Documentary tells story Americans should remember
Last week I watched Rory Kennedy’s documentary, “Last Days in Vietnam,” which recounts the harrowing events of April 1975.
Not harrowing for most Americans, including myself, but for the South Vietnamese and the few Americans left in the country as the capital city of Saigon fell.
The footage, some of which hadn’t been seen before, paints a grim picture: Vietnamese panicking, fearing for their lives, hopping over fences; scrambling up walls. It’s like the final scenes of the movie “Titanic” played out on land.
The unfortunate truth: Many of these people had worked with and helped the Americans. If caught, they and their families faced prison and possibly death. We saved some of them, but many paid for their loyalty to the U.S.
Watching the documentary, though, I couldn’t completely shake feelings of nostalgia.
You see, 40 years ago, I was a month shy of graduating from Cape Henlopen High School. Like many Americans, I expect, I was pretty oblivious to the tragedy unfolding half a world away.
The most important fact, to me, about Vietnam was: I wasn’t going. In 1973, America had switched over to an all-volunteer army, ending the draft.
Last week in The New York Times, Lawrence J. Korb, a former Naval flight officer who served in Vietnam, wrote that the creation of an all-volunteer force was “perhaps the only good result of the Vietnam War.” Korb was among several writers who explored the lessons, if any, learned from the Vietnam War.
It’s good to know something good came out of the war. And I agree with him.
Soldiers today are better trained, their units more cohesive. They are committed professionals.
And they are a distinct minority. Only about 1 percent of American citizens serve in the military.
The rest of us do our part by thanking them for their service, chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at public events and tearing up when Lee Greenwood sings “God Bless the USA.”
In other words, not much. Our only risk of injury comes from patting ourselves on the back for being so gosh darn patriotic.
That’s what bothers me. There’s something disconcerting, even dangerous, about the disconnect between regular Americans and the 1 percent who actually fight for our country.
Forty years ago, stung by defeat in Vietnam, Americans wanted to stop being the “policemen of the world.”
Listening to some politicians today, you’d think Vietnam never happened. Despite its many advantages, the all-volunteer military has one big disadvantage: It makes going to war too easy.
Consider this blunt assessment from presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. “There’s a group of folks in our party who would have troops in six countries right now - maybe more.”
He went further. “The other Republicans will criticize Hillary Clinton and the president for their foreign policy,” he said, “but they would have done the same thing - just 10 times over!”
Think about our more recent history.
Could President Bush have drummed up enough support to invade Iraq if it meant a broad swath of American youth would be drafted?
Afghanistan, yes. In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans would have supported war no matter what.
At least I think so. And yet it’s interesting to note that Bush declined to ask Americans to even pay for the war. Unlike past American wars, no taxes were raised, no war bonds sold.
Instead, President Bush offered tax cuts and implored us to keep shopping. Americans, at least 99 percent of them, suffered no hardships. We neither fought nor funded the war.
Apparently, Bush calculated that asking Americans to pay for the Afghanistan conflict would have had a cooling effect on ramped-up war fever. Iraq would have been an even tougher sell.
I’m not calling for a return of the draft. We don’t want to return to a less professional military force.
But it would be nice to add a dose of reality to our foreign policy discussions, such as they are. Just requiring Americans to pay a surcharge to fund wars would cause us to more carefully consider foreign adventures.
Forty years ago, there were a lot of kids like me, thrilled not to face the draft. Today, many of those same kids have grown up to be fire-breathing chicken hawks.
They ridicule President Obama’s “leading from behind” and sabotage efforts to negotiate with our adversaries, especially Iran.
Another writer in the Times’s look at Vietnam 40 years later was Douglas Porch, a distinguished professor emeritus at Naval Postgraduate School.
Porch wrote, “Nations that acquiesce to counterinsurgency wars on terror must realize that ‘small wars’ are long, dirty affairs fought most often in remote places among peoples little inclined to see the arrival of Western forces as liberation.”
He continued, “Military victories in these wars seldom come at an acceptable political, diplomatic, legal, moral and financial cost. The United States should have internalized this 40 years ago.”
Sad thing is, I thought we had.
