[Vision2020] Idaho's Part-Time Patriots

[david sarff]

Chas,
If the country is amiable and sensitive to assisting us. I think you are way 
wrong. If they don’t want us there, we must indeed uphold your sensitivity. 
Our government has a high responsibility when we all march into hell to 
uphold its standards. Tom’s request is of our representatives, it is their 
charge to help in anyway they can. If we are at out best, we will indeed 
address old mistakes and look to mend them. As you do.
Dave

>
>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.
>
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