There are many events springing up to celebrate Vietnam veterans since the war was generally 50 years ago, when the political climate gave too many of us insults instead of parades when we came home.
As a certified grump, I will have to beg your forgiveness for my lack of enthusiasm for these events despite the good intentions. It’s nice to see the reversal of sentiment at long last, but for me too much time has passed.
No sour grapes here, I am just focused on things other than myself. I would say if you want to do something for Vietnam vets, join us to make sure the troops of today and tomorrow feel America’s love.
In fact, I will invite you right now to google “CHPA combat” to find the Combat Helicopter Pilots Association website, where for a few visitor clicks and $30 on your credit card you can send a Christmas Box of goodies to a deployed man or woman. You will brighten their day with your unexpected gift, and as always they will share with their buddies.
I’ll tell you about one American woman who made her mark in Vietnam, but first I will set the background. [For the story of Donna Rowe and Baby Kathleen, click here.]
For the past dozen years I have been a guest lecturer at local high school history classes on the Myths and Truths of the Vietnam War, now joined by Mike King. As I tell students using a detailed slideshow, even though it had a noble purpose, the truth about the war was bad enough, but the truth was lost in myths, half-truths and political struggles.
America never did and likely never will understand what happened in Vietnam. If students realize how a false history took root, they will be better prepared to be skeptical of TV news and be better informed by reading two good newspapers, one that leans right and one that leans left.
The skewing of history had a lot to do with John Kerry and his ilk in the anti-war movement trying to end the war by selling the false narrative that our troops were monsters raping, murdering and ravaging the country.
Meanwhile, we will never know how many of our own troops died needlessly from the stupidity applied by Lyndon Johnson’s White House, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s idiotic “proportional response” policies and the go-along Pentagon. The one party in that war deserving attaboys was our troops, who fought with honor and never lost a major battle, the same party most maligned. It’s a good illustration to students of the concept of “scapegoat” for a miserable war everyone hated since there seemed to be no end in sight.
And of course we can’t forget the new Democrat Congress, winning in a landslide in the aftermath of Watergate. Those Democrats in 1974 broke America’s pledge in the peace agreement, that we would fund the defense of South Vietnam if the enemy in the North ever violated their pledge by attacking after our withdrawal in 1973.
And so, when America abandoned its ally, South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975. Leftists might say the re-uniting of that country was a good thing, but maybe they don’t know or care what really happened.
More than 60,000 were executed by Communists for their crime of working with Americans. Countless refugees fled in vastly overloaded rickety boats and perished by the tens of thousands. More than 800,000 were sent to re-education camps, more like torture camps where a considerable number died of starvation, brutality or loss of the will to live. All the good jobs and houses and businesses were confiscated for Communists from the North. Even today, South Vietnamese veterans and their children and grandchildren are treated as the lowest priority for housing, jobs, etc.
A Marine combat photographer in North Carolina, R.J. Del Vecchio, operates a charitable organization to raise funds for our surviving veteran allies in Vietnam. When he travels there to spread a little money around to them, it isn’t much but they are grateful for the recognition, especially since they live in abject poverty and are treated badly by their own country. Del told me about one vet eternally grateful for the luxury of being able to buy a cup of coffee once a week.
When I talk to students I tell them when we were sent to war we were just a few years older than them, and we did the kind of things with civilians in Vietnam that would make Americans proud.
We were fighting to stop an invading enemy and we defended South Vietnam’s cities from Communist attacks. But we also built roads and schools, taught improved farming methods, brought medical care where it had never been seen, and did things like my extra duty of raising money to buy food and clothes for the local orphanage in Bien Hoa.
The story of baby Kathleen is just one among so many. But still, the false narrative of evil American troops and dysfunctional veterans lives on, and has been recounted in a number of absurd Hollywood movies.
When I think of how divided our country was over the war, and America’s shameful chapter in history as we abandoned our ally to the merciless Communists, I am reminded of Senator William Fullbright, who brought to his Senate Foreign Relations Committee a former Naval officer named John Kerry to tell his fantastic lies that American troops were committing daily, widespread atrocities in Vietnam.
That is the same Senator Fullbright who commented when South Vietnam fell to the Communists and innocent blood was still running in the streets that he was no more distressed than if Arkansas had lost a football game to Texas. That senator would not want to know what I, and millions like me, think of him.
In Vietnam today, genocide against the peaceful Montagnard people continues. But just like the executions by Communist victors, brutal re-education camps, boat people deaths, Congress’ shameful betrayal of our ally and the Communists’ murder of 2 million of their own people in neighboring Cambodia, America had finally dis-entangled from Vietnam, had its back firmly turned, and was and still is determined not to see.
Even after all these years, when I see talking heads on TV begin to discuss the Vietnam War, I know I am about to hear something stupid, because the truth about that war was lost and the real lessons never learned.
And I doubt that will ever change.
[Terry Garlock of Peachtree City, Ga., was a Cobra helicopter gunship pilot in the Vietnam War. He occasionally contributes a column to The Citizen. His email is [email protected].]
