[Vision2020] Idaho's Part-Time Patriots

[Chasuk]

On 1/23/07, Chasuk <chasuk at gmail.com> wrote:

> For those who are interested, I will post my thoughts on this matter
> later today.

As promised, here are my thoughts on the matter.

We (the U.S) financed the 1945 - 1954 Vietnamese anti-colonial war
against France.  In 1956, when Vietnam was divided between
anti-Communist South and Communist North, we discouraged reunification
talks.  We supported the South Vietnamese against the Viet Cong
guerrillas in a war that we were largely responsible for creating.

We finally pulled out when the public pressure got too hot for the
U.S. government to handle.  After all, we had lost nearly 60,000
troops.  This wasn't a noble war, and we couldn't pretend any longer
that it was idealistic.  The combined Vietnamese fatalities were
conservatively 4,000,000.  To put this in perspective, if the U.S had
experienced similar losses, we would have had 28 million dead.

In my opinion, we betrayed the people of Vietnam.  Then we hurt them
more by imposing an embargo that lasted until Clinton dissolved it in
1994.  Should we continue to aggravate old wounds by insisting that
they help us locate our 1,791 MIA's (statistic from the National
League of POW/MIA Families), while we ignore their much more
numerically significant losses? In our motion pictures, they are still
the villains, and to many veterans, they are still "gooks."  How about
a monument in D.C. for the Vietnamese dead?

Imagine that you are a public servant in Vietnam, and you receive a
request from a U.S. diplomat asking that you help locate American
MIA's.  In your own country there are tens of thousands of dead
missing, and much of the the blame rests inarguably with the U.S.
government.  How could such a request not be interpreted as
accusatory?  HELP US FIND OUR DEAD.  AFTER ALL, YOU KILLED THEM.

We can't locate victims on our own soil, with Katrina and 911 as
examples.   And these victims are recently dead.  How easy do you
think it is to search for bones interred for 40 years, and how eager
should they be to help us?

Go onto a reservation and ask Indians to help dig up the bones of
Custer, after generations of being marginalized by our society, and
depicted as savages in John Ford/John Wayne Westerns?  What do you
think their response would be?

Mourn the dead, sure.   But don't dig up the past unless we are ready
to dig up all of it, and build memorials for the slain soldiers of
Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, not just our own.  To seek final peace
for 1,791 while forgetting the tens of thousands of others slain in
the same conflict is insulting not just to the Vietnamese, but to all
of the victims of murderous humanity.