corrupt. No people could have pursued such a grim defensive fight for so long without a deep underlying yearning for freedom."

"Pro-lifers’ reactions against the Vietnam War pushed the movement further to the left. In the early years of the movement, opponents of abortion, most of whom were staunchly anticommunist, had been reluctant to say anything against the nation’s military effort in Vietnam. They were New Deal liberals and advocates of the civil rights movement, but in the mid-1960s, they hesitated to link themselves to a radical student cause that would put them at odds with their nation’s government and with some of the nation’s highest-ranking Catholic clerics, including New York archbishop Cardinal Francis Spellman, who had endorsed the war as a necessity in the fight against Communism. Indeed, one of the leading pro-life books of the late 1960s, Charles E. Rice’s The Vanishing Right to Live, explicitly condemned those who refused to serve in Vietnam. But by the end of the decade, some pro-lifers concluded that if they valued human life before birth, they also needed to protect the lives of those already born and join the campaign against the war. After Fr. James McHugh, founder of the National Right to Life Committee and director of the bishops’ Family Life Bureau, included a discussion of the ethics of war in the model homily on abortion that he sent to the nation’s Catholic priests in January 1969, an increasing number of pro-lifers began talking about the injustice of the war in Vietnam, as well as the arms race. The definitive antiabortion publication of 1970, a 500-page tome by Georgetown philosophy professor Germain Grisez, condemned the nuclear arms race as unethical and questioned the morality of the Vietnam War, saying that it “poses many problems from an ethical point of view”. Despite conservative Catholics’ initial reluctance to issue an unmitigated condemnation of the war, denunciations of the nation’s military effort in Vietnam became widespread in the pro-life movement by 1972. “We cannot be selective in our love for life,” Detroit’s archbishop, Cardinal John Dearden, declared in September 1972. “The very same reasons call on us to protect it wherever and however it is threatened, whether through the suffocation of poverty or in villages ravaged by napalm or unborn life in a mother’s womb”."

"In 1969, while on medical leave from Vietnam, I took my mother up the road to have lunch and to get reacquainted. When we got up to pay and leave the fellow in the next booth got up and blocked our path. This was not a hippie or some punk protester- this was a man in his thirties, blue-collar worker, probably married and with one or two kids of his own. He insisted on informing me that I wasn't a real soldier and I didn't know what war was because he had fought in Korea! He said anyone could get a Purple Heart now just for the asking, and that the three I now wore were bullshit. This man, supposedly the mainstay of our country, was prepared to start a fight at 2 o'clock in the afternoon in a restaurant. Who the hell was this guy? I didn't know him, had never met him, nor done anything to him. Was the whole country being brainwashed? It was then and is now beyond my power to describe the anger and hatred I felt then, and still feel today. What intelligent people we have bred that they can be led by the nose by whoever makes the most noise! As disappointing as I'm sure it must be to some, I am not some neurotic vet desecrating society every time I'm released from the psych ward of the local VA. In fact I'm married with three kids (none of them neurotic either), a $100,000 home in the suburbs, and my own company. My feelings are still strong and buried just slightly below the surface. Today I do business with a great many of these same people who symbolically, if not physically, spit on us when we came home from Vietnam. They think I'm a great guy. I don't boast about my service time, yet I don't hide it, either. I wait with patience hoping that some day these very same people will have the opportunity to burn in hell while I laugh."

"You put the government on the spot when you even mention Vietnam. They feel embarrassed — you notice that?... It's just a trap that they let themselves get into. … But they're trapped, they can't get out. You notice I said 'they.' They are trapped, They can't get out. If they pour more men in, they'll get deeper. If they pull the men out, it's a defeat. And they should have known that in the first place. France had about 200,000 Frenchmen over there, and the most highly mechanized modern army sitting on this earth. And those little rice farmers ate them up, and their tanks, and everything else. Yes, they did, and France was deeply entrenched, had been there a hundred or more years. Now, if she couldn't stay there and was entrenched, why, you are out of your mind if you think Sam can get in over there. But we're not supposed to say that. If we say that, we're anti-American, or we're seditious, or we're subversive…. They put Diem over there. Diem took all their money, all their war equipment and everything else, and got them trapped. Then they killed him. Yes, they killed him, murdered him in cold blood, him and his brother, Madame Nhu's husband, because they were embarrassed. They found out that they had made him strong and he was turning against them…. You know, when the puppet starts talking back to the puppeteer, the puppeteer is in bad shape…."

"The Soviet Union hastened to endorse the Bandung principles, and the United States began to ease its hostility toward nonalignment (which Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had denounced as "morally bankrupt"), acknowledge the diminishing appeal of its security pacts, and court independent Third World governments. Vietnam was an exception. The Eisenhower administration, which had refused to sign the Geneva Accords, feared a communist victory in the national elections and a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. After the French withdrawal, the United States proceeded to build up a client state in the south, allowing President Ngô Đình Diệm to cancel the 1956 elections and to clamp down on his opponents. Contrary to the Geneva Accords, which forbade the Vietnamese from entering foreign alliances or allowing foreign troops into Vietnam, Dulles mobilized the US-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization to agree to protect South Vietnam against communist aggression. When a popular insurgency, which Diệm contemptuously labeled Viet Cong (Vietnamese communists) erupted in the south two years later and received support from the north, Eisenhower expanded US economic and military aid and personnel on the ground. Between 1955 and 1961 the United States poured more than $1 billion in economic and military aid into the Diệm regime, and by the time Eisenhower left office there were approximately one thousand US military advisers in South Vietnam."

"The US intervention in Vietnam was not inevitable. It evolved from the vacuum left by the collapse of Japan's Asian Empire, followed by the communists' victory in China, the Korean stalemate, and France's defeat in 1954. But it also grew out of the Cold War decisions of three US presidents: Truman's to move away from Roosevelt's anticolonialism and back the French, Eisenhower's to block the Vietnamese national elections in 1956 and prop up the Diệm regime, and Kennedy's to increase the number of US military advisers, Special Forces, and CIA agents in South Vietnam. All three intended to transform Vietnam into a "proving ground for democracy in Asia.""

"Three months before the presidential election Johnson had already obtained his justification for going to war. From the beginning of 1964 the US military had taken over direction of the CIA/South Vietnamese covert commando attacks against North Vietnam as well as naval intelligence gathering in the coastal areas (known as DESOTO patrols). On August 1, 1964, shortly after a South Vietnamese commando attack on two islands, the destroyer Maddox entered the Gulf of Tonkin for the purpose of collecting electronic intelligence. The next day, as it approached the island of Hon Me, it encountered three North Vietnamese torpedo boats whose signals had been intercepted. The Maddox fired, damaging only one of them. Two days later, the Maddox, now joined by a second intelligence vessel, C. Turner Joy, again fired on what appeared to be approaching enemy ships, although no evidence has ever been found of a second North Vietnamese interception."

"Although neither US ship had been hit and there were no casualties, Johnson immediately ordered a retaliatory bombing raid against North Vietnamese naval bases. Evoking America's dread of surprise assaults, Johnson appealed for public support against an "unprovoked attack" in international waters. After Defense Secretary Robert McNamara assured Congress that the US Navy had "played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any," Johnson on August 7, 1964 won near-unanimous Senate approval for a resolution authorizing him to use US military force to defend the freedom of South Vietnam, a measure his administration had prepared earlier in the spring. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution enabled Johnson to spurn proposals that fall for another Geneva conference to achieve a negotiated settlement over Vietnam."

"Shortly after his overwhelming electoral victory, Johnson moved quickly to rescue South Vietnam from an imminent collapse. In 1965 he launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and by the end of the year he had dispatched 180,000 combat troops as well. Although this dramatic escalation contained several cautious elements, Johnson had transformed South Vietnam into a Cold War struggle and one of the longest and most divisive wars in US history."

"In selecting bombing targets, Johnson avoided destroying North Vietnamese dams and ports and thereby provoking a Chinese intervention although the Ho Ch Minh Trail was bombed, Johnson made no moves to invade Laos or attack the Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia; and US forces confined themselves to search-and-destroy operations against enemy units and largely refrained from involvement in local politics."

"The US involvement in Vietnam had a major effect on global politics. Antiwar movements developed rapidly in America, with young people burning their draft cards, fleeing the country, or serving jail sentences rather than go to Vietnam. By October 1965 protest demonstrations in forty American cities had spread to Europe and Asia. Critics of the war condemned America's atrocities against the civilian population- North and South- and its use of chemical weapons, and they called for an immediate US withdrawal. Antiwar activists derided Washington's claim of battling Chinese communism to save Asians from tyranny, and deplored America's opposition to the third World's struggle for independence. To the generation raised after World War II and the Holocaust, America's claim to defend freedom against a tiny, tenacious people, and its support of a corrupt and repressive puppet government, rang increasingly hollow."

"The AK-47 went head-to-head with the M-16, and emerged on the winning side."

"When I was a serving soldier, very much accepting the framework of the Cold War as the proper lens to examine and think about international politics, it was possible to conclude that the Vietnam War was necessary."

"In the Seattle airport, as I was arriving home after serving in Vietnam in 1968-1969, a gang of 10 to 20 strangers clustered in the terminal and shouted insults at me as I passed by in my uniform. At the time, I paid them little attention. I was swept up in living, at long last, the dream that had sustained me through the hell of war: I was coming home. I was touching U.S. soil for the first time. Besides, I simply could not appreciate the magnitude of what they were doing at the time. It never occurred to me that people could be so morally bankrupt that, devoid of any fortitude, they would substitute the safety of another's company and, together, attack individual young soldiers, who walked through the airport alone in the sacred moment of homecoming. The longer I was home, however, the more clearly I understood that my Seattle experience was no curious aberration. This was part of an organized effort by a large and vocal segment of our society to ridicule and demean traditional values and strength of character by ridiculing and demeaning those who believed in them."

"There is a dangerous myth: That people like my persecutors in Seattle were just as courageous for resisting duty as the men who put their lives on the line. "Bring the boys home?" All I heard was, "Hell, no, we won't go." Why did all this supposedly courageous commitment to peace evaporate once the threat of being drafted was removed? Torture and wholesale massacre in Vietnam and Cambodia increased exponentially when the U.S. pulled out. Why were there no protests then? The answer, of course, is that commitment to peace was never the issue. Resisting service was. Figuratively, I have been "spat upon" countless times over the years, but not by hippies in airports. I am spat upon every time one of my countrymen prostitutes his values to perpetuate the myth that the easy, comfortable way out of a difficult time for our country was as "courageous" as making hard choices."

"We changed planes in Denver and noticed that the general public was avoiding us. No thanks, no welcome home or anything, just stares and dirty looks. We didn't care; we were home. Our emotions were numb. We landed at the old downtown airport in Kansas City and put our duffle bags in storage lockers. They actually had those at airports back then. We got a taxi to Liberty, Missouri, but didn't have enough money between us to get all the way home to Excelsior. Didn't matter. We figured we could hitchhike. After all, we were in our Army uniforms, and figured someone would stop and offer us a ride. We were wrong. Cars went past honking and giving us one-finger salutes, one ran off the shoulder at us and made us dodge aside. Still, we didn't care, we were home."

"I kept thinking things had changed since I left. My sister Debbie had gotten married. Many high school friends were away at college. I contacted them but they were still young, they didn't understand that I had changed. Some of the same people were still sitting on cars downtown and talking about things that really didn't matter to me anymore. It wasn't them that had changed; it was me. The transition from a war zone to Middle America was not easy. Still, I had that "1000-yard stare," loud noises made me jump, helicopters woke me up when they flew over the house, and I felt ten years older. Many others had a much harder time in Vietnam than I had. The Grunts, the wounded, the guys that didn't make it home. We each had our own war. But we did what our country asked of us."

"I put the uniform away. I didn't talk about my experiences except with other Veterans. I didn't join the VFW, the American Legion, or any of the war protests that were still happening. I just wanted to be left alone and get busy with life. I was proud of my service even though the country didn't seem to be proud of us. I remember when I heard the news that Saigon had fallen. I was a Missouri State Trooper by then and I had to pull over to the road shoulder and stop. I kept wondering, "Why?" All those lives, all the wounded. America: two wins, one tie, one loss. Later, at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, I remember watching the "Welcome Home" shows. I got teary-eyed watching the surprise visits by soldiers to their kids' schools and the excitement in the families' eyes when they saw them. That is what homecomings are supposed to be like. I remember welcoming my Marine Corps son home from Afghanistan (twice), my sailor son came home after a deployment to the Middle East on the carrier, George H.W. Bush. I remember all the Patriot Guard missions to welcome home servicemen and women. I also remember the PGR missions for the KIAs (killed in action). Lives ended too soon. Less than 9% of the population has ever served in the military, around 3% have ever served in combat. Too many people are too wrapped up in the Kardashians, Miley Cyrus, iPhones, tweets, fashion, or just daily life to consider the Veterans and active duty military. Next time you see someone wearing a Veteran ball cap or uniform, thank them for serving. They will appreciate it."

"One more issue we had to deal with upon our return was our language. Over there, everything was fuck this, fuck that, fucking morning, fucking boots, fucking mud, fucking war. It was embedded in our language and it's how we talked; but it wasn't acceptable back in "The World." I remember the family got together after I returned. Most of my relatives were there; they were all visiting. I couldn't think of too much to say until my sister's cat jumped up on my lap. I don't like cats too much, and it dug its claws into my groin. I immediately yelled, "Fucking cat!" and knocked it across the room. You could have heard a pin drop. I knew then I would have to make some changes now that I was home. My sister laughed and said I impressed her with my control. She figured I would have just grabbed the cat and killed it. I heard of one Vet who had a similar experience. Everyone asked him why he was so quiet. Finally, he said, "I would have said something, but I was afraid I would fuck up.""

"If we go down that road we might have, within five years, 300,000 men in the rice paddies of the jungles of Viet-Nam and never be able to find them."

"I used to be a left-wing, antiestablishment, protest-oriented, march-on-Washington type of individual. Once, back in college, I participated in a hunger strike to end the Vietnam War. By not eating, I was supposedly enabling myself to focus my consciousness on peace. What actually happened was that I became absolutely obsessed with cheeseburgers, although if I really, really forced myself to concentrate on the tragedy in Southeast Asia, I could also visualize french fries. I kept this up for several days, but failed to have much of an impact on Washington. At no point, so far as I know, did a White House aide burst into the Oval Office and shout with alarm, "Some students at Haverford College have been refusing to eat for several days! followed by Lyndon Johnson saying, "Mah God! Ah got to change mah foreign policy!""

"1968- This is when it began to dawn on me that there was a serious competition going on in America to see who could be the biggest group of assholes: the right-wing assholes who thought that the Vietnam War was a good thing, as long as they personally did not have to go over to Vietnam and get shot at; or the left-wing assholes who thought that what we really needed was for more people to shoot each other here at home. It seemed as if both sets of assholes were winning in 1968. The King assassination did, in fact, result in terrible riots; and the Vietnam War, despite its growing unpopularity, became the longest in American history, with more U.S. troops over there than ever, and more men being drafted, and no end in sight."

"The antiwar protests led to pro-war- or more accurately, anti-anti-war- protests, including a big one in Manhattan in which thousands of people, many of them construction workers, marched through the streets. I went out and watched that one during my lunch hour. My main memory is of two men, both about my age: One was a crew-cut protestor, wearing a tool belt; the other was a long-haired guy on the sidewalk. The long-haired guy started yelling "STOP THE WAR! STOP THE WAR!" The crew-cut guy ran over to him and, stopping just short of making physical contact, began yelling "BETTER DEAD THAN RED! BETTER DEAD THAN RED!" The two of them stood there, close enough to exchange spittle, screaming slogans at each other. That was political discourse in 1970."

"1973- This was the year that the war finally ended. Nixon called it "peace with honor," although he surely knew that the Communists would take over, just the same as if we had never gotten involved over there in the first place- except of course for the hundreds of thousands of people who got hurt or killed. So you tell me why the whole thing was not a terrible, criminal waste. You tell me why Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize, instead of being required- along with all the other "leaders" who kept sending Americans over there long after they knew the war was pointless- to get down on his knees and beg the forgiveness of the American veterans, and their families, and the Vietnamese people. Everybody knew that "peace with honor" was bullshit, but nobody cared at that point. Everybody just wanted it to be over. When it finally was, there was no joy, only relief."

"A few years ago I got into a heated argument with the 18-year-old son of a friend of mine. Actually, it wasn't so much an argument as it was me getting angry at him for something he said. What he said, basically, was that he wished there was a war like Vietnam going on right then, so that the members of his generation would have something big, something exciting, in their lives. I told him that this was a reprehensible thing to say; I told him he should not want people to die to keep his generation amused. But in retrospect- although I obviously don't want another Vietnam- I see what he meant. He didn't want people to die; he wanted there to be something to give his life significance, something to mark his formative era that would be more meaningful than whatever TV sitcoms were popular at the time. We Boomers had that; we had a lot going on, maybe too much."

"Said goodbye to his momma as he left South Dakota To fight for the red, white and blue He was nineteen and green with a new M-16 Just doing what he had to do He was dropped in the jungle where the choppers would rumble With the smell of napalm in the air And the sergeant said "Look up ahead""

"Like a dark evil cloud Twelve-hundred came down on him and twenty-nine more They fought for their lives but most of them died In the One-Seventy-Third Airborne"

"On the eighth of November the angels were crying As they carried his brothers away With the fire raining down and the hell all around There were few men left standing that day Saw the eagle fly through a clear blue sky 1965, the eighth of November"

"We cannot remain silent on Viet Nam. We should remember that whatever victory there may be possible, it will have a racial stigma…. It will always be the case of a predominantly white power killing an Asian nation. We are interested in peace, not just for Christians but for the whole of humanity."

"The limits of the centralizing cybernetic model became clear in Vietnam, although its large role in the US defeat has often been disregarded. James Gibson has perhaps done the most to document the dramatic failure of ‘technowar’, ‘a production system that can be rationally managed and warfare as a kind of activity that can be scientifically determined by constructing computer models’. The principles of OR and SA were applied to provide analysis of the conflict and guidance to the policy makers while cybernetic command-and-control technologies were widely deployed. What developed in Vietnam can be appropriately described as an ‘information pathology’, an obsession with statistical evaluations and directing the war from the top, perceived as the point of omniscience, when in practice soldiers on the ground often understood far better than their superiors how badly the war was going."

"Between 1967 and 1972, the Air Force ran Operation Igloo White at the cost of nearly $1 billion a year. Through an array of sensors designed to record sound, heat, vibrations, and even the smell of urine, feeding information to a control centre in Thailand which sent on the resulting targeting information to patrolling jet aircraft (even the release of bombs could be controlled remotely), this vast cybernetic mechanism was designed to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads and trails providing logistical support to the North Vietnamese. At the time, extravagant claims were made about the performance of the system with the reported number of destroyed trucks in 1970 exceeding the total number of trucks believed to be in all of North Vietnam. In reality, far fewer truck remains were ever identified, there were probably many false positives in target identification, and the North Vietnamese and their Laotian allies became adept at fooling the sensors. In spite of all this, the official statistics still trumpeted a 90 per cent success rate in destroying equipment traveling down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an assertion difficult to sustain given that the North Vietnamese conducted major tank and artillery operations in South Vietnam in 1972. Edwards incisively observes that ‘Operation Igloo White’s centralized, computerized,automated, power-at-a-distance method of “interdiction” resembled a microcosmic version of the whole US approach to Vietnam’."

"Those of us who served in Vietnam are now 70 years old, give or take... we've all grown a bit gray-haired and fat over the years, and probably look like cuddly Grandpas and Grandmas now. Trust me, that wasn't how we looked back then. And unlike any previous American war, when we came "marching home," we were reviled, insulted, spat upon, had blood thrown on us in airports, or simply avoided and ignored. Those were not isolated incidents, and they left scares every bit as real and painful as an AK-47 or an RPG, the famous Russian- and Chinese-made Rocket-Propelled Grenade. When we got home, no one wanted to hear about the war, and we quickly learned not to bring it up. We were the embarrassing "800-pound gorilla" in the room that everyone wished would fade away; so that's what we did. For many vets we interviewed, I am the first person they've spoken to about the war since they came home, including their wives and children. Neither the American Legion nor the VFW wanted us around, much less as members. So, we formed our own veterans' groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America, the Band of Brothers, and many others. They brought us together and have given us a new sense of pride, as you can see from the Vietnam Veteran baseball caps many now wear."

"Over 9 million of us served on active duty during the war; 2,710,000, or about one third served in Vietnam; 211,454 were wounded, and 58,220 were killed. Unfortunately, that last number does not include the tens of thousands who have died because of the indiscriminate spraying of Agent Orange, or had their lives dramatically shortened because of the myriad of diseases it causes. They are part of a growing list of names that are NOT engraved on the wall in Washington. My estimate, which is by no means scientific, is that well over 50% of surviving Vietnam veterans now suffer from PTSD or one of the many Agent Orange-related illnesses such as Type II Diabetes, Neuropathy, Heart Disease, Parkinson's, Prostate Cancer, Hodgkin's Disease, and other types of cancers. Most of these diseases struck as we reached 60 years of age, like so many ticking bombs. As someone said, "Vietnam- it's the gift that keeps on giving. If they didn't kill us over there, they're determined to kill us over here.""

"The irony is that we who served were patriotic then and, if anything, we are even more patriotic now. Still, I don't believe there was a single vet I interviewed who doesn't think the war was a monstrous mistake and that we were sold down the river by a long series of US Presidents and Washington politicians, few of whom ever served, fewer still let their own children serve, and none ever studied the history of the people and country where they chose to send us to bleed and die, because they were afraid to admit a mistake."

"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years."