"Goooooooood morning Vietnam! It's 0600 hours. What does the "O" stand for? O my God, it's early!" -- Adrian Cronauer
"Our power, therefore, is a very vital shield. If we are driven from the field in Viet-Nam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise, or in American protection." -- Lyndon B. Johnson
"I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service. " -- John F. Kerry
"Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam. " -- Marshall McLuhan
"It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas." -- Ronald Reagan
I've often wondered why I never came to terms with opposition to this war. At that time in my life, I was able to sympathize with both sides of most issues. I never quite understood the arguments of people who thought we should get out of Vietnam. I remember standing around during some poorly organized protests, watching my classmates scream out at the uninterested and merely annoyed. I simply could not buy the anti-war rationale (...that killing bad guys makes you bad). So, I never heard a good argument against the war. Still haven't. Sure, war was hell. It also seemed necessary, given that not all the bad guys had surrendered yet.
Television made a big deal about college campus riots and demonstrations of young people. I surely would not have advocated that political leaders seriously listen to most of my classmates. Heck, these kids had no perspective whatsoever, no wisdom in the matter, and no basis for claiming either. The fact that TV covered it at all seemed odd at the time. The fact that the politicians listened reflects poorly on their own wisdom.
As to how the war was conducted, well that was the real crime. By restraining full scale military operations, we made every one of our boys a sitting duck. By pulling out, we allowed the slaughter of the entire South Vietnamese Army and spawned the Khmer Rouge and it's murder of 1.7 million people.
Thank God we don't do wars like that any more.
1 comment:
The United States’ war on Viet Nam and its subsequent invasion of Cambodia were the events that propelled the Khmer Rouge into power. A combination of anti-American sentiment (540,000 tons of bombs will do that to a nation) and the U.S. support for the corrupt thug Lon Nol made the native insurgency attractive to the Cambodians.
Furthermore, once the Khmer revealed themselves to be genocidists, the Western press didn’t cover it and Western powers didn’t intervene. The U.S. army had withdrawn and, frankly, no one cared anymore. It took an invasion by the North Vietnamese army to put a stop to the killing fields. They should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize.
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