The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
This was was worse than any of the madness he had witnessed during this tour of duty on the other side of the world. And he’d seen it all. But this?
The young officer studied the terrified eyes of the civilian civil servants he had trained and had come to know personally and was now preparing to abandon. Their capital was falling to the insurgents. He had to leave. And he could not take them with him.
Proud, honorable, conflicted, he knew the lousy, crooked, rotten “democracy” he was assigned to defend did not deserve the sacrifice of one more life.
Yet for the ordinary people trapped in the endless chaos of this war, betrayed by their thieving leaders, he felt empathy and sorrow. He addressed them. His translator, perplexed, terrified and betrayed, was at first speechless. With a gesture of encouragement from the officer he finally repeated what he had heard.
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My brother would not talk about the fall of Saigon for years, his conscience buried the pain for decades, an abiding shame the mantra “You were obeying orders” could never relieve. “The look in their eyes. The look in their eyes.”
A child of the atomic age, I knew when my brothers were called to serve that John Wayne’s America could crush any Third World peasants. A cowboy cap gun in each hand, I heard a president say we would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
And the Master Sergeant said, “Damned straight.”
“To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them …not because the Communists may be doing it…but because it is right.”
And the Master Sergeant, who misunderstood JFK’s call for foreign aid and a Peace Corps, said, “We’ll fight those commie bastards wherever they show up.”
In 1973 an exhausted nation voted to stop the flow of human fodder, the fortunate were ferried out, our military might scuttled into the South China Sea and a wall of too many names was consecrated. And the gentle snow of amnesia fell on us all, in spite of the dead, the maimed, the cost, the monuments and the memorials.
In 1776 an armed insurgency, fighting a hit-and-run guerrilla war of attrition under our rebel commander, Gen. George Washington, drove the world’s most powerful imperial army to evacuate our soil. Because it was not worth the cost to England.
After Washington’s victory, and election, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson argued our new nation should support an insurgent rebellion in France. Washington, understanding too well the cost of war, and the peril in “entangling alliances,” chose neutrality.
When we chose to intervene in places such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we dismissed the counsel of the seasoned, seduced public opinion with “winning hearts and minds” and “nation building” and bumbled into undeclared wars of endless occupation that served no great strategic interest beyond craven political interests.
We cheered the good fight while missions metastasized, defense industries made a killing and the blood of our heroic patriots flowed into the jungles and sands of the world, while back home, most paid little attention to the sacrifices of the few.
After each strategic blunder that snow of historical amnesia fell upon us and with time we’d sleepwalk into the next strategic blunder, and another generation would be lost and granite memorials would rise from the waters of mourning.
In 1994 I visited the Vietnam War Memorial and thought surely this would move my nation, this heartbreaking tribute to our dead that was also a heart-wrenching lesson for the living.
Again the snow of amnesia fell across the land. With the passage of time the America that can remember countless jingles forgot the lessons of Vietnam.
Will we learn anything from Afghanistan? What is certain is that monuments will again rise to honor the noble few who served in yet another faraway place.
In addition to such worthy efforts, it is time for America to answer the pleas of history and heed the ghosts of war by carving the lesson of Afghanistan into our national soul with the same fierce devotion with which our nation will carve 2,461 heartbreaking, beloved, honored American names into cold gray granite.
