Purging The Ghosts of Vietnam

[G_j]

www.commondreams.org/views04/0326-11.htm

Purging The Ghosts of Vietnam

by Robert Freeman

 March 29th marks the thirty first anniversary of America's military withdrawal from Vietnam. In the midst of a new war, we should examine the ending of this other war-the Only War America Ever Lost.

But our angst and aversion about Vietnam suggest we've still never really come to terms with it. Yet it is precisely in re-examining this other war-in re-opening the wound-that we can find reconciliation about it. We may also find some lessons about how to avoid the same mistakes in Iraq.

More than anything else, we need to look at the role our government and society played in justifying and prosecuting the War. And the standard we should hold in judging the Vietnam War is the same one we hold for any conduct, official or personal, public or private. It is this: if it has to be lied about, it's wrong.

This is a brutally simple standard. Its appeal-and its power-derives not just from its simplicity but from its immediate grasp by every moral person. Every child understands this standard and every loving parent recalls it for his children when they stray from it.

If you have to lie about something, it is wrong.
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[G_j]

1. kick

[seemslikeadream]

2. "We had to destroy the village in order to save it,"

And the American people lied to themselves about the War. As long as the boys fighting it were blacks and Latinos and members of the underclass, everything was fine. The Defense contracts were fat and everybody was eating high on the hog.


As in the fable, it was the children, the college students, who first told us that the Emperor had no clothes. And for a while, our first impulse was to shoot the messenger--literally. Finally, however, the gap between what we wanted to believe and what we could no longer deny simply grew too large.

By the late 1960s, the fabric of lies that had sustained the War started to unravel. The Tet offensive in early 1968 demolished the upbeat fiction that we were winning the War. Stories of massacres like My Lai began to leak out. Idiocies like, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," crept into the public lexicon.

Live news footage showed the horrors of saturation bombing, defoliation, and napalm. Supposedly serious voices spoke supposedly seriously about, "bombing them back into the stone age." News anchors began intoning a nightly body count of American lives lost. And with the student deferment abolished, middle class suburban white boys began coming home in body bags.

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