For many Americans, ‘Vietnam’ is a word associated with war and the extraordinarily complex history between our countries. But since normalization began, the U.S. and Vietnam have steadily built bonds of partnership, demonstrating that we can recognize history without being imprisoned by it.
I was 20, and my reality was that people either went to college full-time, or they were draftable. The dear friends that I went to high school with that didn’t go to college eventually wound up in Vietnam, and I noticed that they came home different. I was in Ohio during the Vietnam War era.
The object of my relationship with Vietnam has been to heal the wounds that exist, particularly among our veterans, and to move forward with a positive relationship,… Apparently some in the Vietnamese government don’t want to do that and that’s their decision.
For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.
Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service.
Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare.
We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq – and we should have learned it by now.
Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.
My father told me about American democracy. And he said you have to be actively engaged in the political process to make our democracy work. So I’ve been doing that my entire life. Civil rights movement. The peace movement during the Vietnam conflict. The movement to get an apology and redress for Japanese-Americans.
Of all recent presidents, Clinton was expected to behave the most sensibly in economic matters. He understood how the economy works. But because he had used various dodges to stay out of the Vietnam War, he came to office ill at ease with the military.
I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Police were losing control because they were up against a world they really didn’t understand.
I built bridges and worked for the army and SAS in Vietnam and Zimbabwe. I also sold watches and Jaguars in the Philippines and Singapore. In 1977, I returned to civil engineering and was posted to Muscat.
What has been adjudicated and established in the wake of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement is the ability of the press to basically write or broadcast almost anything about the government. There’s very few restrictions in that way.
I went to Vietnam during the Vietnam War to visit all the troops. We would fly into a hospital and serve mess to the guys, and we ate whatever they were eating. Then we slept there and flew out the next day to little bases where there were maybe 10 or 20 guys. Then we flew to another hospital.
When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them – part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.
My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.
In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, ’69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it’s worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started – an outright war started in 1962.
Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam.
My father wanted to be a hero. He went to the Air Force Academy, was valedictorian, and then he found himself strafing villagers in Vietnam in a war he didn’t want to be in and didn’t understand. He was extremely conflicted about the line where he went from being the good guy to possibly being the bad guy.
I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-eyed leadership.
Lyndon Johnson is not a comfortable model for President Obama to imitate. He is an all-but-forgotten president – pilloried for the failed war in Vietnam and criticized for grandiose reforms conservatives denounce as the epitome of federal social engineering that costs too much and does too little.
Thank you for the sacrifices you and your families are making. Our Vietnam Veterans have taught us that no matter what are positions may be on policy, as Americans and patriots, we must support all of our soldiers with our thoughts and our prayers.
Vietnam affected everything in life while it went on. My time in the service made it clear to me that what we were being told in our newspapers and newscasts, back in the States, wasn’t half the story of what was really going on.
It’s because films like ‘Selma’ are so rarely made that we end up putting them under the microscope. One, maybe two, a year. As a white person, you don’t have that. You have the gamut. No one says to Oliver Stone, ‘Another film about Vietnam? White characters again?’
I wasn’t for Vietnam. When I told that to the hippie newspaper, all my people got nervous.
A lot of people were ambivalent about Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 positioned himself as the peace candidate. Once Johnson sent large amounts of troops into battle in 1965, most Americans were behind the war.
The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.
By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they?
I remember the youth movement in 1968. It started on American university campuses as a protest against the Vietnam war, then came to Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin. Within a year, you had an uprising of youth against their elders.
When I volunteered for the draft as a 20-year-old, mischievous guy at the height of the Vietnam War, most thought I was destined to pass from this earth early!
