Monday, December 28

A question comes to my mind every time I think of the Vietnam War:

Was it justified?

Three small words that can alter a man’s thinking forever. When I was fighting in the war, I obviously thought it was justified because if I did not think that it was justified, I would have been killing people in cold blood. Or at least, I trusted my government enough that I thought that they had a justification for the war. I thought that Lyndon B. Johnson had a very specific reason to be in Vietnam. Obviously, I thought wrong.

After the war ended I talked with a few of the guys in my unit. We all came to the exact same conclusion: Vietnam was not the right place to be at the time. We didn’t know who to shoot and who to help because we had no idea who was Vietcong and who was not. Most of the time, we guessed and our guesses cost many innocent people their lives. If we had to GUESS who was the enemy, we could not effectively fight a war. There weren’t signs that said, “This guy is one of the bad guys. You have to kill him.” And we also didn’t know what we were fighting for—most of us had no idea why we were there. I know that we were trying to stop Communism from spreading into Vietnam and that the Northerners and the Southerners were mad at each other. But how can you stop an IDEA? Like Thomas Paine said before the American Revolution, "They cannot conquer an idea with an army." What if the people truly wanted Communism because they believed that they could create and live out the perfect society that Karl Marx philosophized about. Who were we to say that the utopia that Marx created in his mind could not have existed in Vietnam at that time? And in the end, we didn’t even win the war. We didn’t lose either but we didn’t win. There are still Communist parties in Vietnam to this day. I guess we could not stop the idea enough for it to leave the minds of the people. Maybe it is none of our business what Vietnam was doing at the time. Maybe we were meddling in things that need not have been meddled in.

This war cost the United States 60,000 of its bravest men. Those men that I talked about in my last post—those were the men that gave their lives for their country and their names are now displayed on the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC. There were 350,000 casualties. That seems like a huge price to pay for a war that we should not have been involved in anyway. 60,000—an enormous number that now means so much to anyone who lost a loved one in Vietnam. Those men didn’t ask to die. I realize that as soon as they signed up, they risked their lives for this country but they trusted the government (just as I did) enough to know exactly what to do and when to do it. Who are we without a government that knows what it is doing? I pray for each and every one of those men because I know that the world may not be the same as it is now without their sacrifice.

It’s hard to know exactly what to do at exactly the right time, though. I guess I can give the government a little leeway because it has taken us this far. Even though we have some conflicts occasionally, they have led us into the 21^st century. In the case of Vietnam, even though we didn’t know who the enemy was, we did what we had to do. And I am okay with that. I sleep at night knowing that I did what I had to do each and every day in Vietnam. And even though America made a mistake, we can learn from our mistakes. That is what someone is supposed to do after making a mistake—learn from it. Now if we don’t change our ideas and learn from the mistakes, that will be where the problem arises. Although the Vietnam War was not justified by the United States government, in my mind, I have created a justification for it.

Anyway, I want to make it clear that I do not support war-- no sane person could support the intentional murder of other people. I support the MEN fighting in the wars.