{"id":99150,"date":"2017-09-25T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=99150"},"modified":"2017-09-24T15:29:40","modified_gmt":"2017-09-24T14:29:40","slug":"reclaiming-the-truth-about-vietnam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/09\/reclaiming-the-truth-about-vietnam\/","title":{"rendered":"Reclaiming the Truth about Vietnam"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>20 Sep 2017 – <\/em>\u201cFrom Ia Drang to Khe Sanh, from Hue to Saigon and countless villages in between, they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions of our Armed Forces.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, I get it. Soldiers suffer, soldiers die in the wars we wage, and the commander in chief has to, occasionally, toss clich\u00e9s on their graves.<\/p>\n

The words are those of Barack Obama, five-plus years ago, issuing a Memorial Day proclamation<\/a> establishing a 13-year commemoration of the Vietnam War, for which, apparently, about $65 million was appropriated.<\/p>\n

Veterans for Peace calls it money allocated to rewrite history and has begun a counter-campaign called Full Disclosure, the need for which is more glaring than ever, considering that there is close to zero political opposition to the unleashed American empire and its endless war on terror.<\/p>\n

Just the other day, for instance, 89 senators quietly voted to pass the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, signing off on a $700 billion defense budget, which ups annual military spending by $80 billion and, as Common Dreams<\/a> reported, \u201cwill dump a larger sum of money into the military budget than even President Donald Trump asked for while also authorizing the production of 94 F-35 jets, two dozen more than the Pentagon requested.\u201d<\/p>\n

And of course there\u2019s no controversy here, no media clamor demanding to know where the money will come from. \u201cMoney for war just is. Like the tides,\u201d Adam Johnson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting tweeted, as quoted by Common Dreams.<\/p>\n

Oh quiet profits! The Full Disclosure<\/a> campaign rips away the lies that allow America\u2019s wars to continue: GIs slogging through jungles and rice paddies to protect the ideals we hold dear. These words are not directed at the people who put Obama into office, who did so believing he would end the Bush wars. The fact that he continued them mocks the \u201cvalue\u201d we call democracy, indeed, turns it into a hollow shell.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Air Force dropped over 6 million tons of bombs and other ordnance on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1964 and 1973, more than it expended in World War II, Howard Machtinger<\/a> notes at the Full Disclosure website. And more than 19 million gallons of toxic chemicals, including the infamous Agent Orange, were dumped on the Vietnam countryside.<\/p>\n

\u201cAccurate estimates are hard to come by,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut as many as three million Vietnamese were likely killed, including two million civilians, hundreds of thousands seriously injured and disabled, millions of internally displaced, croplands and forests destroyed: incredible destruction \u2014 physical, environmental, institutional, and psychological. The term ecocide was coined to try to capture the devastation of the Vietnamese landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

And: \u201cAll Vietnamese, as a matter of course, were referred to as \u2018gooks.\u2019 So the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, which had been eroding throughout 20th century warfare, virtually disappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then there was the war\u2019s effect on the soldiers who fought it and the \u201cmoral damage\u201d so many suffered: \u201cTo date,\u201d Machtinger writes, \u201cestimates of veteran suicides range from a low of 9,000 to 150,000, the latter almost triple the number of U.S. deaths during the actual conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I pause in the midst of these numbers, this data, letting the words and the memories wash over me: Agent Orange, napalm, gook, My Lai. Such words link only with terrible irony to the clich\u00e9s of Obama\u2019s proclamation: solemn reverence . . . honor . . . heads held high . . . the ideals we hold dear…<\/p>\n

The first set of words sickened a vast segment of the American public and caused the horror of \u201cVietnam Syndrome\u201d to cripple and emasculate the military-industrial complex for a decade and a half. Slowly, the powers that be regrouped, redefined how we fought our wars: without widespread national sacrifice or a universal draft; and with smart bombs and even smarter public relations, ensuring that most of the American public could watch our clean, efficient wars in the comfort of their living rooms.<\/p>\n

What was also necessary was to marginalize the anti-war voices that shut down the Vietnam War. This was accomplished politically, beginning with the surrender of the Democratic Party to its military-industrial funders in the wake of George McGovern\u2019s 1972 presidential campaign. Eventually, endless war became the new normal, and blotting the shame of our \u201closs\u201d in Vietnam from the historical record became a priority.<\/p>\n

The Full Disclosure campaign is saying: no way. One aspect of this campaign is an interactive exhibit<\/a> of the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers rounded up and killed more than 500 villagers. The exhibit was created by the Chicago chapter of Vets for Peace, which hopes to raise enough money to take it on a national tour and rekindle public awareness of the reality of war.<\/p>\n

A slice of that reality can be found in a New Yorker article written in 2015 by Seymour Hersh<\/a>, the reporter who broke the story some four and a half decades earlier. In the article, Hersh revisits the story of one of the GI participants in My Lai, Paul Meadlo:<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter being told by (Lt. William) Calley to \u2018take care of this group,\u2019 one Charlie Company soldier recounted, Meadlo and a fellow-soldier \u2018were actually playing with the kids, telling the people where to sit down and giving the kids candy.\u2019 When Calley returned and said that he wanted them dead, the soldier said, \u2018Meadlo just looked at him like he couldn\u2019t believe it. He says, \u201cWaste them?\u201d When Calley said yes, another soldier testified, Meadlo and Calley \u2018opened up and started firing.\u2019 But then Meadlo \u2018started to cry.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the war, and those are our values, buried with the dead villagers in a mass grave.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him <\/em>at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first set of words sickened a vast segment of the American public and caused the horror of \u201cVietnam Syndrome\u201d to cripple and emasculate the military-industrial complex for a decade and a half. Slowly, the powers that be regrouped, redefined how we fought our wars: without widespread national sacrifice or a universal draft; and with smart bombs and even smarter public relations, ensuring that most of the American public could watch our clean, efficient wars in the comfort of their living rooms. What was also necessary was to marginalize the anti-war voices that shut down the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}