Honoring the Vietnam War?

I read a piece in the NY Times yesterday about anti-protesters in Hong Kong. These are the people who are protesting the protests — those being led by students in the city, demanding more freedom from the Chinese authorities.

I was taken back to May of 1970. Four days after the Kent State and Jackson State murders the AFL-CIO organized a bunch of construction workers to protest an anti-war march filled with high school and college students in lower Manhattan. (Picture below). Some seventy people were injured and there were six arrests. Compared to Tiananmen Square or to the current situation in Hong Kong, this was a small event, but the image filled newspapers across the country and fanned the already blazing flames as the country tore itself apart over the disastrous war in Vietnam.

Yet another article in the Times took me back to Vietnam days. This one, Paying Respects, Pentagon Revives Vietnam, and War Over Truth discusses the website the Pentagon has launched to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the war.

According to the Times

the extensive website, which has been up for months, largely describes a war of valor and honor that would be unrecognizable to many of the Americans who fought in and against it. 

Leading Vietnam historians complain that it focuses on dozens of medal-winning soldiers while giving scant mention to mistakes by generals and the years of violent protests and anguished debate at home.

I haven’t spent much time on the site, but I did look up May 4, 1970, the day that the words "Kent State" came not to mean a college but, rather, a date — things were either “before Kent State” or after. The picture below shows the scant account the Pentagon gives to that momentous event.

As I click through the timeline, the long list of soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor makes the whole enterprise seem like a glorious battle where truth and the American Way fought against the red hoards from the North. That’s not what I remember. I remember endless deaths, endless broken promises, endless broken lives. I remember My Lai and street executions and naked children running from napalmed villages. I remember being proud of Walter Cronkite when, on February 27, 1968, he told the truth to the American people, saying "it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."

The Times report includes the following:

The glossy view of history has now prompted more than 500 scholars, veterans and activists — including the civil rights leader Julian Bond; Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers; Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan; and Peter Yarrow of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary — to join Mr. Hayden in demanding the ability to correct the Pentagon’s version of history and a place for the old antiwar activists in the anniversary events. 

This week, in a move that has drawn the battle lines all over again, the group sent a petition to Lt. Gen. Claude M. Kicklighter, the retired Vietnam veteran who is overseeing the commemoration, to ask that the effort not be a “one-sided” look at a war that tore a generation apart. 

General Kicklighter declined to be interviewed, but a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Tom Crosson, said in an email that the mission of the commemoration, as directed by Congress, is to “assist a grateful nation” in thanking veterans and their families. He said that the Pentagon was willing to make corrections “when factual errors or potential mischaracterizations are brought to our attention,” and that “there is no attempt to whitewash the history of the Vietnam War.

A grateful nation thanking veterans? Come on! I am a patriotic son of a career military man, but the Vietnam War was a mistake from day one, we were never a grateful nation as far as Vietnam was concerned and we have no reason to thank the Pentagon. As for the veterans, I honor their sacrifice and I mourn their loss, but the war was wrong. The honorable thing to do at the time was to resist the draft, resist the war and kick the generals in the balls.

Perhaps the second two are still honorable in 2014.