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| Screen shot from youtube video of Country Joe at Woodstock singing "What're we Fightin' For?" |
War Story #8 What’s the Mission?
I have already reported that upon arrival in Vietnam in 1967, soldiers were given wallet cards answering the question of why they were in Vietnam: to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. I can’t imagine how the author of this mission statement could have envisioned how this was to take place.
Really? Wars are expensive in terms of blood, treasury, and national standing. You would think that before choosing to go to war, a clearly defined, rational objective could be expressed. The initial objective was embodied in the so-called Domino Theory. We must stop the march of godless communism in Vietnam to prevent losing the rest of Southeast Asia. I guess we thought we “owned” all of this in the first place. Ridiculous, but fear has a way of fogging our brains. By 1967, it was looking like the march of godless communism was not the governing dynamic—more and more it dawned on us that we were really dealing with the complexities of nationalism and not imagined external threats. We took sides, but we jettisoned the Diem regime and naively hoped we could win hearts and minds at gunpoint. Perhaps we thought the outcome would be something like the one in Korea, but there is no doubt that shallow thinking led us into a quagmire.
In 1971, I was talking with one of our Chinese interpreters, Sergeant Anh, who was Chinese and claimed to be a persecuted minority. He told me that you could tell a Chinese person from a Vietnamese person by looking at their feet. He claimed that the big toe of a Vietnamese person sticks out sideways like that of a monkey. That year we had reports of a pregnant woman being gunned down in a rice paddy by a Vietnamese helicopter gunship. The Vietnamese response was, “It’s OK, she was Cambodian.” All of these countries have been in turmoil for centuries, and it’s hard to imagine how ethnic differences could be resolved by the United States or even by China. You just have to wonder how well our national leaders understood the situation. From what I saw first-hand, very little.
If you wanted to learn about Vietnamese culture back in those days, it was difficult. Bernard B Fall was the best expert on the military aspects, and he was teaching right here in our national capitol at Howard University, but the Pentagon showed little interest. Have you ever seen a discussion of the various religions such as Catholicism, Buddhism, or sects such as Hoa Hao, or Cao Dai? Ever wonder why those monks immolated themselves? Ever heard of Bao Dai or the Bình Xuyên? Have you learned about Ho Chi Minh? Do you know about the French and Japanese influences, including the Michelin rubber plantations? What did General Westmoreland know of these things? He or we could not have won any hearts or minds without understanding them. We could not have imposed our will militarily without staying engaged forever. It was a fool’s errand.
In a latrine at Firebase Martha in 1967, I read a piece of graffiti that has remained in my brain ever since, “Kill a Cong for Christ.” I have often wondered who wrote it. Was it some clever satirist? Was it a latter-day Crusader, a knight fighting to save the Vietnamese Holy Land, or just some poor soul trying to formulate what he understood to be the real mission, since the mission he was given was nonsense?
‘Thank you for your service.’ we’re told. When I hear that, I’m thinking to myself that if you really mean that, you will do a better job of learning about the world and be more demanding when examining the rationale that our fearless leaders give for going or returning to war in places like Iraq, Iran, Syria, or all of the above. I thought the bogey man had gone away at the end of the Cold War, but it seems that the bogey man has returned and gotten religion these days. To fight in any of these places requires us to take sides in civil wars and to fight tar babies. Did Vietnam not teach us anything? From what I saw, US Forces could capture, say, Mosul, but then what?
Link to youtube video of Country Joe: https://youtu.be/-7Y0ekr-3So
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