Editorials
Sunday, April 29, 2001
HINDSIGHT about the Vietnam War remains a matter of disagreement among Americans that may be as intense today as it was when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese 26 years ago tomorrow.
Emotions have been recharged by former Sen. Robert Kerrey's admission that he was responsible for the deaths of unarmed civilians while serving as a squad leader during the war. Regardless of conflicting versions of the incident, the heroism of American soldiers and sailors and the lessons that have been drawn from the war should not be diminished.
Kerrey defends his actions as a mistake resulting from the return of fire during the darkness of night and the confusion of war. That caused the deaths of at least 13 unarmed civilians, mostly women and children.
Gerhard Klann, a member of Kerrey's squad, maintains Kerrey ordered the squad to execute the women and children because, otherwise, the squad's retreat would have been jeopardized. The episode is detailed today in The New York Times Magazine and a television segment scheduled for airing Tuesday on the CBS program "60 Minutes II."
The contradictions are not likely to be resolved. Kerrey later was awarded the Medal of Honor for a mission in which part of his leg being blown off. Kerrey became governor of Nebraska and then a Democratic U.S. senator but chose not to run for re-election last year. He ran for president in 1992 but said he had no ambition to make another run for the White House. He is president of New School University in New York.
Recounting this incident, whichever version is correct, undoubtedly resurrects feelings about the horror and futility of the war fought in the jungles, deltas, and mountains of Vietnam. Many Americans today insist that the war could have been won if the military had not been constrained and had been allowed to invade North Vietnam and to use greater force short of bombing the north, as Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay put it, "back to the Stone Age."
That was prevented, they maintain, by civilians in Washington, right up to Presidents Johnson and Nixon. In turn, according to this version, those who opposed U.S. policy criticized the political leaders who put American military units there in the first place. Former President Reagan referred in a Memorial Day 1986 message to the brave "boys in Vietnam...who fought a terrible and vicious war without support from home."
The most telling criticism of U.S. policy has come not from street demonstrators but from scholars steeped in the history and culture of Vietnam. They point to the resolve of the North Vietnamese -- and some in the South -- to release Vietnam from French colonialism. Those Vietnamese saw the United States as the successor to France as a colonial power.
IN RETROSPECT, PARTICULAR military strategies and political actions are legitimate targets of criticism. After Tet 1968, President Lyndon Johnson halted bombing missions and pleaded for peace talks, giving Hanoi time to regroup from what had been devastating losses suffered by the Viet Cong, as the Communist forces in South Vietnam were called. President Nixons decision to withdraw U.S. troops gradually from Vietnam and the decision by Congress to cut off aid to Saigon after the 1973 Paris Accords signaled defeat, not an honorable peace. If those errors had not been made, however, the outcome probably would have been the same, except at a different time.
During the war, Americans were told optimistically of a "light at the end of the tunnel." As they became more versed in the patience of the Vietnamese, they increasingly wondered if that tunnel was a thousand years long.
"My real feeling is, I don't know how we could have won that war," says Col. Robert A. Doughty, an adviser to a Vietnamese armored cavalry unit in the late 1960s and now chairman of the history department at West Point. "It was the nature of the war itself. You're fighting an enemy who is willing to take those kind of casualties. Lord, I saw them die by the hundreds."
The premise of American policy in Vietnam turned out to be wrong. It was an ideological theory of the Cold War that defeat In Vietnam would lead to a toppling of dominoes from Bangkok to Jakarta, with China at the controls.
AFTER SAIGON FELL, Laos and Cambodia fell, but that was it. Today, the United States has established diplomatic relations with China --although shaky at the moment -- and with Vietnam, which is trying to construct a market economy.
American foreign policy is more cautious today. The elder President George Bush sought to overcome what he called the "Vietnam syndrome" when he launched Desert Storm in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The aversion to casualties created by the Vietnam War inspired the guidelines of Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and then Maj. Gen. Colin Powell, his military assistant, that a commitment of forces would include a clearly defined "exit strategy."
That same aversion has made Americans more reluctant than perhaps at any time in history to place their young men, and now young women, "in harm's way." Bloodless, high-technology warfare has been successful in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in the former Yugoslavia. But circumstances may arise someday that will require ground forces -- not on a so-called peacekeeping mission but in combat with rifles in hand and boots on the ground.
As stories like that told by Bob Kerrey and his squad members are vivid reminders, we can only hope that maintaining sufficient military power will push that day far into the future.
Published by Oahu Publications Inc., a subsidiary of Black Press.Don Kendall, President
John Flanagan, publisher and editor in chief 529-4748; jflanagan@starbulletin.com
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