Vietnam: The Lie That Was Lived

Photo: AP/John Nance

One of my earliest reliable memories occurred during that very tense time that accompanied the Cuban Missile Crisis.  At the tender age of seven, I didn't fully understand all of what was going on, but I could hear the tense, almost funeral voices that issued from our television during the evening news.  I also remember that for three straight nights, we went to bed with both the radio and television left on.  In the days before the text push, this was the only way for the government to issue alerts to the citizenry.

We lived in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, a metro area ringed by Titan II and Minuteman ICBM missile silos which made the area one of the many prime targets for a potential Soviet first strike.  I knew about the dangers of the time because the government made sure I knew.  At least twice per week we had "duck n' cover" drills at school.  Our vice-principal would occasionally walk around with one of those old-fashioned flash guns.  He would stick it just inside the door, trigger the flash, and then time how long it took us to get under our desks.  The winning class got either an extra dessert at lunch or 15 extra minutes of recess.  Yay.  On top of that, a couple of times per month we would watch film strips or movies about what we were supposed to do if we heard the sirens or saw a big flash in the sky.  At home, the networks would regularly run public service programming telling us pretty much the same thing, along with how to establish an emergency kit.



So, while the Cold War was kinda scary, we were fully prepared as to what to do and where to go if the balloon went up.  Because of that, we trusted the government implicitly, believing that they had our best interests at heart.

But there was also something else going on at the time.  President Kennedy had begun to send military advisors to a small southeast Asian country that had once been known as French Indo-China, but now known as Vietnam.  It was pure Cold War politics.  Vietnam had been divided into to countries, like Korea, a Communist north and a...well...democratic south.  That the character of that southern government was in practice little different from the foe to the north mattered not.  This was the second of a series of foreign policy blunders where the United States lent support to anyone who said they were anti-communist.  As a result, we ended up supporting a whole host of horribly dictatorial regimes.  In those regions today, the reputation of the United States remains sullied.

As events went forward in Vietnam, the "experts in the Kennedy, and eventually in the Johnson administrations continued to recommend increased levels of boots on the ground until 1968 when there were over a half-million men and women stationed in-country and additional tens of thousands aboard ships at sea and at military and support bases throughout the region.

Ken Burns, who is the premier documentarian of the modern era, produced a retrospective of the Vietnam War.  While other attempts have been done, this one had the benefit of a host of declassified information as well as interviews with many who fought against us.  I've watched the whole thing twice now, and it has left me with a deep burning sense of outrage.

Governments lie.  Everyone now knows this.  But the amount and depth of the lies that were fed to the American public by the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations strain the bounds of credulity, even in this supremely cynical era.  The American government knew very early on that the war would not be winnable.  In fact, the measures taken by the military and the U.S. representatives in-country did more to expand the recruitment of peasants into the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army.  It's easy to point to our traditional blind spot, fighting the new war the same way the last one was fought, as a method totally incompatible with the strategic situation.  The military had to fight both a more conventional battle against regular army troops concurrently with a wide-spread campaign against guerrillas present in force throughout the south.  We had never fought an unconventional war before, and we were utterly unprepared for this one.

The unpopularity of the war here at home was manifested in countless demonstrations and riots.  Those on the left who participated in those protests lost credibility through their disgraceful treatment of returning veterans, many of whom had not been there by choice.  The United States hovered on the edge of civil war, helped along by assassinations of Martin Luther King allegedly by a white supremacist democrat, and Robert Kennedy by a Palestinian.  When I look around at our country today, I am beginning to hear those disturbing echoes once again.

Eventually, North Vietnam, having learned how to negotiate with Americans through the lessons of the North Koreans, signed a treaty in Paris, which gave Nixon his so-called "Peace with honor."  But in the months and years afterwards, the North in blatant violation of the terms of the treaty, sent upwards of 350,000 combat troops across the DMZ into South Vietnam where they were pre-positioned for the final offensive.  According to the treaty, if this was done, then the United States was obligated to send combat troops back in.  President Ford declined to do so, with good reason.  Simply put, the Communists had outlasted the attention span of American voters, who simply no longer cared what happened.

In the end, while the U.S. won several major battles, the North Vietnamese won the war and the world was treated to the sight of U.S. helicopters frantically evacuating the last Americans as the North Vietnamese army entered Saigon.  To say it was an ignominious retreat is an embarrassing understatement.  A few years afterwards, an American official in Vietnam to conduct business, told his opposite number, "You know, we defeated your military."  The Vietnamese official responded, "That may be true.  I also know that it is irrelevant."

Now we're engaged in another unconventional conflict, the War on Terror.  We have troops fighting and dying in several middle eastern countries, once again supporting terrible regimes shot through with corruption.  Experts tell us that this ten-year-long commitment has been instrumental in keeping America free from the kind of devastating terror attacks that have occurred in Europe and other places.  But how do we know for sure?  Are we being lied to once again?  Are we sending our youth to fight and die in a foreign land for a goal of distant nebulosity?

The sad fact is that we probably will not know the extent and degree to which we are being lied to until enough time has passed for Ken Burns to do a documentary on the War on Terror.  But the government would not lie to us unless we allow them to lie to us.  By refusing to critically challenge the assertions fed to us through a compliant media we become complicit in the lie, and at least partially responsible for the outcome.

Watching this documentary makes me sad.  It makes me angry.  It also makes for a very dark view of our future.  We can as citizens lie down and let them roll over us, or we can stand and force the government into telling the truth.  To quote President Lincoln, "We, even we here hold the power and bear the responsibility."