The truth about the Vietnam War. This is not for the faint of heart: Few Americans born after the Tet Offensive know even the barest facts about the Vietnam War. I aim this generalization not at the oft-underrated Joe Sixpack but at graduates of our finest universities. I remember getting coffee with an old friend, then fresh out of Yale, right after she had backpacked through Vietnam. Whenever she mentioned the war she referred to the former South Vietnam as “the democratic side.” It was immediately clear that she, like virtually everyone else of her and my generation, had never heard of the Geneva Accords of 1954 to guarantee free elections in South Vietnam, elections scuttled after the CIA predicted that Ho Chi Minh would win. My friend had had no sense that the U.S. invaded (a word rarely used, but what else can you call sending 500,000 troops to a foreign nation?) South Vietnam to prop up an authoritarian government with little popular legitimacy. We launched a ruthless pacification campaign; it failed—but not before Washington spread the war into Laos and Cambodia and ultimately killed some two million civilians. This was the war, and there was no “democratic side.” By contrast, my interlocutor—an intelligent and cultured person—did show a sure command of the political history of Tibet, which had been the next stop on her Asian tour. From Generation X on down, there is a gaping lack of knowledge about the most foolish and brutal of our postwar wars. (Yes, worse than Iraq.) But this is not a vacant lot ready for intellectual development. Instead this block of nescience is something dense, opaque, and fenced off with barbed wire. Why is there so much socially reinforced ignorance about our bloodiest war since World War II? One reason is that uttering any less-than-flattering account of the war is likely to make one feel, even in 2013, like a bit of a traitor. By airing unpleasant facts about the war am I smearing my Uncle G—, an avid gardener, terrific father, husband, and all-around great guy who was an Army Ranger in Laos? Am I blood-libeling my brother’s beloved high-school English teacher who served in the Special Forces advising and fighting with the Khmer Khrom ethnic minority and wrote a memoir about it? I don’t doubt this man’s courage any more than I believe that our war in Southeast Asia can be recast as a “Lost Crusade”—his book’s title—to protect Vietnam’s ethnic minorities. Nobody wants to be called out for “spitting on the troops.” Not that historians have found a single instance of people actually expectorating on returning Vietnam soldiers. That this piece of revanchist folklore has taken such firm root shows how hypersensitive America remains to any hint that the war was anything less than noble. Even after four decades, you don’t make friends by implying that the personal sacrifice of members of your community was for nothing. Or worse than nothing. Because the main reason we don’t want to know about Vietnam is that it gave so much to not want to know about. Yes, Vietnam was a military defeat that killed some 58,000 American soldiers and left 75,000 severely disabled—reason enough, for many, to stuff it down the memory hole. But as scholar and journalist Nick Turse shows in a new book that is scrupulously documented, what makes the memory of this war so worthy of repression is that its defining feature was mass atrocities against civilians. Rape; the massacres of women, children, and the elderly; military vehicles running over civilians for sport; “Zippo raids” that burned down villages; indiscriminate shelling and aerial bombardment; despoliation of crops and drinking water; routinized torture—this was the unredeemable essence of our Vietnam War, not American teenagers coming of age and bonding against a bamboo backdrop, not “good intentions” in Washington leading us into a “quagmire.” theamericanconservative/articles/vietnam-a-war-on-civilians/
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 13:46:26 +0000
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