I remember the iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked, holding out her arms and screaming after being caught in a South Vietnamese napalm attack. This was on June 8, 1972, and I was 10.
I was 13 when Saigon fell in April of 1975. I remember the photo of CIA employees – not US embassy employees, as people originally thought – being evacuated from a rooftop by helicopter.
I remember learning about the Gulf of Tonkin (the non-attack that President Johnson used to mislead the American people and gain support for the war) and the Tet Offensive (a widespread, coordinated and shocking attack on US and South Vietnamese forces that, while ultimately foiled, was somewhat of a political victory for the North Vietnamese) and the Mai Lai massacre (the mass murder on March 16, 1968 of between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians – mostly women, children and babies, and old people – by the US Army).
I remember how horrified I felt when I first learned that we sprayed 20 million gallons of poisonous Agent Orange over six million acres in Southeast Asia between 1961 and 1967. The U.S. Veterans Administration has listed prostate cancer, respiratory cancers, multiple myeloma, diabetes, soft tissue sarcoma, spina bifida and other severe ailments in children of veterans exposed to Agent Orange. As of 2006, the Vietnamese government estimates there are over four million victims of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam.
I remember the aftereffects of Vietnam: how soldiers came home suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and couldn’t find work or places to live. Rather than being cheered and thanked and welcomed home, they were booed and shunned and spat upon. People screamed, “Baby killer!” and demonized and heckled them. Barack Obama has called the treatment of returning Vietnam veterans “a national disgrace.”
And I remember visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC sometime in the 1980s and being moved to tears by all the names. Over nine million people served in Vietnam and more than 58,000 lost their lives or are missing in action. (Michigan sent more than 400,000 to Vietnam, and my state lost 2,654 men.)
Maybe someone else remembers what was accomplished in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975 because I don’t.
Rather than learning from history, politicians keep repeating it. St. Ronnie of Reagan’s 1983 invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada was hilariously nicknamed “Operation Urgent Fury.” The Persian Gulf War, commonly known as “Operation Desert Storm,” took place in 1990 and 1991. We waged war in Somalia from 1992 to 1995. “Operation Enduring Freedom” began in 2001 with the bombing of Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan. The Iraq war, known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” officially took place from 2003 to 2010, although 50,000 US troops are still there as “advisors.” US “anti-terrorism activities” (whatever that means) were underway in Georgia, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Eritrea in 2004. And let’s not forget our recent foray into Libyan airspace, known as “Operation Odyssey Dawn.”
It’s never too late to learn from our mistakes. Or is it?
My friend Randall Glumm told me that Congress just passed a bill designating March 30, 2011 as “Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day.” Better thirty-six years late than never, huh?
Sources: Michigan Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, CBS News, New York Daily News
As a guy who joined the Army Reserve to avoid Vietnam, but who lost several friends there, including one who came home laughing about machine-gunning children, I now feel sadness, but no shame or remorse, when I see guys my age begging in the rain at entrance ramps. I feel sadness and I feel grateful that I avoided their fate.
ReplyDeleteI tried to stop the war, wrote letters, marched, was gassed, handcuffed, arrested and jailed. To no avail, of course. I was schizophrenic because I was in the military at the time. (Proudly, after 6 years I managed to leave at the same rank I had after basic training.)
After the war I worked for years in two VA hospitals. Most of those patients were WWII and Korea vets. I didn't work in psych so I dind't seem many Vietnam vets.
I'm still angry about that mess. I confess that I pay little more than lip service (small donations to local charities) these days. The Greeks knew that old men send the young to war and ever shall it be that way it seems.
No, pat, NOT better late than never. You had to be one of us to appreciate just HOW bad it was. We were shunned by the VFW and American Legion. We couldn't walk with our heads held high, wearing our uniforms as others had been able to do before us. It was not the welcome home any of us expected.
ReplyDeleteI came back in 1973 after having a nervous breakdown and receiving an honorable discharge for medical reasons. I never actually made it to Nam because of that, yet, I was awaded the same medal that anyone who signs up during war time gets, the National Medal of Defense. I was and am STILL proud to have it. And NOW they want to "make it up to us"? Fine, give me the VA disability that I deserve for a service connected disability (even though there was a psychiatric report stating that the condition was aggravated by service). Look around at any VA facility and you can pick out almost EVERY Viet Nam vet. They're easy to spot. They're the ones that look like they never got off the dope they started using there to make it all go away. And before anyone says anything about previous war veterans, some came home with alcohol problems, others with heroin habits so no one was a choir boy. At the very least they came home with nicotine addiction.
Better late than never? How many veterans committed suicide because they were denied proper medical and emotional care? Yes, even the VA denied they were war heroes because Nam was never a "declared" war. It wasn't until MUCH later on (and I mean the 80's) that we were finally allowed to be cared for by the VA.
Maybe the president calls it a national disgrace, but it's beyond that. It's the same as the SHAME of looking around the White House and seeing hundreds of homeless people, many of them Viet Nam vets, huddled around fire filled barrels to keep warm. Where is the help for them? What does the government plan on doing to help them? You're certainly right on the main point. This country does NOT learn from its mistakes!
My thought are with you in your pain--getting help in the US for mental illness is often a too difficult task, Vietnam Vet or not. We seem to be unable to accept that illness is illness--often treatable, sometimes fatal. It doesn't matter where the illness lies.
ReplyDeleteWe have improved; slowly, incrementally, but we are moving in the right direction (small succor to the Vets huddles around fire barrels, I know). We aren't ignoring mental disabilities the way we did in the Vietnam era. We learned about the painful realities of PTSD from you men, we are trying to come to terms with trauma and closed head injuries in this war. The war itself is a seperate issue: the absolute is that we must take care of the men and women who fight for us. We have to fight for you.
I think, as belated and 'too little too late' as this day may be, it has opened the eyes of some folks to Veterans on-going needs. Vets need to keep talking--to better their own situation, and those of their comrades in arms who are always at the ready and too often forgotten when their service is over.
Thank you for what you did, for what you are doing now, and for keeping faith with your country, in spite of our occasional blind callousness.
Patrick, thank you and thank you to all who commented. For one who is becoming gabby in old age I can't find many words but thank you.
ReplyDeleterg - tried to post my name but couldn't figure out how; gabby and goofy
Wow, just wow! I can't even fathom this. My reality is so different and by no means do I mean to degrade this topic. My mouth is gapping from how we as humans treat one another.
ReplyDelete