I’m loathe to get too deep in the weeds on this because the right would just love for us to spend the next 5 days debating John Kerry and the Vietnam war (certainly even if Nancy Pelosi is sworn in speaker, Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt would see fit to put up another blog post parsing every word ever put out by Kerry) but there are two aspects to the Vietnam War the right keeps distorting:
1. The overall idea of the war – which was started and escalated by two Democratic presidents and prolonged by a Republican – was always flawed, and we lost too many good men fighting it for no good reason. The right keeps pushing the idea that we were mere moments from victory when the hated left pushed us to leave, when in fact the war had gone way past the tipping point across the political spectrum and there was no end in sight.
2. It was a small portion of the forces, but in fact American troops did commit atrocities in Vietnam. I understand this is a useful club against Kerry but it’s simply a perversion of history to pretend as if every soldier in Vietnam performed admirably. In fact, civilians were tortured, intentionally killed and raped. It does us no good to paper over history and pretend away bad things when they in fact did happen because then we’re just doomed to repeat them (Abu Ghraib, Haditha). It isn’t hating the troops to say that American troops have done very horrible things in the past. It’s called History. It isn’t pretty sometime.
By the time my generation becomes the majority, the battles over Vietnam will be dead and buried (though I have no doubt we’ll see an Iraq Veterans for the Truth attacking some future Democratic candidate with lies) but it is important for us not to just willy-nilly rewrite history.
The right keeps pushing the idea that we were mere moments from victory when the hated left pushed us to leave
Source?
It was a small portion of the forces, but in fact American troops did commit atrocities in Vietnam. I understand this is a useful club against Kerry but it’s simply a perversion of history to pretend as if every soldier in Vietnam performed admirably. In fact, civilians were tortured, intentionally killed and raped.
The problem is, John Kerry testified that he personally witnessed these atrocities, when in fact, he never did. THAT is how he dishonored the troops. By fingering people he served along side with as criminals. He shit all over those guys and then people like you get indignant when they came forward to call Kerry a liar.
“The problem is, John Kerry testified that he personally witnessed these atrocities, when in fact, he never did. ”
Source?
Jay: the source is basically any conservative who has written a comment on Iraq. You guys are always talking about how it was the left who forced America to leave Iraq.
And why do you keep saying Kerry didn’t see the things he saw when in fact he did? WHY DO YOU GUYS KEEP PRETENDING?
Wasn’t there a recent report that found violations of the rules of war and mistreatment of prisoners in most units that fought in Vietnam? Didn’t the Germans report last week that they witnessed war crimes by American soldiers in Bosnia during that conflict?
War brutalizes everyone who participates in it, victor and victim alike. If people want to believe that it is some kind of game, they can. Those people can also expect the moon is green cheese as well.
John Huston’s film about WWII battle fatigue “Let There Be Light” is available on googlevideo for free. It would be a good thing if more people watched it.
Thanks for this. A couple of thoughts
First, the whole war was an ongoing atrocity, the way it worked. A “free fire zone” is an atrocity, for example, an area where ordinary people live, and where you shoot at whatever moves.
(That’s the atrocity John Kerry said he saw & participated in, btw. The rest he heard about from eye witness testimony during the Winter Soldiers hearings.)
There was individual and company-scale nasty sadistic stuff too, as in Iraq today, and we can argue about how much– less than some would say, more than you think, I’d guess– but clean & detached aerial bombing onto areas where everybody looks like civilian farmers, that’s a war crime, with horrible results, and it was the way the war was fought.
Second, these guys turned out to be wrong about the whole thing. We knew it at the time, and told them (just like we did and do about Iraq) and they just said “LALALALA” and told us we were stupid traitors. They have never ever ever acknowledged their real central screwup, Except for McNamara, a little, and he got almost crucified for it, from both sides.
They don’t talk about it anymore, but after everybody saw that the Vietnamese didn’t want us, and that each new government we installed was composed of even more evil thugs, the sole remaining rationale for the war became “the domino theory.” And there was no arguing with it. It was taken as being as proven as the theory of gravity. If you said, “you don’t know that,” they’d look at you as if you were crazy.
Here it is. We had to keep fighting because if we stopped, the communists would have won, and then communism would spread in some mysterious plague-like way to take over all of asia, including new zealand and australia, and then barrel across the pacific to california. Oooooooooo!
Seriously, that was the rationale. “We’re fighting the communists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”
That sure happened, didn’t it?
There was no reason for it. None. As soon as we got out, communism started to implode. All that death, all that torture, all that poisoning of the minds and bodies of all those people– stupid and pointless, by the hawks’ own standards.
The hawks were wrong then, they are wrong now. Get prepared: they will never admit it, It has to be somebody else’s fault. Mine, probably.
Within a few years of the end of this war, I expect a whole new wave of MIA and “they spat on us” rambo-style hysteria and urban legendry about Iraq to start sliding its way into becoming convenional wisdom, in some circles, at least.
Or, maybe not. Let’s hope. This is playing out differently.
The worst of it is, while the Vietnamese, being a Buddhist culture, have forgiven us, the Arabs are a whole other thing. We’ll be living with this particular can of worms for a long long long long time.
Actually, Vietnam may have been a key factor in toppling the worst evil in human history Tim – communism. And almost any war against communism is good and moral. More murders in its name than all of the other isms rolled toegther. I’m not sure anybody can expalin how others on the other side saw Vietanm, but it at least clearly demonstrated to the communist world our determinantion to fight along, hard war to oppose them.
Yes, thousands of American lives lost in a Vietnamese hell-hole – that showed the commies!!!!
yes. Thousands lost in Vietnam, but the commies have murdered 100,000,000 by many counts.
But many more thousands lost in the battle against Nazism and Japan. Are you OK with letting the more dangerous, murderous political extremists go untouched?