Approaching 50 years since the end of the American War, as the Vietnamese call it, and something over 70 years since the start of it, depending when you start the clock, truth and reconciliation remain incomplete. I don't mean for the people of Vietnam, who seem, from what little I know, in general to have a better grasp of both truth and reconciliation than the U.S. government or corporate media. I also don't mean truth and reconciliation between governments, which really don't traffic in either. I mean truth and reconciliation within the United States.
The U.S. government and society have yet to reach any sort of consensus on apologizing to the people of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and the world for the atrocity that was the war on Vietnam. The complex necessity of apologizing to and blaming those who did it -- with more apology the lower the rank and more blame the higher -- has yet to fully win out over the grotesque absurdity of thanking them and calling the U.S. military's largest crime in at least these 70 years a "service". It is of course possible to wish nothing but well for people while also refraining from thanking them for an atrocity.
U.S. treatment of the war on Vietnam is typical of U.S. historical blindness. Nobody would debate whether Vietnam or Afghanistan was the longest of U.S. wars if Native Americans were deemed real people and the wars on them, therefore, real wars. Virtually every media outlet in the United States would not call the U.S. Civil War the deadliest of U.S. wars if the 96 percent of humanity outside the United States were deemed real people whose deaths mattered. But the war on Vietnam is still strangely recent. Many living people remember it. It is still very present in U.S. entertainment. It was a war that happened after television news coverage came into being and before governments had mastered the censorship thereof, so mental images of it are uglier (and truer) than of some other wars before and since. Yet said images are disproportionately of U.S. soldiers and mostly fictional ones doing fictional things, due to the aforementioned entertainment.
Warmongers still do war propaganda with an eye toward crushing "the Vietnam syndrome" -- meaning U.S. public opposition to wars (understood as a disease). The U.S. peace movement is still disproportionately made up of people who began their peace activism during the war on Vietnam. Militarists still misinterpret Vietnam as an argument for even worse slaughter. Some opponents of imperialism still misinterpret Vietnam as an argument for violent resistance -- despite 50 years (and 100 years, for that matter) in which nonviolent resistance has been far more successful.
Many strategizing for peace still misinterpret the war on Vietnam as teaching us that a military draft is a path to peace, even though drafts have facilitated greater warmaking by many countries including by the United States in the U.S. Civil War, two world wars, and the wars on Korea and Vietnam, the last of which was able to kill more people than any U.S. war since because of the draft -- which hardcore war proponents want to bring back, a task to which well-meaning people should not offer assistance.
TRUTH The DeadThe war on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, by various measures, has not been outdone in any single war by the United States since. A 2008 study by Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimated 3.8 million violent war deaths, civilian and military, north and south, during the years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. That's nearly 10 percent of the population. This study is discussed by Nick Turse in his excellent book, Kill Anything That Moves. Turse believes the estimate is low. But, low or not, it needs to have added to it hundreds of thousands of people killed in Laos and Cambodia, and those in all of those countries who died after the war had ended from injuries, illnesses, starvation, land mines, Agent Orange, or other effects of the war. Those deaths continue mounting to this day. Then there are some 58,000 members of the U.S. military, a number that can also be increased by the number of veterans who have died from Agent Orange, war injuries, or the increased suicide rate that can afflict war veterans. The death count, as in many recent wars, is small, however, compared with the count of those injured and left alive, not to mention those whose whose lives were severely damaged in other ways, such as having their homes burned.
The war on Vietnam is a contemporary war for us in that it was a war that killed mostly civilians and mostly on one side. U.S. deaths of 58,000 are about 1.5 percent of 3.8 million, a typical ratio for later U.S. wars.
Turse comments: "Though no one will ever know the true figure, a 2008 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and a Vietnamese government estimate, suggest there were around two million civilian deaths, the vast majority in South Vietnam. A conservative killed-to-injured ratio yields a figure of 5.3 million civilians wounded. Add to these numbers 11 million civilians driven from their lands and made homeless at one time or another, and as many as 4.8 million sprayed with toxic defoliants like Agent Orange."
These are people, Turse points out, who in many cases lived in this war for 20 years, while visiting U.S. troops usually spent 12 or 13 months in it.
"To deprive their Vietnamese enemies of food, recruits, intelligence, and other support, American command policy turned large swathes of those provinces into 'free fire zones,' subject to intense bombing and artillery shelling, that was expressly designed to 'generate' refugees, driving people from their homes in the name of 'pacification.' Houses were set ablaze, whole villages were bulldozed, and people were forced into squalid refugee camps and filthy urban slums short of water, food, and shelter."
The Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. lists 58,000 names on 150 meters of wall. That's 387 names per meter. To similarly list 4 million names would require 10,336 meters, or the distance from the Lincoln Memorial to the steps of the U.S. Capitol, and back again, and back to the Capitol once more, and then as far back as all the museums but stopping short of the Washington Monument.
The BombsThe human numbers are matched by the bomb numbers. The United States dropped in Southeast Asia 6,727,084 tons of bombs, more than triple what it had dropped in Asia and Europe combined in World War II. It also sprayed from the air tens of millions of liters of Agent Orange, not to mention napalm, with devastating results. The effects remain today. Tens of millions of bombs remain unexploded, and increasingly dangerous. The impact has been on all species, not just humans.
In Laos, about a third of the country's land remains ruined by the heavy presence of unexploded bombs, which continue to kill large numbers of people. These include some 80 million cluster bomblets and thousands of large bombs, rockets, mortars, shells, and land mines. From 1964 to 1973, the United States conducted one bombing mission against poor, unarmed, farming families every eight minutes, twenty-four/seven -- with a goal of wiping out any food that could feed any troops (or anybody else). The United States pretended it was delivering humanitarian aid.
Other times, it was just a matter of littering. Bombers flying from Thailand to Vietnam would sometimes be unable to bomb Vietnam due to weather conditions, and so would simply drop their bombs on Laos rather than perform a more difficult landing with a full load back in Thailand.
Yet other times it was a need to put good deadly equipment to use. When President Lyndon Johnson announced an end to bombing in North Vietnam in 1968, planes bombed Laos instead. "We couldn't just let the planes rust," explained one official. The poor today in Laos cannot find access to good healthcare when injured by old bombs, and must survive disabled in an economy few will invest in due to all the bombs. The desperate must take on the risky task of selling the metal from bombs they successfully defuse.
Cambodia was treated roughly as Laos was, with similar and predictable results. President Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger who told Alexander Haig to create "a massive bombing campaign... anything that flies on anything that moves". The hard-core right-wing Khmer Rouge grew from 10,000 in 1970 to 200,000 troops in 1973 via recruitment focused on the casualties and destruction of U.S. bombing. By 1975 they'd defeated the pro-U.S. government.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
