Salon.com > Vietnam War

Robert Reich: “Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy”

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:58:00 +0000

Many of you soon-to-be college graduates are determined to make the world a better place. Some of you are choosing careers in public service or joining nonprofits or volunteering in your communities.

But many of you are cynical about politics. You see the system as inherently corrupt. You doubt real progress is possible.

“What chance do we have against the Koch brothers and the other billionaires?” you’ve asked me. “How can we fight against Monsanto, Boeing, JP Morgan, and Bank of America? They buy elections. They run America.”

Let me remind you: Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. You have no chance if you assume you have no chance.

“But it was different when you graduated,” you say. “The sixties were a time of social progress.”

You don’t know your history.

When I graduated in 1968, the Vietnam War was raging. Over half a million American troops were already there. I didn’t know if I’d be drafted. A member of my class who spoke at commencement said he was heading to Canada and urged us to join him.

Two months before, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. America’s cities were burning. Bobby Kennedy had just been gunned down.

Syria: What’s really happening

Tue, 07 May 2013 19:02:00 +0000

In 1968, caught in the throes of the Vietnam War, a frustrated Lyndon Johnson quipped to Bill Moyers that he felt like a hitchhiker on a highway in a Texas hailstorm. “I can’t run, I can’t hide and I can’t make it stop.”

Syria isn’t Barack Obama’s Vietnam by a long shot. And I seriously doubt that Obama feels the same way Johnson did. But Johnson’s conundrum is in many ways Obama’s, too. In Syria, there are no good options, American credibility is at stake, and the pressures to act are considerable in the face of great uncertainties.

Doing nothing is unacceptable in the face of almost 80,000 dead and millions of Syrians displaced internally and abroad. Limited involvement – even on the military side -- will likely be ineffective, and getting stuck with the check through undertaking a massive military intervention is out of the question.

So what’s a guy to do? Sure, there are risks of acting; but there are consequences of not acting, too.

Indeed, in this regard, Syria is a moral tragedy and humanitarian disaster. It’s hemorrhaging refugees and radicalized jihadists. It’s a threat to regional stability and to Turkey, Jordan and Israel. It’s a potential proliferator of chemical weapons, a way to weaken Iran if only the Americans would recognize the opportunities; and it’s a threat to America’s credibility if Obama doesn’t act boldly in the face of self-declared “red lines.”

Tale of lost Vietnam vet reunited with family in “Unclaimed” deemed false

Wed, 01 May 2013 20:31:00 +0000

The remarkable story of a Vietnam vet, who had been reunited with his American family after being presumed dead in 1968, made international headlines earlier this week thanks to an upcoming documentary, "Unclaimed."

But if it sounded too good to be true, it's because it was.

The ambitious project by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Jorgensen charts veteran Tom Faunce's journey to reconnect Special Forces Green Beret Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson with his family. Though the filmmaker makes no claims, the conclusion seems firm when Robertson's 80-year old sister declares: “There’s no question. I was certain it was him in the video, but when I held his head in my hands and looked in his eyes, there was no question that was my brother."

But new information has emerged, debunking the conclusion of Jorgensen's film. From the Independent:

“Unclaimed” charts search for forgotten Vietman vet

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:04:00 +0000

UPDATE: The identity of the main claiming to be Robertson has been revealed to be Dang Tan Ngoc, a Vietnamese citizen who has also impersonated other Vietnam vets.

Filmmaker Michael Jorgensen has charted a remarkable journey with Vietnam vet Tom Faunce in the documentary "Unclaimed," which aims to reconnect a U.S. Vietnam war vet, reported dead in 1968, with his American family.

The man, whom Faunce believes to be Special Forces Green Beret Master Sgt. John Hartley Robertson, remembers only that his helicopter was shot down in Laos in 1968 and that he had a wife and children in Alabama. Though presumed dead by Americans, the man says that he survived a year of torture in Vietnam and then married the nurse who cared for him.

From the Toronto Star:

Vietnamese women weren’t the only rape victims in Vietnam

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 06:53:00 +0000

On August 31, 1969, a rape was committed in Vietnam. Maybe numerous rapes were committed there that day, but this was a rare one involving American GIs that actually made its way into the military justice system.

And that wasn’t the only thing that set it apart.

War is obscene. I mean that in every sense of the word. Some veterans will tell you that you can’t know war if you haven’t served in one, if you haven’t seen combat. These are often the same guys who won’t tell you the truths that they know about war and who never think to blame themselves in any way for our collective ignorance.

The truth is, you actually can know a lot about war without fighting in one. It just isn’t the sort of knowledge that’s easy to come by.

There are more than 30,000 books on the Vietnam War in print. There are volumes on the decision-making of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, grand biographies of Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, rafts of memoirs by American soldiers -- some staggeringly well-written, many not -- and plenty of disposable paperbacks about snipers, medics, and field Marines. I can tell you from experience that if you read a few dozen of the best of them, you can get a fairly good idea about what that war was really like. Maybe not perfect knowledge, but a reasonable picture anyway. Or you can read several hundred of the middling-to-poor books and, if you pay special attention to the few real truths buried in all the run-of-the-mill war stories, you’ll still get some feeling for war American-style.

Gohmert tells CPAC: We could’ve won Vietnam

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:58:00 +0000

In a speech that spanned several decades of U.S. foreign policy, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, tied together the Vietnam War, the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and mostly blamed it all on Jimmy Carter.

Gohmert was speaking on a panel called "Too Many American Wars? Should We Fight Anywhere and Can We Afford It?", and began by stating that "Vietnam was winnable, but people in Washington decided we should not win it." He added that the "lesson" of Vietnam is that "you don't send American men and women into harm's way unless you're gonna give them what they need" to win.

Gohmert blamed Jimmy Carter for many of America's current foreign policy problems, referring to the Iranian hostage crisis, and pointing to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: "I still believe today that we have Americans dying for their country because we did not send a message in 1979 that you do not attack Atcmerican soil."

The rest of the members of the panel agreed, including Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who pointed to America's "tendancy to end wars indecisively," and "America's political leadership being too sophisticated and focusing on things like exit strategies, as opposed to victory strategies."

Dr. Ivan Eland, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, noted that "we've shown the people how to beat us."

I was a teenage conservative

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:38:00 +0000

Barry Goldwater was my first political hero. The most antiauthoritarian figure in mainstream American politics, who said what he thought without giving a damn, he looked and sounded as Western as Arizona, the state he represented in the Senate. Goldwater and John Kennedy hatched plans in the White House—for what they assumed would be their upcoming presidential campaign against each other in 1964—to travel the country in the Arizonan’s small plane that he flew himself, stopping off at airports in the middle of nowhere to debate one issue or another before taking off again. This two-fisted, free-flying persona made Goldwater the kind of politician that film director Howard Hawks might have come up with; by comparison, government couldn’t help appearing soullessly oppressive. Great Society liberalism had become the norm by the mid-1960s, and this reinforced Goldwater’s iconoclasm, striking a politically attuned, insistently nonconformist teenager as utopian, in the same way that Kennedy embodied idealism for so many others of my generation.

Afghanistan’s escalating violence

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:59:00 +0000

Imagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn’t it? James Holmes times 21? It would dominate the news. We would certainly be consulting experts, trying to make sense of the pattern, groping for explanations. And what if the same thing had also happened almost once every two weeks in 2011? Imagine the shock, imagine the reaction here.

Well, the equivalent has happened in Afghanistan (minus, of course, the superhero movies). It even has a name: green-on-blue violence. In 2012 -- and twice last week -- Afghan soldiers, policemen, or security guards, largely in units being trained or mentored by the U.S. or its NATO allies, have turned their guns on those mentors, the people who are funding, supporting, and teaching them, and pulled the trigger.

When Chomsky wept

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Forty-two years ago I had an unusual experience. I became friendly with a guy named Noam Chomsky. I came to know him as a human being before becoming fully aware of his fame and the impact of his work. I have often thought of this experience since -- both because of the insights it gave me into him and, more important, the deep trouble in which our nation and world find themselves today. His foremost contribution for me has been his constant focus on how U.S. leaders treat so many of the world's population as "unpeople," either exploiting them economically or engaging in war-making, which has murdered, maimed or made homeless over 20 million people since the end of World War II (over 5 million in Iraq and 16 million in Indochina according to official U.S. government statistics).

Jane Fonda: “I never was a hippie!”

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 22:00:00 +0000

If Jane Fonda is not ladylike, then that word has no meaning. Eating a green bean salad at Harry Cipriani, a legendary high-society restaurant on New York's Fifth Avenue, Fonda fits right in with the other lunchers, who are mostly well-dressed women of a certain age, with impeccable manners and perfect posture. Is there a contradiction between the gracious demeanor of this 74-year-old grandmother -- a Manhattan society girl by birth, who was named for her distant relation Lady Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII -- and the fact that Fonda was and remains the most famous and most divisive of all Hollywood activists?

I don't see one, personally, but to put it more expansively you could argue that Fonda's life and career have embraced the contradictions of American womanhood across parts of two centuries. She is a sexpot movie star turned feminist, an antiwar rebel and Parisian intellectual turned ladylike senior citizen (and avowed Christian). Her name remains poisonous in right-wing circles 40 years after her famous visit to North Vietnam, which was intended to further an end to the war and communicate with American POWs, not to lend aid and comfort to the enemy. Fonda has repeatedly and profusely apologized for being photographed next to an anti-aircraft gun that was presumably used to shoot at American jets, calling it "a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever." Contrary to conservative legend, she did not call ordinary American soldiers "war criminals" during her broadcasts from Hanoi. (She did indeed describe their political and military leaders that way, which is quite another matter.)

White phosphorus: The new napalm?

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 15:12:00 +0000

“Too hot! Too hot!” wailed 9-year-old Kim Phuc as sticky napalm burned through her clothes and skin. Forty years ago this week, Kim Phuc was photographed running down the road away from her burning village after a South Vietnamese plane dropped incendiary weapons.

The photograph, taken by Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut for Associated Press on June 8, 1972, became emblematic of the terrible impact on civilians of the U.S.-led bombing campaigns over Southeast Asia.

In the decade that followed, the shocking consequences that napalm inflicted on civilians in Vietnam and elsewhere became a major factor motivating adoption of a new international law restricting the use of some incendiary weapons. But that law, Protocol III to the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), has failed to live up to its promise.

Today, children continue to endure the devastating impacts of incendiary weapons. It is time for governments to revisit CCW Protocol III and strengthen existing law to minimize that suffering.

Napalm is the most notorious incendiary substance, but it is only one of more than 180. The harm caused by white phosphorus munitions, used in more recent conflicts, exemplifies these weapons’ humanitarian problems.

Has the Pentagon learned nothing?

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:10:00 +0000

Recently, after insurgents unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan involving dozens of fighters armed with suicide vests, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms, as well as car bombs, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn’t happened. “I’m not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet Offensive,” said George Little, the Pentagon’s top spokesman. “We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG [rocket propelled grenade], mortar fire, etcetera. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta weighed in similarly. “There were,” he insisted, “no tactical gains here. These are isolated attacks that are done for symbolic purposes, and they have not regained any territory.” Such sentiments were echoed by many in the media, who emphasized that the attacks “didn’t accomplish much” or were “unsuccessful.”

The modern war canon

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Former BBC war reporter Martin Bell picks out essential reading on the Bosnia and Vietnam wars and explains why a book of poetry speaks more to him about the reality of conflict than any other writing.

You were a war reporter for many years. In the past few weeks, the Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin and other journalists have been killed in Syria. Do you think it has become more dangerous?

The awesome, thrilling spectacle of … Vietnam?

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Before I review "Vietnam in HD," the six-hour History Channel epic, I need to get a couple of caveats out of the way.

First, if you have a high definition television, access to the History Channel's HD signal, and a killer home stereo system, you should record the series and watch it in a dark room with no interruptions, preferably while indulging your inebriating substance of choice. It's a sound and light show extraordinaire -- a trip.

But you should only do this if -- and here comes caveat No. 2 -- you consider intense, often shockingly bloody documentary images to be just another thing to gawk over; something to toss up on a big screen instead of, say, "Sucker Punch" or "The Dark Knight" or "The Dirty Dozen." Judged purely as a technical achievement, "Vietnam in HD" (Nov. 8-10, 9 p.m./8 Central) is impressive. It merges thousands of bits of footage collected via the History Film Corps into a nearly seamless whole -- a roiling canvas of chopper evacuations, napalm strikes, city and jungle infantry skirmishes, and shots of wounded and dead soldiers with burned and mangled flesh. And it weds these images to the narratives of individual American soldiers who served in different phases of the war, from the early advisor stage (roughly 1961-1964) through the peak of infantry combat (1965-1969), the post-Tet Offensive period of "Vietnamization" and the fall of Saigon. (I've previewed the first four hours; the last two, "A Changing War"/"Peace With Honor," weren't available for critics.)