Vietnam: Resistance, Regret and Redemption
Sunday, 27 January 2013 07:06By H Patricia Hynes, Truthout | Op-Ed
A UH-1D helicopter climbs skyward after discharging a load of infantrymen on a search and destroy mission in Vietnam. (Photo: US Army)
The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, making possible a re-united Vietnam, but the bitter divisions and toxic legacies of the war in Vietnam live on.
"In our country, Vietnam is not the name of a small nation with its own rivers and mountains, its little vegetable gardens with lettuce and peppers, its splendid beaches and rice fields, its children learning arithmetic, and the old men who love the roses they grow..." wrote The New York Times Vietnam War correspondent, Gloria Emerson.1
For our president, commanding officers and diplomats, she continued, Vietnam was an honorable cause defeated by a loss of will at home and a detestable jungle where "our army of children fought an army of fanatics." For much of the American public, the war was a bitterly divisive issue to put behind them. With no good ending, why dwell on or learn from or lose sleep over Vietnam, unless you had lost a child or were a veteran haunted by its violence.
For some veterans, Vietnam was the place of shame in which they witnessed and committed war crimes, ordered by their government. For others, it was a war in which they shamelessly committed atrocities. For many, it was a war of resistance within a war of aggression, with their resistance expressed in publicly protesting the war in uniform, publishing underground newspapers, black militancy, refusing orders, taking drugs, growing long hair and afros, printing "peace" on their combat helmets, and countless other transgressions of military culture and code.
Vietnam is also the place where many soldiers were poisoned by their own government's chemical warfare, namely Agent Orange. For them, their children and now their grandchildren, the war has never ended. Nor has it for those veterans who have spent their life atoning for the crimes of war in which they participated. Leaving Vietnam, coming home did not erase the wounds and sorrow of war.
Beginnings
No sooner had Allied forces in Europe defeated fascism, than liberated France turned its military against its independence-seeking colony Vietnam. Thus began a 9-year war that ended in French defeat in Indochina, drew the United States into Vietnam and lured five American presidents increasingly into another country's civil conflict to protect American geopolitical and economic interests. It concluded with a second Western power defeat by a rural, peasant people in their nationalist struggle for independence.
In April 1950, President Truman matter-of-factly sanctioned $20 million in direct military aid to support the French war against its Indochina colonies - Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.2 The iron fist of McCarthyism and the Cold War domino theory combined to push and pull the administration into what would grow to be the American War, as the Vietnamese know it. Larger infusions of military aid, military advisers to build a modern South Vietnamese army and paramilitaries to conduct psychological warfare and military sabotage followed under Eisenhower.
Kennedy vastly increased military advisers and trainers; sent in Green Berets for covert operations; conspired in the overthrow of the corrupt, erratic Diem regime in South Vietnam; and initiated the 10-year chemical assault with toxic defoliants, among them Agent Orange. Despite the covert warfare under Eisenhower and Kennedy, many date the start of the war to March 8, 1965 when Johnson sent in two battalions of combat marines. By July, 100,000 more troops were deployed and bombing of South and North Vietnam intensified, with improved napalm that adhered better to human skin and burned more deeply. A colossal buildup of troops brought more than a half- million US, and some allied, soldiers into the war by June 1968.
Nixon widened the war and unleashed brutal bombing on North Vietnam and North Vietnamese encampments and supply lines in Cambodia and Laos. The bombing of Cambodia killed up to 10 percent of the population, rendered two million homeless, destroyed the peasant economy and created the conditions for the rise of the extremist and savage Khmer Rouge.3
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