US Government Sanitizes Vietnam War History
Global Research, October 30, 2014
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-government-sanitizes-vietnam-war-history/5410891
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-government-sanitizes-vietnam-war-history/5410891
For
many years after the Vietnam War, we enjoyed the “Vietnam syndrome,” in
which US presidents hesitated to launch substantial military attacks on
other countries. They feared intense opposition akin to the powerful
movement that helped bring an end to the war in Vietnam. But in 1991, at
the end of the Gulf War, George H.W. Bush declared, “By God, we’ve
kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!”
With
George W. Bush’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and Barack Obama’s drone
wars in seven Muslim-majority countries and his escalating wars in Iraq
and Syria, we have apparently moved beyond the Vietnam syndrome. By
planting disinformation in the public realm, the government has built
support for its recent wars, as it did with Vietnam.
Now
the Pentagon is planning to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the
Vietnam War by launching a $30 million program to rewrite and sanitize
its history. Replete with a fancy interactive website, the effort is
aimed at teaching schoolchildren a revisionist history of the war. The
program is focused on honoring our service members who fought in
Vietnam. But conspicuously absent from the website is a description of
the antiwar movement, at the heart of which was the GI movement.
Thousands
of GIs participated in the antiwar movement. Many felt betrayed by
their government. They established coffee houses and underground
newspapers where they shared information about resistance. During the
course of the war, more than 500,000 soldiers deserted. The strength of
the rebellion of ground troops caused the military to shift to an air
war. Ultimately, the war claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans. Untold
numbers were wounded and returned with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In an astounding statistic, more Vietnam veterans have committed suicide
than were killed in the war.
Millions
of Americans, many of us students on college campuses, marched,
demonstrated, spoke out, sang and protested against the war. Thousands
were arrested and some, at Kent State and Jackson State, were killed.
The military draft and images of dead Vietnamese galvanized the
movement. On November 15, 1969, in what was the largest protest
demonstration in Washington, DC, at that time, 250,000 people marched on
the nation’s capital, demanding an end to the war. Yet the Pentagon’s
website merely refers to it as a “massive protest.”
But
Americans weren’t the only ones dying. Between 2 and 3 million
Indochinese – in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – were killed. War crimes –
such as the My Lai massacre – were common. In 1968, US soldiers
slaughtered 500 unarmed old men, women and children in the Vietnamese
village of My Lai. Yet the Pentagon website refers only to the “My Lai
Incident,” despite the fact that it is customarily referred to as a
massacre.
One of the most
shameful legacies of the Vietnam War is the US military’s use of the
deadly defoliant Agent Orange, dioxin. The military sprayed it
unsparingly over much of Vietnam’s land. An estimated 3 million
Vietnamese still suffer the effects of those deadly chemical defoliants.
Tens of thousands of US soldiers were also affected. It has caused
birth defects in hundreds of thousands of children, both in Vietnam and
the United States. It is currently affecting the second and third
generations of people directly exposed to Agent Orange decades ago.
Certain cancers, diabetes, and spina bifida and other serious birth
defects can be traced to Agent Orange exposure. In addition, the
chemicals destroyed much of the natural environment of Vietnam; the soil
in many “hot spots” near former US army bases remains contaminated.
In
the Paris Peace Accords signed in 1973, the Nixon administration
pledged to contribute $3 billion toward healing the wounds of war and
the post-war reconstruction of Vietnam. That promise remains
unfulfilled.
Despite the
continuing damage and injury wrought by Agent Orange, the Pentagon
website makes scant mention of “Operation Ranch Hand.” It says that from
1961 to 1971, the US sprayed 18 million gallons of chemicals over 20
percent of South Vietnam’s jungles and 36 percent of its mangrove
forests. But the website does not cite the devastating effects of that
spraying.
The incomplete
history contained on the Pentagon website stirred more than 500 veterans
of the US peace movement during the Vietnam era to sign a petition to
Lt. Gen. Claude M. “Mick” Kicklighter. It asks that the official program
“include viewpoints, speakers and educational materials that represent a
full and fair reflection of the issues which divided our country during
the war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.” The petition cites the “many
thousands of veterans” who opposed the war, the “draft refusals of many
thousands of young Americans,” the “millions who exercised their rights
as American citizens by marching, praying, organizing moratoriums,
writing letters to Congress,” and “those who were tried by our
government for civil disobedience or who died in protests.” And, the
petition says, “very importantly, we cannot forget the millions of
victims of the war, both military and civilian, who died in Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia, nor those who perished or were hurt in its aftermath
by land mines, unexploded ordnance, Agent Orange and refugee flight.”
Antiwar
activists who signed the petition include Tom Hayden and Pentagon
Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. “All of us remember that the
Pentagon got us into this war in Vietnam with its version of the truth,”
Hayden said in an interview with The New York Times. “If you conduct a
war, you shouldn’t be in charge of narrating it,” he added.
Veterans
for Peace (VFP) is organizing an alternative commemoration of the
Vietnam War. “One of the biggest concerns for us,” VFP executive
director Michael McPhearson told the Times, “is that if a full narrative
is not remembered, the government will use the narrative it creates to
continue to conduct wars around the world – as a propaganda tool.”
Indeed,
just as Lyndon B. Johnson used the manufactured Tonkin Gulf incident as
a pretext to escalate the Vietnam War, George W. Bush relied on
mythical weapons of mass destruction to justify his war on Iraq, and the
“war on terror” to justify his invasion of Afghanistan. And Obama
justifies his drone wars by citing national security considerations,
even though he creates more enemies of the United States as he kills
thousands of civilians. ISIS and Khorasan (which no one in Syria heard
of until about three weeks ago) are the new enemies Obama is using to
justify his wars in Iraq and Syria, although he admits they pose no
imminent threat to the United States. The Vietnam syndrome has been
replaced by the “Permanent War.”
It
is no cliché that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.
Unless we are provided an honest accounting of the disgraceful history
of the US war on Vietnam, we will be ill equipped to protest the current
and future wars conducted in our name.
Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.
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