Eric Paul Nolte
Today I saw a short video that was produced as a "thank you" to American veterans who were in the military to defend our country, all of whom were vulnerable to being put in harm's way, even if we were not actually at war during the years of our service. As many National Guardsmen discovered at the start of the Gulf War, they could be activated at any time and sent overseas to fight. The little film caused me to well up with emotion. We've fought so many pointless wars! In my opinion, almost all wars are insanely pointless. But not all of them.
During the Vietnam War, I was on active duty in the Army. I could have been deployed to Vietnam, but I had the good fortune to be sent to Germany instead where, in my spare time, I spent most of my pay on flying lessons, and thereby put myself on a good track to become an airline pilot while acquiring a taste for good German beer.
When the Vietnam War began for the US in the mid-1960s, I was a barely pubescent boy in junior high school. I remember that everybody thought that surely the war would be over long before those of my age became eligible either to join or be drafted into the military.
There were anti-war slogans in the air. Make love, not war. Hell no, we won't go! Bring 'em home!
My generation, or, more correctly, those in my circle of politically and religiously liberal youth were agreed on our opposition to the war, in general, and to the draft in particular because, we argued, it was the draft that made it possible for our government to engage in this hare-brained, hopeless, foreign military adventure that was being carried out with no plan actually to fight the war in a way that stood any chance of achieving anything like victory. In my circles, we thought the war was a cynical pose on the part of our government to give the impression that we could actually stop the spread of communism while refusing to do what it would take to "win" the war. Meanwhile, the war became a bloody meat grinder of the flesh of our young men (and more than a few women as well.)
This week, I came across some more of the facts of the matter.
Yes, we engaged in a long war that was often conducted with futile strategy and tactics.
But at the end of the day, as pointed out by Bruce Hershensohn, senior fellow at Pepperdine University, we get to the truth about the war we allegedly lost:
When the North Vietnamese left the Paris Peace talks in 1972, the US announced that in December 1972 we would begin serious bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the capital and major port cities of North Vietnam.
We did bomb them, and within a month, the North Vietnamese, militarily devastated, came back to the negotiations in Paris and a peace accord was signed by the USA, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong.
As of January 1973, we had won a decisive victory in the Vietnam War.
The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong agreed by their signatures that their defeat had been decisive.
Therefore, the US celebrated on January 27, 1973, our Victory in Vietnam Day.
South Vietnam was to be left protected from assault by the North and the Viet Cong.
This peace accord entailed an agreement in which the US pledged to replace any military hardware that South Vietnam might require in its defense against aggression from the North.
Let me restate this more simply:
Our incontestable victory in Vietnam was dependent upon our promise to back up the South Vietnamese with replacement hardware, should this be required in the face of attack from their enemies.
But then a year later Richard Nixon was disgraced by the Watergate fiasco and was forced out of office.
In the elections that followed in 1974, the US Congress was decisively taken over by the Democrats.
Despite the impassioned pleas of Republican President Gerald Ford and others, the Democrats then voted to end all funding for our aid to South Vietnam.
The North Vietnamese then immediately invaded the South. When they advanced without opposition that could replenish the South's equipment, North Vietnamese forces shortly took over the whole country. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City and the whole country fell under the rule of the communist dictatorship from the north.
The whole affair of American involvement in Vietnam has proven to be a searing, intellectually and morally vertigo-inspiring episode, like no other in our history.
It might not have needed to be so terrible if the Democrats had not abandoned our former Vietnamese allies.
Our abandonment of South Vietnam resulted in the "re-education" camps in which more than a million South Vietnamese were interned, and where a quarter-million of them died by summary execution, disease, and starvation.
The Boat People were another two million people who fled the country for fear of their lives, and among them, another quarter million died from weather, accidents, and at the hands of pirates.
Reasonable people can argue over whether we should ever have been in Vietnam in the first place.
But no one of goodwill can reasonably argue that our outright reneging on our promise of protection to the South Vietnamese people was a terrible betrayal that resulted in at least another half million deaths and the destruction of the lives and prospects of countless millions more.
Ironically, in a move not unlike the transformation of the communist dictatorship of China, Vietnam has since evolved into much more of a market economy than almost anyone might have imagined possible, and it is now engaged in lively trade with the United States and much of the rest of the world.
As an interesting footnote, I find it fascinating that Jane Fonda, the infamous "Hanoi Jane," has come forward with a heartfelt apology for her behavior during her two-week visit to North Vietnam at the height of the war. Jane Fonda was accused of treasonously giving our enemies a propaganda bonanza because of her being exploited in such photographs as the one of her sitting, smiling, on an anti-aircraft gun used for shooting down American airplanes.
The Democratic party, vastly more culpable here than Jane Fonda, given its murderous abandonment of our allies in South Vietnam, should long ago have come forward to apologize for their despicable, pragmatic action. Hmm. Actually, it would be fitting if some of them were in jail for this kind of horrible behavior.
The death toll here, obviously caused by the Democratic party's betrayal of South Vietnam, is five times larger than the deaths caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima or by the fire-bombing that resulted in the destruction of the German city of Dresden.
E P N
2018.1111, Armistice Day, commemorating the end of the First World War, the War to End All Wars,
and now renamed Veteran's Day.
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