Part 1 in a series from by Myra MacPherson adapted from an article published in Consortium News February 16, 2015
In the public domain.
This series shows us Vietnam as seen through the lens of five American ex-soldiers: They returned to their former battlefield, where three of them had seen fierce fighting, to live full time among and to aid the people burdened by two terrible legacies of that war:
1) the thousands of children and farmers who still are blown up or injured by bombs dropped half a century ago that didn’t explode back then and
2) the chillingly large number of children and adults who suffer from the effects of the world’s most poisonous defoliant, Agent Orange; today fourth-generation children continue to be born with twisted and useless limbs.
Throughout Vietnam today, this band of brothers in peace travel and work tirelessly to help victims of a war long past. The group includes a poet, a psychiatric social worker, a former aide to a United States senator, a former cop, and a long ago gang member who found peace and purpose back here, in Vietnam.
They came here first as innocent young soldiers andreturned to the United States shattered. They never unpacked their pain, anger, sorrow, sense of betrayal, guilt and disillusionment about what had been done to the people of Vietnam. They returned, burdened with memories and driven by a mission. They live from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City and points in between — Hue, Da Nang, Hoi An, Nha Trang.
Not only are these men fighting for the lives of modern-day Vietnamese victims of that old war, they are — like fellow members of the 3,300 Veterans for Peace (VFP} around the world and a large contingent of distinguished Vietnam scholars, historians and peace activists — outraged at the whitewashing they see in a mammoth Department of Defense 50th anniversary commemoration of the Vietnam War that will soon saturate the media and the public.
The Pentagon material, which will be disseminated to schools and the public, even includes the ancient lie about the Gulf of Tonkin “incident,” which pushed the United States into full-scale war in 1964. The Department of Defense Commemorative website states that the Gulf of Tonkin incident began with “The U.S. response to the North Vietnamese attack on USS Maddox (DD 731) in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. [This] marked the beginning of the Navy’s air and surface bombardment against North Vietnam.”
However, for decades it has been known that the North Vietnamese attack never happened; this false allegation incited Congress to give the green light to go to war. As retired Capt. Carl Otis Schuster, U.S. Navy (ret), wrote “the string of intelligence mistakes, mistranslations, misinterpretations and faulty decision-making that occurred in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964 reveals how easily analysts and officials can jump to the wrong conclusions and lead a nation into war.”
“The DOD commemoration of our war is a farce,” explodes Chuck Palazzo, one of the former combat veterans who lives in Da Nang. “A waste of money [taxpayers cost will run into the millions of dollars] and a feeble attempt to brainwash the younger generation as well as the rest of us, that what we did was right – it was, of course so wrong!”
The complexities of this war make it difficult for many who served; VFP members respect the idea of honoring veterans who were shunned on their return but denounce a fictionalized version of the war itself.
Myra MacPherson is the author of the Vietnam classic, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. She has continued to lecture and write about Vietnam and veterans.