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;void(0)) WAR (VIETNAM) . . see: "LYNDON JOHNSON" see "WAR & PEACE" for related links After the meeting, Eisenhower walked to the Oval Office with Hagerty. The President told his press secretary to prime a reporter to ask him at the next news conference about the Geneva Conference. Eisenhower would then try to emphasize "that all is not lost if Dien Bien Phu falls, which probably it will." Eisenhower then wrote a long, thoughtful letter to [General Alfred] Gruenther, [the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe] whom he depended on as his most reliable link to the French leadership. After repeating again that unilateral American intervention was out of the question ("it would lay us open to the charge of imperialism and colonialism or at the very least of objectionable paternalism"), Eisenhower complained that "ever since 1945 France has been unable to decide whether she most fears Russia or Germany. As a result, her policies in Europe have been nothing but confusion; starts and stops; advances and retreats!" Eisenhower said of Dien Bien Phu, "This spectacle has been saddening indeed. It seems incredible that a nation which had only the help of a tiny British Army when it turned back the German flood in 1914 and withstood the gigantic 1916 attacks at Verdun could now be reduced to the point where it cannot produce a few hundred technicians to keep planes flying properly in Indochina." Eisenhower thought the French problem was one of leadership and spirit. "The only hope is to produce a new and inspirational leader and I do not mean one that is 6 feet 5 and who considers himself to be, by some miraculous biological and transmigrative process, the offspring of Clemenceau and Jeanne d'Arc." --Stephen Ambrose (19362002) American historian and author. _Eisenhower_ vol. II, _The President_, 1984 quoted in _Major Problems in the History of the Vietnam War: Documents and Essays_ edited by Robert J. McMahon. - The war effort was fatally wounded in June when the New York Times and Washington Post began publishing the secret history of the war, the Pentagon Papers. In 1967 Secretary of Defense McNamara had put together a team of 40 researchers to examine how the United States had become involved in the war in the first place; that in itself was an incredible admission while soldiers were giving their lives for their country. One of the researchers, Daniel Ellsberg, copied the documents and delivered them to the newspapers, which began publishing them. Alarmed, Nixon's Justice Department issued a restraining order to block publication, citing "national interest." The Times took the issue to the Supreme Court, arguing the government had failed to prove its case. The court agreed, six to three, and allowed publication. The secret history was "deeply disturbing" said Newsweek, for it exposed the delusions and deceptions of previous leaders, especially in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The documents revealed a war kept secret from Americans covert military operations against North Vietnam, bombing missions in Laos, while such actions were being denied by the United States. Memoranda contradicted official statements: JFK knew of and approved the plot that led to the coup d'etat against Diem in 1963; the next year the CIA reported it did not believe the domino theory was relevant to Asia; intelligence experts in Vietnam had informed LBJ then that the insurgency against the Saigon regime was primarily indigenous instead of being directed from Hanoi; the administration knew that air strikes did not soften but had hardened the attitude of the enemy; the various Saigon regimes were not free and democratic but corrupt and controlled by Washington. The Papers exposed how Johnson did not tell legislators or the people the full details of the attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, how in 1965 he wanted to avoid publicity about his expansion of American involvement. It was clear as activists had said all along elected officials had lied about the war. In the hearts and minds of most Americans, the Vietnam war ended during the first half of 1971. The deception and lies disclosed in the Pentagon Papers, the revelations about the U.S. military, ARVN's failure in Laos, the nature of the Thieu government in Saigon all revealed the dark underside of the war and ended lingering doubts: the effort was no longer worth the price. --Terry H. Anderson American professor of history and author. _The Sixties_ [2004], "The Climax and Demise of the Sixties, 1970-1973" - The crowd was addressed by a small man with a wispy goatee wearing a high-collared khaki jacket and white rubber sandals. The fifty- six-year-old revolutionary had lived in exile most of his life under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc Nguyen the Patriot. While living in France, the Soviet Union, and China, Quoc had immersed himself in Marxist and Leninist theory and was a principal founder of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1929. A revolutionary nationalist and committed Communist, he viewed both causes as inseparable. Yet he was also a shrewd pragmatist willing to entertain the support of any great power that might aid his most cherished goal of Vietnamese independence. At the beginning of World War II, to protect his identity, Quoc changed his alias to Ho Chi Minh Ho the Bringer of Light. In 1945, Ho was optimistic about American help. As he stepped to the podium in Ba Dinh Square his first words were these: "All men are created equal. The Creator has given us certain inviolable rights: the right to life, the right to be free, and the right to achieve happiness." Then he paused and said, "Fellow countrymen, can you hear me clearly?" "YES!" they roared back. "These immortal words were taken from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America." At one point two American P-38 Lightnings swooped over the crowd. It was probably a random flyby, but the crowd took it as a dramatic signal of American support. The wartime help of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency), along with President Roosevelt's public endorsements of self-determination for all nations, fueled Vietnamese hopes that the United States would oppose any French effort to reconquer Indochina. In declaring their Vietnamese independence, Ho Chi Minh announced the formation of a new state, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), and sought international recognition. But he had not counted on the coming of a new war, the Cold War. The new American president, Harry Truman, was determined to build a strong European alliance against the Soviet Union. To secure French support in that coalition, he was prepared to help them regain their Indochinese colony. --Christian G. Appy _Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides_ [2003], Part 2, "History Is Not Made With Ifs" - (comparing the war in Iraq with Vietnam)... Another Vietnam? by Robert L. Bartley (1937-2003) American journalist and editor of the Wall Street Journal. Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. This from the WSJ [3 November 2003] [. . . ] Well, first of all, the Tet offensive was a militarily significant effort, not four truck bombs. After erosion of their position during 1967, the Communists threw all of their South Vietnam guerrilla forces into attacks in more than 100 cities across the length and breadth of the country. Most spectacularly, since it came before the eyes of the Saigon press corps, a 19-man sapper squad penetrated the U.S. Embassy compound. They failed to enter the chancery building, despite early reports, and the last of them was killed or repulsed after a six-hour battle. General William Westmoreland appeared in the shattered compound to proclaim a great victory. His televised appearance came against a backdrop of destruction throughout the country, and the American elite decided to believe not the general but their own eyes. A widely cited Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed that "the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed, it may be falling apart beneath our feet." Walter Cronkite turned against the war, editorializing on the need for negotiation. With this home-front reaction, Tet was the turning- point in the war, the anvil of Communist victory and American defeat. Yet in fact, Westmoreland was right, subsequent analysts have uniformly concluded. The Communist offensive was decisively repulsed. There was no general uprising in favor of the North. The South Vietnamese army did not buckle, though operating at 50% strength because of imprudent holiday leaves. The indigenous Viet Cong were destroyed, leaving the rest of the war to be conducted by troops recruited in the North. "To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other in a major crisis abroad cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism," Peter Braestrup wrote in his book "Big Story." He was Washington Post Saigon bureau chief during Tet, and his critique didn't provoke serious controversy even within the press corps. Tet was a military victory turned into a psychological defeat on the home front. Shall we do it again in Iraq? Tet represents another, less widely understood, turning point in the Vietnam War. Soon after the offensive, Gen. Westmoreland was replaced as the U.S. commander by Creighton W. Abrams, with a notable change in U.S. strategy and tactics. The contrast of the two eras is pregnant with lessons for the far smaller guerrilla war in Iraq. "More troops" was Gen. Westmoreland's first request from Vietnam, and also his last one. He sought to take the battle to the enemy, with "search and destroy" missions intended to find the major enemy units hiding in the jungle hills. It was a war of attrition, using superior U.S. firepower to destroy the enemy's forces faster than he could replace them. But the scale of the Tet assaults was scarcely encouraging. Under Gen. Abrams, "search and destroy" was replaced by "clear and hold." This is recorded in "A Better War," by Lewis Sorley, who notes that most of the histories of Vietnam pretty much skip the post-1968 period. Abrams put emphasis not on attrition but on the security of the local population, and the training of the South Vietnamese who would continue the fighting as Americans left. The success of these programs was tested by the Easter Offensive of 1972. Some 200,000 North Vietnamese troops attacked on three fronts. U.S. ground troop withdrawals continued as scheduled, but President Nixon ordered heavy air and naval retaliation, including the mining of North Vietnamese ports. With this air support, the South Vietnamese army repelled the invasion. The North Vietnamese lost half of their attacking force and half of their tanks and artillery. The legendary Vo Nguyen Giap was quietly removed from command of the Northern armies. Three years later the North had recovered sufficient strength to repeat the offensive. But by then the Paris peace accords had been signed, with U.S. prisoners returned at the cost of allowing Hanoi to infiltrate military units in the south. With Watergate, Congress had passed the Case-Church Amendment forbidding military involvement in Southeast Asia. Sen. Edward Kennedy passed a $266 million cut in supplemental spending for Vietnam, and funds were slashed for the coming year. Counter-insurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson remarked, "perhaps the major lesson of the Vietnam War is: do not rely on the United States as an ally." This time the South Vietnamese got no assistance from the U.S. and fell before an assault by 20 tank-led divisions. Some million refugees took to the seas as "the boat people." After the loss of Iran and some trying times in Europe, the U.S. elected Ronald Reagan, who revived the American military and faced the Communists down at Reykjavik. The Communist empire fell after all, and Vietnam goes down as a lost battle in a successful campaign. Yet something more than a lost battle, a self-inflicted wound arising from an essentially dishonorable strain of American neurosis. Yes, by all means, don't do it again in Iraq. As Gov. Dean says, the first step is to tell the truth, starting with the truth of what happened in Vietnam. - God bless America land we enjoy no discussions with the Russians 'til they stop sending arms to Hanoi. --Irving Berlin (18881989) American songwriter. Parody of his "God Bless America" written for his friend Yip Harburg in 1969. Only years later did the news media in retrospective accounts of Tet say what General Westmoreland claimed, historians soon ascertained, and communist veterans of the battle later bitterly conceded: Tet, despite its drama and political success in Washington, was a grave military setback for Hanoi, decimating the Vietcong guerrillas who were suddenly exposed to overwhelming allied firepower. --Peter Braestrup "The News Media and the War in Vietnam Myths and Realities" - We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war, and that she would struggle along with us. --Bui Tin, Colonel, People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantages when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for re-election. The second and third waves in May and September were, in retrospect, mistakes. Our forces in the South were nearly wiped out by all the fighting in 1968. It took us until 1971 to re-establish our presence, but we had to use North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. If the American forces had not begun to withdraw under Nixon in 1969, they could have punished us severely. We suffered badly in 1969 and 1970 as it was. --Bui Tin, Colonel, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam's army, received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. Interview of Bui Tin conducted by Stephen Young "How North Vietnam Won the War," Wall Street Journal, August 3, 1995. - Whether history will judge this war to be different or not, we cannot say. But this we can say with certainty: a government and a society that silences those who dissent is one that has lost its way. This we can say: that what is essential in a free society is that there should be an atmosphere where those who wish to dissent and even to demonstrate can do so without fear of recrimination or vilification. --Henry Steele Commager (19021998) American historian. _Freedom and Order_ [1966] - Movie stars have a tremendous impact. We forget that a roll of celluloid film travels all over the world, seen by many millions of people. People make heroes out of the stars they see on the screen, and heroes have power. Politicians are eager to line up movie stars like hunks of meat. And there's a great danger of movie stars abusing this power themselves. Every day, stars turn down requests for interviews, photo layouts. If a star wants to keep punching ideas, he has an unfair advantage, because he has access to the media, much more than politicians. I think Jane Fonda is guilty of abusing this power. During the Vietnam War, she called me and asked for my support for her trip to Hanoi. I was never in favor of the Vietnam War. I didn't want my sons Michael and Joel dying for a corrupt regime. But I said to Jane, "What are you trying to do? Negotiate a separate peace with North Vietnam?" She was adamant. I suggested she fight our government's point of view through her congressman, senator, or a personal appeal through the press. "A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring." A few weeks later, I saw a picture of Jane Fonda in Hanoi, sitting on an antiaircraft gun that had probably shot down some of our planes. --Kirk Douglas [Issur Danielovitch] (1916 ) American film actor and producer. _The Ragman's Son_ [1988], Ch. 28 - You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is. . . that it will go over very quickly. --Dwight D. Eisenhower (18901969), American Army General, supreme Allied commander WWII, NATO commander, American President [19531961]. On the strategic importance of Indochina, in a press conference [7 April 1954]. Paul Galanti learned of Kerry's [1971] speech while held captive inside North Vietnam's infamous 'Hanoi Hilton' prison. The Navy pilot had been shot down in 1966 and spent nearly seven years as a prisoner of war... During torture sessions, he said, his captors cited the antiwar speeches as 'an example of why we should cross over to [their] side' ...The Viet Cong didn't think they had to win the war on the battlefield,' Galanti said, 'because thanks to these protestors they were going to win it on the streets of San Francisco and Washington.' --Paul Galanti _Los Angeles Times_ [17 February 2004] - The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying out. Nothing will be able to withstand world pressure for independence. They may stay for a while; but they will have to go because the white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never leave. As for me, I prefer to smell French shit for five years, rather than Chinese shit for the rest of my life. --Ho Chi Minh (18901969) Founder of the Indochina Communist Party [1930] and president [19451969] of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). [March 1946], U.S. Department of Defense _The Pentagon Papers_ v. 1 [1971] pp.18-19. If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges by night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death. --Ho Chi Minh (18901969) Founder of the Indochina Communist Party [1930] and president [19451969] of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). In Jean Lacouture _Ho Chi Minh_ [1968] p. 138. - I feel like a hitchhiker on a Texas highway in the middle of a hailstorm; I can't run, I can't hide, and I can't make it go away. --Lyndon B. Johnson (19081973) American Democratic statesman, President [19631969]. (Referring to the Vietnam War.) We still seek no wider war. --Lyndon B. Johnson (19081973) American Democratic statesman, President [19631969]. In a speech following the Gulf of Tonkin incident [4 August 1964]. We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves. --Lyndon B. Johnson (19081973) American Democratic statesman, President [19631969]. Remark at Akron University, Akron, Ohio [21 October 1964]. Our objective in South Vietnam has never been the annihilation of the enemy. It has been to bring about a recognition in Hanoi that its objective taking over the South by force could not be achieved. --Lyndon B. Johnson (19081973) American Democratic statesman, President [19631969]. Address to the nation [31 March 1968]. - Two of the strongest advocates of US involvement were the Washington Post and the New York Times. The Post wrote, April 7, 1961, 'American prestige is very much involved in the effort to protect the Vietnamese people from Communist absorption.' The New York Times argued, March I2, 1963, that 'The cost [of saving Vietnam] is large, but the cost of Southeast Asia coming under the domination of Russia and Communist China would be still larger.' On May 21, 1964 the Times urged: 'If we demonstrate that we will make whatever military and political effort [denying victory to Communism] requires, the Communists sooner or later will also recognize reality.' The Post insisted, June I, 1964, that America continue to show in Vietnam that 'persistence in aggression is fruitless and possibly deadly.' But the Times deserted Johnson early in 1966, the Post in summer 1967. About the same time the TV networks became neutral, then increasingly hostile. --Paul Johnson (1928 ) British historian. _A History of the American People_ [1997] p. 883 - We now have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place. --John Fitzgerald Kennedy (19171963) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [19611963]. Remark made to New York Times columnist James Reston following the Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting in Vienna [June 1961]. We can protect these countries by our guarantee against outright military invasion. We can assist them through economic assistance to improve the life of their people. We can assist them through defense support in strengthening their armed forces against intenal guerilla activity. But, in the final analysis. . . they have to organize the political and social life of the country in such a way that they maintain the support of their people. There is a limit beyond which our efforts cannot go. --John Fitzgerald Kennedy (19171963) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [19611963]. Press conference [5 May 1961]. There is another type of warfare new in its intensity, ancient in its origin war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of by aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what have been strangely called 'wars of liberation', to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom they have finally achieved. --John Fitzgerald Kennedy (19171963) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [19611963]. [6 June 1962]; in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 886. Cohan & Major note: Kennedy was seeking to move U.S. strategy away from absolute reliance on the nuclear deterrent and to strengthen America's capacity to make a conventional response to a conventional threat. The classic instance of such a threat appeared to be the continuing bid by communist North Vietnam to incorporate South Vietnam. Thus began the counter-insurgency program in Vietnam, first with a limited number of U.S. military advisers and ultimately with a full-scale commitment to war after Kennedy's death in Nov. 1963. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam. --John Fitzgerald Kennedy (19171963) American Democratic statesman, President of the U.S. [19611963]. Press conference [3 September 1963]. - If you want to, go ahead and fight in the jungles of Vietnam. The French fought there for seven years and still had to quit in the end. Perhaps the Americans will be able to stick it out for a little longer, but eventually they will have to quit too. --Nikita Khrushchev (18941971) Soviet statesman, Premier [19581964]. To Dean Rusk in 1961, in Eric Hobsbawm _The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991_ [2005 edn.] p. 222. Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war. --Jeane Kirkpatrick (19262006) American political scientist, professor, author, and the first woman to serve as the American Ambassador to the United Nations. _Dictatorship and Double Standards_ [1979] My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. --Curtis LeMay (19061990) American Air Force officer. _Mission with LeMay: My Story_ [1965] p.565. The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race. --Walter Lippmann (18891974) American journalist. On U.S. foreign policy in Indochina, in his column in the _New York Herald Tribune_ [2 February 1965]. - I don't object to its being called 'McNamara's War' . . . It is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it. --Robert S. McNamara (1916 ) American Democratic politician. In "New York Times" [25 April 1964]. We . . . acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We were wrong. We were terribly wrong. --Robert S. McNamara (1916 ) American Democratic politician. Speaking in Washington, just before the twentieth anniversary of the American withdrawal from Vietnam [April 1995]. - I remember with shame how often I failed to correct those who said I was heroic and prophetic in leading anti-war demonstrations and going to jail. But we were not heroes, never mind prophets. It did not take much courage to protest the Vietnam War. We said that nothing could be worse than the war itself. We were wrong. By any honest measure of injustice and suffering, what followed the river of blood and mounds of corpses, the re-education camps and the killing fields of Cambodia, the thousands of boat people at the bottom of the China Sea or languishing in refugee hovels to this day was worse than what went before. Much worse. I do not say we were wrong to oppose the war. But my opposition was tempered by my brothers, both of whom served in Vietnam. And it was tempered by the young black men of Brooklyn (where I was engaged in the civil- rights movement) who fought there, some of whom died there, who I was not prepared to say had died in vain or in support of an evil cause. A large part of a generation thinks it earned its moral credentials in the anti-war movement but we were neither so right nor so righteous as we thought we were. --Richard John Neuhaus (1936 ) Canadian Catholic priest and writer. - Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that. --Richard Nixon (19131994) American Republican statesman, President [19691974]. Broadcast [3 November 1969]. If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world. --Richard Nixon (19131994) American Republican statesman, President [19691974]. [30 April 1970] - I've gone to Canada for readings and met people who left the country during the war. A lot of these guys are embarrassed by it. They're asking the question today that they asked back then did I do this because I was opposed to the war or because I didn't want to die? Was it cowardice or conscience? And that plagues all of us those who went to Vietnam and those who went to Canada and those who just got out of it through legal means. It plagues everyone because no one wants to die, even in a right war. But there were a lot of us in Vietnam who didn't want to be there and many of us didn't have the courage to do what the resisters did. It took a lot of courage to cross the border and leave behind your family and your hometown and your girlfriend. What looked like an act of cowardice to the Reagan- Dole Republicans took a lot more courage than I had. Even though I was opposed to the war, I still couldn't find the courage to walk away. When I was at Fort Lewis before going to Vietnam I planned to go to Vancouver. I came as close as you can come without actually doing it. I ended up going to Vietnam just to protect my reputation and sense of self-esteem, but the guys who went to Canada somehow were able to find the moral courage to make a choice they knew was gonna dog them the rest of their lives. --Tim O' Brien (Quoted in Christian G. Appy's _Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides_ [2003], Part 6, "Taps") - If you are able, save for them a place inside of you and save one backward glance when you are leaving for the places they can no longer go Be not ashamed to say you loved them, though you may or may not have always. Take what they have left and what they have taught you, with their dying and keep it with your own. And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind. --Major Michael Davis O'Donnell [1 January 1970] - Like many men of my generation, I had an opportunity to give war a chance, and I promptly chickened out. I went to my draft physical in 1970 with a doctor's letter about my history of drug abuse. The letter was four and a half pages long with three and a half pages devoted to listing the drugs I'd abused. I was shunted into the office of an Army psychiatrist who, at the end of a forty-five-minute interview with me, was pounding his desk and shouting, "You're f**ked up! You don't belong in the Army!" He was certainly right on the first count and possibly right on the second. Anyway, I didn't have to go. But that, of course, meant someone else had to go in my place. I would like to dedicate this book [Give War A Chance, 1992] to him. I hope you got back in one piece, fellow. I hope you were more use to your platoon mates than I would have been. I hope you're rich and happy now. And in 1971, when somebody punched me in the face for being a long-haired peace creep, I hope that was you. --P.J. O'Rourke (1947 ) American political satirist. The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny. Outside the context of a free society, who would want to die for the right to vote? Yet that is what the American soldiers were asked to die for not even for their own vote, but to secure that privilege for the South Vietnamese, who had no other rights and no knowledge of rights or freedom. --Ayn Rand (19051982) Russian-born American writer. In _The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought_ The Ayn Rand Library, Volume V, [1989], pt. 2, ch. 14. We should declare war on North Vietnam...we could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas. --Ronald Reagan (19112004) American President [19811989] and former Hollywood actor. [10 October 1965], quoted in Green and McColl _Reagan's Reign of Error _ [1987]. - 'Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world,' AP photojournalist Eddie Adams once wrote. A fitting quote for Adams, because his 1968 photograph of an officer shooting a handcuffed prisoner in the head at point-blank range not only earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, but also went a long way toward souring Americans' attitudes about the Vietnam War. For all the image's political impact, though, the situation wasn't as black-and-white as it's rendered. What Adams' photograph doesn't reveal is that the man being shot was the captain of a Vietcong "revenge squad" that had executed dozens of unarmed civilians earlier the same day. Regardless, it instantly became an icon of the war's savagery and made the official pulling the trigger General Nguyen Ngoc Loan its iconic villain. Sadly, the photograph's legacy would haunt Loan for the rest of his life. Following the war, he was reviled wherever he went. After an Australian VA hospital refused to treat him, he was transferred to the United States, where he was met with a massive (though unsuccessful) campaign to deport him. He eventually settled in Virginia and opened a restaurant but was forced to close it down as soon as his past caught up with him. Vandals scrawled 'We know who you are' on his walls, and business dried up. Adams felt so bad for Loan that he apologized for having taken the photo at all, admitting, 'The general killed the Vietcong; I killed the general with my camera.' --Ransom Riggs _Mental Floss Magazine_ [Jan/Feb 2007], "13 Photographs That Changed The World: #4: The Photograph That Ended A War But Ruined A Life" - Hindsight tempts those us who live in the last decade of the twentieth century to wonder if perhaps the United States, the one power in 1945 which counted, could not have come to the aid of the then more nationalist than communist Ho Chi Minh, seized the flood, told the French to stay home, and perhaps prevented much of the misery of the next three decades in Vietnam. --Dan Roberts _A Moment in Time_, Vol. 3 - Mornings I wake up early, way before the rest of the family. When we are on the road, which is most of the time now, my wife, Brenda, and I sleep in the master bedroom at the back of our Blue Bird bus. It's a big one, the kind entertainers travel in. About sunrise I awaken to find myself beside Brenda, everything much as it always is, but I always feel an element of pleasant surprise in her presence. After being severely wounded in Vietnam, one of the hardest things for me to accept was the depth of my lady's fidelity. I often pull her to me in those first few moments of the new day. The warmth of her presence, the form and features of her being and the reality of our surviving relationship comforts my soul. I linger beside her, grateful that the recurrent nightmare I used to have never came true. In that dream I would come home to find the place empty, the loneliness growing into desolation. I would awake from that nightmare nauseated with anxiety and pull Brenda to me, desperate for consolation, as I do this day. I linger for another moment because the worst of the day is about to come. Then I rise and pad into the bathroom. What I see in the mirror is the result of having been burned nearly to death. It isn't pretty. The right side of my face, my throat, and my chest down to the waistline have that streaked and melted look of skin grafts. My right eye is taped shut because the eyelid doesn't close naturally; so I have to tape it down at night, and frequently wipe it during the day, as it waters. I do not have a right ear. I am bald this from the burns and simple aging. I pray for strength in everything else, but I do not pray for any grace that would block out the knowledge that comes from this daily confrontation with my grotesque image. This is the one thing I require of myself. I take responsibility for putting on the cosmetic appliances that allow me to go about in the world without causing so much head turning; although, of course, there will always be far more of that than I would like. I untape my eye. I don my hair piece a single one now which is superior to the two complementary ones I used to wear. I put on the plastic ear with fingers that refuse to straighten. As I do, my thoughts often trace the borderline between the will to live and despair. Sometimes I feel as though the real me has died; that's how much I long to reject my image as it appears to the world. Yet I do not pray for strength at this moment precisely because, in a sense, the person I used to be has died. My crewmates in Vietnam thought I had died and divided up the spoils of what I had left on this earth. My commanding officer wrote a letter to Brenda and my parents telling them of my death. But I have come back from the dead. And a man who comes back from the dead has a story to tell. --Dave Roever (1946 ) _Welcome Home, Davey_ [1986], Ch. 1 The auditorium was nearly full so I decided that Brenda and I would sit in the top balcony where I could be out of sight and not endure the stares of people not used to seeing a man with one eye, one ear, and one nostril. We sat in the back row of the third balcony, but the place eventually filled completely and late arrivals ended up filling every chair around me. As they stared with curiosity, I wanted to just scream "If you only knew!" The speakers were spectacular. One by one they challenged, convicted, and inspired me. They gave me what I had come there for; wonderful reasons to live. When all the speakers had finished, closing remarks were provided by a man who would totally revolutionize my life. His name was Colonel Robinson Risner and he had been the highest ranking prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton. He shuffled out to center stage, hardly lifting his feet from the floor, fresh out of a rat-infested hell hole. Colonel Risner talked about being a prisoner of war. He spoke of his ordeals and those of other POWs the beatings, isolation, and mental games played on them by their captors. In vivid detail he described how they tied ropes around his shoulders, connected them behind his back, and inserted a stick which they twisted. I listened as he described the unspeakable pain of being torn asunder as his chest ripped open. I felt a tugging on my coat. I looked and realized I was standing. "Sit down, baby." Brenda pleaded. "I can't sit down. There's an officer on deck and, anyway, I don't sit in the presence of heros. I stand for them." She realized it was useless. I stood with tears running down my cheek. I looked at him with my one good eye and felt his pain. I declared, "I'm going down to meet this man." "Honey, you can't get through this crowd." "A man with one eye, one ear, and one nostril can get through any crowd." I took off down the stairwell to the congested crowd below. It was obvious that my coming arrival was heralded among the throng of people because they began to separate right down the middle. I felt like Moses parting the Red Sea. They departed hither and thither and I walked through. I could hear people murmuring, making little remarks about my appearance. I didn't care, I had one thing on my mind. I just wanted to meet Robbie and thank him. When I arrived at the platform I realized it was ten feet tall. I ran to both ends looking for stairs. I finally found a way up, but there was a large purple felt rope hanging across the stairs. With golden hooks on both ends and suspended on golden stands, this regal barrier had a small plaque on it which read, "None Shall Pass." I thought about it for a moment. My mind raced back in time. It had been a long trek from Vietnam where I was sent almost two years earlier. I ran up and down leech-infested rivers in a high- speed boat knowing that river boat gunners had a price tag on their heads. I had been shot at, then actually shot, blown to pieces by a hand grenade, and taken to an Army hospital. (For a Navy sailor, being a patient in an army hospital can be dangerous! Chances of survival were 50-50 if nothing had happened to me!) I survived 14 months in a hospital, 13 major operations, drove 1,200 miles, and worked my way through 15,000 people only to stand in front of this little barrier telling me, "None Shall Pass." I thought to myself, "One shall pass!" I picked up the rope, disengaged it from the stand, threw it to the floor, and marched up the stairs. I was instantly confronted by people wearing badges on their lapels saying "Staff." . . . I passed between them as they stood with their mouths open. I guess the sight was more than they could handled. I worked my way through another crowd clustered around the colonel. Suddenly he looked up and our eyes met. People stood back as we faced each other. Spontaneous silence filled the auditorium. He spoke first. "Vietnam?" he asked, pointing at my face. "Yes sir." "Son, I'm sorry." His words sent a hot flash through my skin. Embarrassed at his pity, I fired back, "Colonel, sir, I did not come here to get your pity." Then with my crippled hand, with only one finger that would extend, I snapped him a salute and said, "Sir, I have come to thank you. I've come to thank you for what you did for me in Vietnam and for the pain you have known in serving this great country." He reached over and took my hand into his. This seasoned veteran of Korea and Vietnam, this ace of a pilot, this man among men, had a tear in his eye. He tugged on my paralyzed fingers, looked in my good eye, and without blinking, asked, "Young man, when you've suffered for American, don't you love her so much more?" Even as he spoke the words, they were burning into my soul. And, there written on the table of my heart, they remain today. I said, "Yes, sir, colonel, I do love her so much more." It was then I realized why some people can burn an American flag, even in the guise of freedom of speech. (Exercising that "liberty" is only possible because of those who laid down their lives to preserve what that flag stands for, including the right to burn it.) It's easy to destroy what you have not burned for. It's easy to burn what you have not bled for, but when you've suffered for something, you love it so much more! --Dave Roever (1946- ) _Scarred_ [1995], "Preface" An air of bitterness lingered heavily for several days after the incident at Tu Tua. Reports of enemy movement seemed to pick up dramatically. In July 1969, after the Tet Offensive, the enemy made considerable advances. I've heard from the communists themselves that they really felt as if they had lost the war in 1968. I remember watching a BBC documentary while I was in England in which a North Vietnamese general said, "We lost the war in 1968 to the Americans. The Tet Offensive crushed us. But when we saw the antiwar demonstrations in America and the American youth in rebellion, we took new heart and began to fight again. The whole war turned in our favor." --Dave Roever (1946- ) _Welcome Home, Davey_ [1986], Ch. 11 - What gave great encouragement to Ho Chi Minh and his people were the traitors like [actress] Jane Fonda and [former Attorney General] Ramsey Clark and [antiwar activist] Tom Hayden who went over there and said, "Just hold on, hold on. We're winning it at home. We're destroying the morale of the people at home." And they did. The antiwar movement was an essential part of the Communist strategy to destroy American morale. --John Singlaub (Quoted in Christian G. Appy's _Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides_ [2003], Part 2, "Paradise Island" - ...However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? The American Intelligentsia lost its [nerve] and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future? --Alexander Solzhenitsyn (19182008) Russian novelist. Speech at Harvard University [1978]. - Remembrance of Vietnam is not on the wane; it is on the ascendancy. The number of visitors to the Memorial keeps growing. There are many excellent web sites on the Internet, television documentaries, and many outstanding books, some of which we are fortunate to quote here. Some of the Internet sites publish letters, poems, and essays written in tribute to Vietnam veterans. On one www.thewall-usa.com, Racheline Maltese had this to say after a visit to the Memorial: "I am only 21. I do not remember the war when it was happening. I did not learn about it in school. To see these men and women with their shirts and flags shakes me. Seeing the things people have left here shakes me. A picture of Jimi Hendrix, a bottle of Seagrams 7, a pack of cigarettes have reduced me to tears. "I wonder if you [the inscribed veterans] watch us. If you'd like to say 'thank you' for these gifts. I wonder if we mourn for you or for ourselves." --Lamar Underwood _The Quotable Soldier_ [2000], "'Nam: Words From Beyond The Wall" - - It is not the policy of this GOVT to assist the French to re-establish their control over Indochina by force and the willingness of the USA to see French control re-established assumed that French claim to have the support of the population of Indochina is borne out by future events. --U.S. government statement [Oct. 1945]; The Pentagon Papers v. 1 [1971] p.17, in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 879. Cohan & Major point out: The leader of the Vietnamese nationalist movement, Ho Chi Minh, was a communist, but at this stage anti- colonialism prevailed over anti-communism as a determinant of U.S. policy. & see: The French through their folly ... have left us with two ghastly courses of action: 1. To wash our hands of the country [Vietnam] and allow the communists to overrun it. 2. To continue to pour treasure (and perhaps eventually lives) into a hopeless cause. --Charlton Ogburn Jr (1911-1998) to Dean Rusk [18 August 1950]. in M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.} _History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 879. Cohan & Major explain: Simultaneously with his pledge to defend South Korea in June 1950, President Truman committed the United States to enhance its support for the French in their war with the communist-led nationalists in Vietnam. Option 2 was followed from 1950 to 1973; Option I in 1975. - - [We were] in one [Vietnamese] valley, called the Que Son Valley, two miles wide and ten, twelve miles long. We cleaned out every living thing in that valley people and animals and destroyed everything else. We just rounded them all up four to five hundred people and started moving them eleven klicks [kilometers] to some type of camp. All their animals was killed. Then we made the valley a free-fire zone. After we cleaned it out, anything you saw was a legitimate target. Two days later, half the people were right back in it. They went back to nothing because we burned and destroyed everything. They had to be some good people to withstand all that. They come right back to nothing and start over. Go out and get some thatch or find some that wasn't burnt, tie it together with a couple branches over some poles, and sit up under it with their little beat-up aluminum pots. That's some of the most determined people I've ever run into. I don't hate them. They did what they had to do. It's the politicians that put everybody in that place. Although I would like to get a hold of the one that set the booby trap. [Laughs] . . . . I don't have much bitterness. Well, I don't think I do. I just wish that none of it ever happened for everyone's sake. It was a bad political mistake. --George Watkins (A Vietnam vet who lost both legs and both eyes after stepping on a land mine while in Quang Tri Province in April 1968. Quoted in Christian G. Appy's _Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides_ [2003], Part 1, "Paying the Price") - - Press and television have created an aura not of victory but of defeat, which, coupled with the vocal antiwar elements, profoundly influenced timid officials in Washington. It was like two boxers in a ring, one having the other on the ropes, close to a knock-out, when the apparent winner's second inexplicably throws in the towel. --William Westmoreland (19142005) American soldier. _A Soldier Reports_ [1976] We met the enemy and he was us. --William Westmoreland (19142005) American soldier. Quoted in _Rolling Stone_ [20 April 1978]. - The corner has definitely been turned toward victory in Vietnam. --Defense Department announcement [May 1963]. - Twenty-nine years after the end of the Vietnam war, communist military mastermind General Vo Nguyen Giap remains grateful to the Americans who opposed it. [...] "I would like to thank them," the 93-year-old veteran said on Friday of those Americans who opposed the war. --"Vietnam's Hero Still Grateful to Anti-War Americans" [April 2004] - The misreporting, along with Communist and North Vietnamese agents in the United States, led to demonstrations in the streets by Americans in protest of the war. Gen. Giap later wrote in his book, that the news media reporting and the demonstrations in America surprised them. Instead of seeking a conditional surrender, they would now hold out because America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of victory could be theirs. http://www.1stcavmedic.com/tet_offensive_of_1968.htm - A Ho Chi Minh City museum that honors Vietnam war protesters features a photograph of Sen. John Kerry being greeted by the general secretary of the Communist Party, Comrade Do Muoi. [...] Epstein said the display photograph's "unquestionable significance lies in its placement in the American protesters' section of the War Crimes Museum" in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. "The Vietnamese communists clearly recognize John Kerry's contributions to their victory," he said. "This find can be compared to the discovery of a painting of Neville Chamberlain hanging in a place of honor in Hitler's Eagle's Nest in 1945." --"Kerry honored at communist museum" end page | UGLY - UNICORNS | UNHAPPINESS | UNIONS - USELESS | VACATION - VENGENCE | VENICE - VICTORY | VIGILANCE - VIRGINITY | VIRTUE - VULGARITY | WAGES - WAR & PEACE | WAR (THE CIVIL) - WAR (THE REVOLUTIONARY) | WAR (THOUGHTS ABOUT) - PAGE 1 (A-M) | WAR (THOUGHTS ABOUT) - PAGE 2 (N-Z) | WAR (VIETNAM) | WAR (WORLD WAR I) | WAR (WORLD WAR II) PAGE 1 (A-M) | WAR (WORLD WAR II) PAGE 2 (N-Z) | WASHINGTON (D.C.) - WEAK/WEAKNESS | WEALTH - WEASELS | WEATHER - WELLS (H.G.) | WEST (THE OLD/WILD) - WILDE (OSCAR) | WILL - WINNING | WINTER - WISDOM | WISHING - WIVES | WOMEN - WOMEN'S LIB | WOMEN'S RIGHTS - WORDS | WORK - WORLD | WORLD TRADE CENTER & PENTAGON DISASTER, 11 SEPTEMB | WORRY - WRONG | WRITING | YESTERDAY - ZOOS | | R | S | T | U - END | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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