Why We Old Soldiers Won’t Just Fade Away?
August 30, 2002
It’s been 27 years since the last American was airlifted off the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. A generation of Americans has come of age with no firsthand sense of what the Vietnam War was about or what it meant to us here at home. They need to know more about this. They need to know the truth. They need to hear it from those who fought the war, because no one knows it better.
After I returned from Vietnam, it took me 17 years to start my book, HEROES or Something, and another 17 to finish it. I stuck it out to help set the record straight. I’m not alone. I’m part of a movement to record the truth about our experiences in Vietnam.
We Were Soldiers Once and Young and Stolen Valor are disparate but important high-profile, non-fiction examples of this movement. Just as important are numerous others.
An article about HEROES or Something released nationally by Gannett News Service, put a finger on the pulse of this movement. It found that LaSalle University has collected some 11,000 personal expressions of soldiers’ Vietnam War experiences.
The largest of its kind, the LaSalle collection hosts some 1200 novels and short stories, and 380 diaries, memoirs and autobiographies. They continue to accumulate there at a rate of 10 to 15 per month. John Baky, director of the campus library at LaSalle and a Vietnam veteran, noted the volume of fiction written about the Vietnam War exceeds that about the Civil War three-fold.
During the past 27 years, Americans, once so divided about Vietnam, have been moving towards consensus about the war there. Although Americans certainly are of no single mind as to what went wrong, we seem to agree our policy was flawed. Those of us who lived through those contentious years have difficulty believing even that minimal consensus has emerged.
Those who have come of age since Vietnam have similar difficulty believing that in 1965, when the American troop build-up took off, there existed a different consensus, that America’s intervention in Vietnam was a right and necessary bulwark in our 20-year, cold-war policy to contain global communist expansion. This is an important point, because it bears directly on the grand canard of the Vietnam War: That the Americans who fought the war were no better than US policy itself.
The rightness and necessity of US intervention in Vietnam are what the public clamor later was about. The key fact is that, correctly or incorrectly, America saw this intervention before 1967 as a justifiable defense of freedom, a cause to which millions of young Americans pledged their hearts and souls.
To deny this key fact is more than mistaken, it is pernicious:
- If we condemn our soldiers for the missions we assigned them, we do grave injustice to those who already have sacrificed so much on our behalf. Visit any VA hospital for additional information on this point.
- If we think for a minute that we lost Vietnam because we sent a bunch of losers there, we miss entirely all the important and hard-won lessons of that time. We must right our collective sense of national history for it to serve us as a reliable guide to the future.
- If we fail to distinguish our soldiers from their missions, in times like these when the soldiers are justly celebrated, the missions themselves may elude the critical scrutiny that missions always merit. We owe it to today's soldiers, if not to ourselves, to insure that future missions abide the lessons of Vietnam.
I speak of a movement, not for it. Our views are myriad and diverse. We are bound simply by a common desire that our dear nation recognize the many truths we experienced in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War was one more in a long line of history's great tragedies. Over 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, and another 158,000 were seriously wounded. Over 5200 allied troops from South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand also died there. Vietnamese killed on both sides are estimated to include 1,109,000 military, and another 415,000 civilians. Estimates of Vietnamese wounded are 499,000 military and 935,000 civilians.
The political leaders of all parties to the Vietnam War will forever bear the burden of history for the suffering all sides shared. American losses will have been in vain only if we ignore the lessons bought and paid for by all too many of those noble hearts and souls.
Brad Kennedy is the author of BETRAYAL: Will Stone in Vietnam. Austin, TX: Plain View Press, 2008.