A closer look at Vietnam

The United States paid a price for its attempt to impose its will on Southeast Asia. \nBut the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians paid a far higher price: Not thousands, but millions dead. Millions more are hurt, maimed and starving, and a landscape laid to waste by bombing and still deadly with unexploded ordinance and mines add to the tragedy. \nIn line with U.S. propaganda, many Americans speak of all of this destruction as a "mistake" (or perhaps a "tragic error"), but you don't devastate three countries by mistake -- it was entirely deliberate.\nI always wonder what "mistake" means in this context. Does it mean we really meant to bomb Bolivia or Nigeria back into the Stone Age, but the bombers missed their target? Or was this more the kind of "mistake" a bully makes when the the scrawny guy who looked like an easy target turns out to be a lightweight boxing champ?\nPresident Bill Clinton visited Vietnam recently, the first U.S. president to do so since Richard Nixon in 1969. It was a long-overdue gesture, probably more motivated by American corporations' interest in Vietnamese markets (visions of sweatshops are no doubt dancing in their heads) than in making amends, let alone making good on the United States' long-forgotten promise to help rebuild Vietnam.\nOrdinary American citizens have done more than the politicians, Vietnam veterans prominently among them. When our government refused to supply mine maps to assist in the already dangerous task of locating and defusing the mines that still pepper the land of Vietnam, veterans voluntarily went to help. \nVietnam veterans were also prominent in the anti-war movement, a fact that is often forgotten.\nI learned a lot about American citizens' opposition to their government's Vietnam policies from historian H. Bruce Franklin's article in the Dec. 11 issue of The Nation -- and I'm usually the person who informs others. Franklin said American World War II veterans opposed U.S. support for French colonialism in 1945. This support took the form of supplying troopships to carry U.S.-armed French forces to Vietnam, which had declared its independence right after the Japanese defeat. American crewmen "drew up a resolution condemning the U.S. government for using American ships to transport an invasion army 'to subjugate the native population' of Vietnam," Franklin said.\nWhen the Vietnamese finally defeated the French at Dienbienphu in 1954 and the U.S. was preparing to mount its own invasion (because, as Vice President Nixon explained, "the Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war or govern themselves"), veteran opposition arose once more. \nAn American Legion division with 78,000 members opposed a U.S. war in southeast Asia, and a senator attacked sending American soldiers to "perpetuate colonialism and white man's exploitation of Asia." \nFiery stuff, eh? When a Gallup poll found 68 percent opposed the use of U.S. troops in Indochina, government planners moved their operation to covert mode, as the Reagan administration would do later in Central America for similar reasons.\nVeteran opposition to the Vietnam war continued throughout, though it is conveniently forgotten now in mainstream discourse. As Franklin notes, "Who today can believe that 1,500 crew members of the USS Constellation signed a petition demanding that Jane Fonda's anti-war show be allowed to perform on board?" \nVietnam veteran and sociologist Jerry Lembcke documents antiwar activism by vets in his important book The Spitting Image, indicating that the only Americans who actually spat on veterans (a popular myth among today's Vietnam revisionists) were supporters of the war, furious at veterans who participated in demonstrations against it. The Nixon administration mounted a public relations campaign to smear such veterans, a tactic which succeeded too well.\nClinton's visit to Vietnam was long overdue. But no less belated is a closer look by the whole nation at the real history of the war (dropping rhetoric like "mistake," for example), and honor paid to those -- civilians and veterans -- who opposed it.