America's Vietnam Tragedy

America's Vietnam Tragedy
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Vietnamese peasants captured by American soldiers, 1966. Photo: Wikipedia Commons.

The PBS documentary on the Vietnam War is reviving my memories of that horrendous conflict in Southeast Asia. I had just arrived in America when President John Kennedy started sending “advisors” to South Vietnam. Despite his early misgivings about America’s role in the war in Vietnam, Kennedy bought the bogus claim of communist dominoes in Southeast Asia. No doubt the humiliation of America in Korea had something to do with Kennedy’s acceleration of president Dwight Eisenhower’s modest military assistance to South Vietnam.

The murder of Kennedy in late 1963 brought to the presidency Lyndon Johnson. He, too, like Kennedy, was originally reluctant to follow the generals’ urging for a perpetual expansion of America’s role in Vietnam. But Johnson slowly saw the war as a communist war against capitalism. He fought back with terrible weapons: bombing, burning, and poisoning Vietnam to a ghastly state and age. He authorized chemical and fire weapons and the bombing of North Vietnam. The napalm fire weapons and herbicides like Agent Orange inflicted savage destruction and death to peasants, rice fields, agrarian culture, forests, mountains and rivers. In other words, American bombs and soldiers obliterated a considerable part of the natural world and rural civilization of Vietnam.

The Vietnam War resurrected the barbarism of WWI.

“Body counts” became the constant demand of the Pentagon and its chief, Robert McNamara. McNamara, former head of Ford Motor Company, was a numbers man. He ordered the generals to quantify their wars. They did and sent him reams of meaningless statistics. But casualties, real or fake, told a slightly different story. Battle results demonstrated American soldiers lost most of their confrontations with the troops of North Vietnam. They did not know the territory and had no clear strategy for fighting. The generals, safely in their offices, gave the troops contradictory orders. On the contrary, North Vietnamese soldiers were fighting to liberate their country from foreigners.

American generals also did not tell the truth to the Secretary of Defense. They kept telling McNamara their soldiers killed so many Vietnamese troops that North Vietnam would have to reverse its policies of sending its soldiers south. McNamara used the manipulated numbers of dead enemy soldiers to justify the madness of the war.

McNamara eventually washed his hands of the war monster he nourished since 1961. In November 1, 1967, he sent a personal memo to Johnson telling him the war was unwinnable. And in a note accompanying the memo he said the “continuation of present action in Southeast Asia would be dangerous, costly in lives, and unsatisfactory to the American people.”

Johnson was not impressed. He sent McNamara to the luxurious position of the president of the World Bank and he chose a more pliable Secretary of Defense. At that moment in late 1967 there were around 500,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. About 24,000 soldiers had died.

The war in Vietnam continued until the early 1970s. America lost the war, just like McNamara predicted. The dead probably exceeded 70,000 and the wounded reached hundreds of thousands.

Was the Vietnam War necessary? Certainly, not. It was a futile affair and an unjust war from the beginning. After all, the Vietnam War was a colonial conflict. America stepped into the shoes of France that governed and fought the Vietnamese for a century. After the disastrous defeat it suffered at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, France abandoned Vietnam. France refused to join American forces in Vietnam.

The lessons from America’s Vietnam experience have not been learned. You don’t fight wars of aggression. And you don’t include ecocide in any war. Unless the war is a defensive conflict, war is pure destruction for both aggressors and defenders. Everyone suffers, worst of all, the natural world.

Remembering Vietnam now is not entirely academic.

The exchange of insults between the heads of two nuclear-armed states, US and North Korea, is a possible prelude to another war in Asia. President Trump has been exceptionally vulgar and threatening. He said at the UN General Assembly meeting he was prepared to totally destroy North Korea. The leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, returned the favor, calling Trump deranged and threatening to explode a nuclear bomb in the Pacific Ocean.

Both men are irresponsible for behaving like angry children: showing off their anger and contempt for civility and the positions they occupy. The Korean leader keeps sending missiles over Japan. And Trump does not lose a chance in indulging in rhetoric of war against North Korea.

The Vietnam War should tell Trump and Kim Jong-un war is unthinkable in the Korean peninsula. If either of them triggers a conventional war, it will be a bloodbath. More than ten million South Koreans are living in Seoul, about thirty miles away from North Korean guns, will be the first sacrifice of such war. And, needless to say, Trump and Kim Jong-un would probably toy with the delusion of easy victory with nukes. In which case, humanity will probably come face to face with WWIII and extermination.

The alternative to this potential nightmare is negotiations between North Korea and the US, terminating the Korean War, and giving the Korean people a chance to determine their own destiny.

Watch the PBS documentary on the Vietnam War – and learn from it.

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