Recently, the Pentagon announced it was launching a multi-million dollar decade-long 50th anniversary “commemoration” of the Vietnam war in “partnership” with more than 10,000 corporations and local groups which are to sponsor hometown events. Its website presents a fairy tale of “honor” and “valor.” Historian Christian Appy, who has authored several books on the war, says the website is “a masterwork of disproportion, distortion and omission.”
Tom Hayden — a leader of the movement against the war — started a petition against this one-sided whitewashed history. It was quickly signed by almost 1,500 people, including many prominent historians.
In May, Hayden and others convened a conference in Washington, D.C. called “Vietnam: The Power of Protest.” Featured speakers included former Congressman Ron Dellums of California who chaired the House Armed Services Committee and former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado.
Hayden told the crowd that powerful forces are engaged in “historic cleansing.” He said, “It serves their purpose because they have no interest in the true history of a war in which they sent thousands to their deaths and, almost before the blood had dried, were moving up the national security ladder and showing up for television interviews to advertise what they called the next cakewalks. Only the blood was caked.”
Dellums said that one of his first acts as a Congressman in 1971 was to take a small annex to his office and mount an exhibit of atrocities committed by the U.S. in Vietnam. He called for a full-fledged congressional investigation of war crimes but was unsuccess-ful. He did hold limited ad hoc hearings on war crimes. As a condition of room use, press and cameras were prohibited.
After the My Lai massacre was exposed by a courageous soldier and an investigative reporter with a marginal press service, U.S. war crimes began to be discussed somewhat in the mainstream media. However, most people had no idea that there were many massacres like My Lai.
Telford Taylor, a retired U.S. army general who was the chief prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, argued that the U.S. was just as criminal in Vietnam and Cambodia as the Nazis during World War II.
The commemoration website’s timeline makes a few trivial mentions of the anti-war movement which was one of the most significant social movements in U.S. history which included many active duty soldiers and veterans of the war.
There is no mention of Secretary of State John Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. The angry young Kerry was then a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). He told the panel about the VVAW’s “Winter Soldier Investigation” hearings in Detroit that year where “over 150 honorably discharged and many highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia.”
He pointed out that these crimes were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He went on to describe the testimony of his fellow veterans who “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam…”
Kerry was talking about face-to-face atrocities. But U.S. bombing of Southeast Asia produced many My Lais from above. Historian Marilyn Young notes:
“Throughout World War II, in all sectors, the United States dropped 2 million tons of bombs; for Indochina the total figure is 8 million tons, with an explosive power equivalent to 640 Hiroshima-size bombs. Three million tons were dropped on Laos, exceeding the total for Germany and Japan by both the U.S. and Great Britain. For nine years, an average of one planeload of bombs fell on Laos every eight minutes. In addition, 150,000 acres of forest were destroyed through the chemical warfare known as defoliation. For South Vietnam, the figure is 19 million gallons of defoliant dropped on an area comprising 20 percent of South Vietnam—some 6 million acres.”
Fifty years have passed and historical memories of that horrible war are being replaced by comfortable fantasies. This country is at war in several nations at this moment while too many share a complacent militarist worldview. It’s time for a national conversation about what our role in the world should be.
