My father was a soldier who served in WWII and Korea. He was also involved in the early prelims to the Vietnam War. He received orders to report to the American base in Vientiane, Laos for his new assignment and our family moved there at the beginning of 1960. I was eight years old at the time. I still have my identity card that declared me an American citizen in English, Lao, and French. I remember being told that as American citizens we had the full backing of the government of the United States of America, and if anyone threatened or harmed us the awesome might of the American military would come roaring to our rescue. It was comforting to know that our government cared so much for each and every one of its citizens.
One still cherished lesson that I learned in Laos is that people entirely different from each other, can connect in profound ways even in the face of impenetrable language barriers. There is a certain spark of humanity that we all recognize in each other (or should). One of the things that I was particularly touched by was a casual acquaintance that I made with some Buddhist monks whose pagoda was near our house. I gradually became convinced of their kindness, compassion, and overall goodness. I came to understand that for all their differences in language, culture, and religion, they were as loveable as anyone I knew. I grew from viewing the Laotian people as strange and threatening, to having a real and lasting affection for them. They were good and kind people.
In 1961 there was a communist coup d'etat in Laos. In the early fighting, the communist forces, the Pathet Lao, seized the airport and took control of the Mekong River separating Laos from Thailand. The Mekong formed the boundary of our backyard and was at that point in its flow, as wide and muddy as the Mississippi. We could gaze across it and just make out the tiny people on the Thai side. For three months we watched the communist gunboats cruise the river looking for anyone trying to escape to Thailand. Tanks ran up and down the street in front of our house, and pro-government forces fired mortars over our compound at the communist gunboats on the river. Gunfire punctuated the nights as we waited and hoped for a chance to flee.
Three months into the coup a call came telling us that we had 30 minutes to gather our belongings and make it to the airport, which the pro-government forces had just recaptured from the communists. Non-essential personnel and dependents were evacuated to Thailand. My mother, two brothers, one sister and I lived in Bangkok for another year while my father remained in Laos performing his duties. He would sneak across the Mekong and come see us every few months, sneaking back into Laos after a long weekend. The Americans remaining in Vientiane lasted a year before having to fight their way out of Laos after the American Embassy was overrun. Just as they were to cross the Mekong River into Thailand they were captured by a large contingent of Pathet Lao fighters. Roughly one year later I attended the ceremony at Ft. Benning, Georgia where my father was decorated for his actions that day.
Just as things were looking grim for the captured Americans, my father took control of the situation and confronted the guerrilla leader. Banking on his acquaintance with the leader of the coup, one Captain Kong Le, and making a wild guess that none of the communist fighters could actually read, my father produced a sheaf of papers covered in the stamps of officialdom and bearing numerous signatures with cryptic titles. He forcefully declared these papers to be "safe passage" for the Americans guaranteed by Kong Le himself.
This confused the guerillas and they discussed and argued about it in excited, bewildered tones as they perused and pondered the mysterious papers. It was clear that they were unsure what to do - and that, thank God, none of them could read. My father pushed his luck, angrily demanding immediate release and promising that his personal friend, Kong Le, would have each of their sorry hides flying from a flag pole before sunrise. Afraid not to, the guerrillas released the Americans who then crossed the Mekong into Thailand and freedom.
Our family spent the next couple of years at Ft. Benning, Georgia before Dad's next foreign assignment. We began 1963 in Paris, France where my father was assigned to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (or SHAPE). SHAPE has since been moved to Belgium, but in 1963 it was just outside Paris.
Living in France was a wonderful experience. I don't care what anyone says, the French are an extraordinary people. I'll never forget the many heartfelt expressions of sympathy I received from virtually every Frenchman who recognized me as an American when, in November of that year John F. Kennedy was taken from us by assassins. In the greatest crime of my lifetime, America was robbed of one of its finest leaders, and I have often pondered how differently American history might have unfolded had JFK not been killed.
Check out this diary, JFK's Foreshadowing of Our Current Crisis of Governance by fellow kossack, PrairieCorrespondent to hear a JFK speech that I'd give my life to hear from one of our leaders today.
Other than the sympathetic and genuinely mourning French people (who loved Kennedy - and why not?), my other most vivid memory of that time is of my older brother crying and blubbering like an infant at the news of the assassination. My brother was and has always been a tough nut, and I had never seen him so inconsolable. It shook me to my core. His profound grief and anguish overshadowed my own, for I was only 11 years old at the time, but his personal distress brought home to me the magnitude of our loss. I cry every time I think about it.
One thing I always think about when I contemplate the loss of John Kennedy, and its impact on our country is the fact that just prior to his assassination he had signed an executive order to begin the process of disengagement in Vietnam. He had decided to pull us out of that losing proposition.
Who can help but wonder how it would have gone if Kennedy had remained our President? How many lives might have been saved?
Now I will no doubt be flamed as a conspiracy theorist, and it will no doubt be argued whether or not JFK was really going to begin a disengagement in Vietnam - and of course I will be accused of having my tinfoil hat on for believing that it is so - but I have my reasons.
JFK's lessons for Iraq
By Marc J. Selverstone, the Boston Globe | March 9, 2006
Arguably, the most vexing question is the great ''what if" of the entire war: ''What if" President John F. Kennedy had not been cut down by an assassin's bullet and had lived out his term -- and perhaps a subsequent one? Would he have made good on an expressed desire to withdraw American troops from Vietnam and turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese? These questions are hardly academic; as a recent New York Times op-ed by Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued, Kennedy had devised a coordinated exit strategy that America's current president would do well to emulate. Source.
In deference to "progressives" who hate "conspiracy theories," I won't go into how badly the CIA and the military industrial complex wanted their "splendid little war" in Vietnam. Or, then again, maybe I will.
THE CIA AND VIETNAM
By John McDermott
(snip) I don't want to suggest that Vietnam policy was a CIA secret that others didn't know about. There are two other points which are of much greater import than secrecy per se. First, it was the CIA which insisted that the US engage itself in a major way in Vietnam in spite of the coolness of the State Department and considerable opposition in the Pentagon. The Agency was the decisive factor in making all those shadowy "commitments" which tied the hands of later Administrations. In addition, because Vietnam was the CIA's biggest project and apparently closest to its leaders' hearts, would-be congressional, press and academic critics were deterred from blowing the whistle on what was from the beginning a policy that many thought neither likely to succeed nor easy to retreat from. The Agency and its friends very aggressively discouraged public criticism of what it was doing. Source
My father retired from the Army and we returned to the states, settling in a southeastern city in early 1964. We got there just in time to watch the Beatles' debut on national television in February of that year (I was, and remain a huge fan).
But there were other much more nefarious goings on afoot in 1964.
1964 is when "Vietnam first moved onto the radar screen in the lives of most Americans." This war was essentially viewed around the world as it was happening and many of the images were uncensored and depicted the gruesome realities of battle and death. At this time, military personnel announced that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired on American destroyers stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin. In August of 1964 congress signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which essentially gave President Johnson the ability to use armed forces in Vietnam. It "freed the President, as Commander in Chief, `to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.'" Bombings in North Vietnam commenced shortly thereafter, and Marines were deployed to Danang in March 1965 because of a reported invasion by North Vietnamese troops. Senator McNamara later revealed that the so-called invasion occurred four weeks after the bombing began and three weeks after the Marines arrived. The lies of the Johnson administration were just beginning.
That year the Department of Defense released a film titled Why Vietnam? to schools and colleges. To the government's dismay "critics attacked it for its many falsifications." Small protests began as soon as the first troops were deployed to Vietnam but the government paid no attention. Later the protests gained momentum as escalation continued.
As the American public viewed the war on their televisions beginning in 1965 they watched as the village of Cam Ne was burned to the ground. 150 homes were burned, 3 women wounded, 1 baby killed, and 4 elderly men taken prisoner. The images that the public saw portrayed "American GIs as heartless killers and America's effort to stop communism as a senseless exercise in inhumanity." By the end of the year there were over 200,000 troops in Vietnam and it was becoming obvious that the United States' bombings were destroying countryside villages and forcing villagers to relocate to refugee camps. On November 2, a young man by the name of Norman R. Morrison burned himself to death in front of the Pentagon in protest of the bombing in Vietnam. Source
The War in Vietnam went from bad to worse while we all watched it on the tube from the comfort of our living rooms. We had a free press back then, and they were the heroes who kept us informed. They braved the dangers of war and kept close tabs on our government, which we were beginning to realize was not to be trusted.
The war dragged on and on, getting worse and worse as time went by. The American losses were troublesome and painful, and the anguish of the Vietnamese people became undeniable.
Back home people were starting to get truly agitated as the losses mounted. Young people, my contemporaries were turning against the government, their elders, and anyone else who continued to justify the slaughter. Frustration turned to anger and people took to the streets to express their outrage and their opposition to the war.
In January of 1968, the Viet Cong launched a series of bold, coordinated attacks across the entire country of South Vietnam in what has come to be known as the Tet Offensive. The audacity of the attacks stunned the world.
TET OFFENSIVE [Tet offensive] 1968, a series of crucial battles in the Vietnam War. On Jan. 31, 1968, the first day of the celebration of the lunar new year, Vietnam's most important holiday, the Vietnamese Communists launched a major offensive throughout South Vietnam. It took weeks for U.S. and South Vietnamese troops to retake all of the captured cities, including the former imperial capital of Hue. Although the offensive was not militarily successful for the Vietnamese Communists, it was a political and psychological victory for them. It dramatically contradicted optimistic claims by the U.S. government that the war had already been won. Source
Yes those optimistic claims had Americans back home believing that the war was a done deal; we were the victors of course, who could ever have doubted it? So when the Tet Offensive came it was a vicious sucker punch to the gut of the American psyche.
Because U.S. politicians and commanders had oversold progress in the war as a way to quiet domestic dissent, the savage Tet fighting shocked millions of Americans and widened Washington's credibility gap on Vietnam. Source
The greatest shock to the American psyche was that VC guerillas had actually attacked and occupied the American Embassy in Saigon - a feat so audacious and unparalleled as to stand out from all the violence and carnage that had gone on before.
But it was at the U.S. Embassy at dawn on January 31 that one of the most important engagements of the war took place.
At a greasy car repair shop at 59 Phan Thanh Gian Street just before the VC attacks on Saigon, 19 VC sappers climbed into a small Peugeot truck and a taxicab to begin the short drive to their objective, the U.S. Embassy. Wearing black pajamas and red armbands, they were part of the elite 250-strong C-10 Sapper Battalion. Most of them had been born in Saigon and were familiar with the streets of the crowded city. (snip)
At 2:45 a.m., the sappers wheeled up to the front gate of the U.S. Embassy and opened fire with AK-47 machine guns and a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Outside the embassy entrance, two American military police of the 716th Battalion -- Spc. 4 Charles Daniel, 23, of Durham, N.C., and Pfc Bill Sebast, 20, of Albany, N.Y. -- returned fire while backing through the heavy steel gate and locking it behind them. At 2:47 they radioed "Signal 300" -- the MP code for enemy attack. A tremendous explosion shook the compound as the sappers blew a 3-foot hole in the wall with a satchel charge. Daniel shouted into the MP radio, "They're coming in -- help me!" and the radio went dead. Source
After all that we had seen and heard over the last few years, after all the lies and broken promises about winning the war, and victory being within our grasp, a tipping point had been reached and most of us had had enough.
Within weeks, President Lyndon B. Johnson would bow out of his race for re-election. Tet was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War. Source
So most historians (all the sane ones) agree that January, 1968 was the beginning of the end of the Vietnamese War. However, for the next six years until we finally "Vietnamized" the war in 1973 we lost nearly half of the 58,000 plus American lives that were lost in that God-forsaken war. Yes while our senators and congressmen debated the relative merits of a "cut and run" solution, and while the bull-headed and insane Nixon administration (can you guess which Party?) insisted on "staying the course," nearly 30,000 Americans were lost. And the lives lost to the Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese during that same period were counted in millions.
Sadly it seems that we have learned very little from our own history. We are repeating our worst mistakes, much to our shame, and much to our great loss. Once again politicians are arguing back and forth about whether or not we can just up and get the fuck out, while a deranged administration defiantly vows to "stay the course." In the mean time, people are dying.
Toward the end of the war in Vietnam John Kerry famously said, "How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?"
We face that same question today. Arguing instead of withdrawing amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.
I'm 54 now and my father is in his 80's. Neither of us can quite believe what's happened to our country. I figured out a long time ago that, not only does our government not care about the safety and well-being of each and every one of its citizens, but much to the contrary treats us increasingly with open contempt.
It saddens me that my father lived to see the past few years: the stolen elections; the abandonment of the people by their elected representatives; the lies; the secrecy; the corruption; the torture; the erosion of our Constitutional rights; the end of democracy. He always loved his country fiercely. He served it for much of his life. He never suspected it could come to this.