Vietnam Thoughts

A few weeks ago a friend and ex-neighbor of ours called and asked for prayers. She and her husband would be traveling to Vietnam with a missions group consisting of people who had served in the US military during that war. While there her husband and a few other men would be returning a Vietnamese helmet that was brought home in 1968 by one of the men as a war souvenir. Our friend wanted prayers because she was worried that there might be a negative response to their intended presentation and also because even after 46 years her husband still struggled with memories from his time in Vietnam.

A couple of weeks later I'm turning on my Yahoo mail page and notice in the news clips a photo of an Vietnamese helmet, white dove scratched onto it, with the caption that it was returned to the family of it's original owner. Clicking onto the link I see a photo of four men my age, very serious looks on their faces, dressed in blue shirts and khaki pants, walking through a rural village, towering over the crowd of people walking behind them, and each holding a corner of a small platform upon which is sitting the said helmet. The man in the right rear was my friend.

The Yahoo article gives the story of how and why the helmet was returned as well as the reaction of the 52 year old nephew of the slain soldier. “This is a very sacred moment for my extended family.” The nephew “wept as the helmet was placed in front of a family altar in his house. The Americans, along with around 100 villagers and local officials gathered for the ceremony, looked on. 'We consider this helmet as part of him and we will keep as a reminder for our family's future generations,' he said.”

The Vietnam war was going full bore in 1968, the year I graduated from high school and started college. It was not a popular conflict for several reasons, the chief of which was the inability for our government to communicate to the American public what exactly “winning” meant while being mired in a land war thousands of miles away in the jungles of Southeast Asia. I had an older brother who graduated from Notre Dame a year previous and while there shared a house with a bunch of anti-war radicals. Clear memories I have of going to bed, my brother coming home late from college and then listing to my father and brother yelling at each other about the war for a couple of hours. This happened several times.

My father hated war. He served as a fighter pilot in WWII, had his planes shot up a bunch of times and the last time needed to bail out over the Mediterranean. His unit suffered 170% casualties. As fast as the new guys would come in they would be shot down. When he came back to the US the people in charge wanted him to tour to promote to young men “the glories of war.” to get them to enlist. The idea disgusted my dad. He fully supported the cause and yet saw too much blood and suffering to call it glorious.

But when young men with radical ideas, taught by professors that actually support Communist theory (ignoring the history of 30 million dead in Russia and 60 million dead in China), come at a proud vet and financially successful self made man with the argument that our military/industrial machine who is actually running our government is engaging in war for financial reasons for the benefit of small group of capitalist fat cats, well . . . you think there wouldn't be yelling? Eventually though my father got really mad at the bombing campaign in Cambodia. He sent a nasty telegram to President Nixon and got rewarded a few months later by being audited for the first time.

My brother became a conscientious objector and did alternate service after college. He did not believe that Vietnam was what his Catholic professors would call a "just war."   I am proud of him for that. On the other hand I had high school classmates that enlisted, two who gave their lives in Vietnam, but I went on to college in the fall of 1968. If called I would have gone, I believed the cause was both just and necessary, but honestly for me and for most people I knew there was no great desire to volunteer to go off and fight in the jungles of Asia.

While I was in college the government instituted a draft in December of 1969 and had a lottery to assign draft priorities for men born from the years 1944 to 1950. We had a deferment for the time we were in college but there was still a lot of anxiety for the guys in my class to find out the draft order of our birthdays. I remember the guy who got number 1. He walked around in a daze for about a week. Perhaps part of that was the party we held for him. My number was 140. By the time the draft ended in 1973 a year after I graduated from college the selection number was up to 120.

You are not going to get a straight story from the press about our efforts and the after effects of the Communist take over of South Vietnam. Liberals like socialism and dislike what they consider the inequalities created by capitalism. They love the idea of pure Communism and so ignore the overwhelming weight of Communist disasters in history. Ninety per cent of college professors consider themselves liberal. They teach and help form the young minds that become the Eastern media and that media reports what it believes is truth without imagining they are in any way biased.  For example, the Yahoo article with my friend saw fit to remark that “a bust of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam's victorious war time leader was also in the room” and that “up to 3 million Vietnamese were killed in the war which the United States undertook to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.” You would think South Vietnam didn't exist and we were the invaders.

I have met a lot of people from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Many needed to leave their countries because to stay would be to die. A lot of them lived many years in refugee camps before coming to America. I met a Vietnamese guy last week whose father worked for the CIA and who had also been employed by the CIA. He was in the same prison camp as John McCain for two years. Although a lot of the people I know have been able to return to visit, this man and his family are not welcome. He says he doesn't care, this is his country, he and his family are Americans and he is thrilled that he doesn't have to live under Communism.

Things have changed quite a bit in Vietnam since the war. Like China they are now open for business and the quality of goods for the common person are gradually improving, although I am told that the good stuff all goes for export. After the killing fields of Pol Pot in Cambodia the Communism dominoes did stop falling, although many countries still struggle with insurgencies.  The halt of the spread of world wide Communism has a lot to do with the collapse of state controlled and planned economies that could not compete in the global market. They had to change to survive or become like North Korea, but there is further revolution coming. Communist countries are run by a cadre of elites whose families benefit the greatest from the system. In the past most people could be kept in the dark about life in the rest of the world but not anymore.

There is politics involved in all foreign policy decisions.  It would be great if we could trust that our leaders were strong morally and always have in mind the best interests both of the United States and the other countries we interact with.  But times are changing and right and wrong are being redefined.  Some think it would be better if our country was weak.  They despise our past, want to change our traditions and work to determine our future.  The moral glue that has held us together from our countries founding is coming undone, replaced by love of self and hate of absolutes. 

Yet men and women are still called to serve, to risk leg and limb, mind and body for something that is bigger than them.  They will do this with good leaders and with bad and they do not get to debate while they serve, apart from clear moral boundaries, the wisdom of every order.  My friend came back from the horrors of war to a country that was divided over the conflict he served in and he and his generation were not embraced.  Yet he still suffers for you and me, for the cause of freedom, for the hope that others will be blessed with what we take as our birthright.