April 30, 1975

Thirty years ago today the first war in my lifetime that was an unmitigated disaster ended. And I don’t mean only a military disaster; it was a diplomatic and moral disaster as well. Fifty-eight thousand US soldiers – and millions of Vietnamese - died in a war that certainly did not reflect what this country claims to stand for. The photograph of the helicopter on the roof that day, with our troops having to beat off Vietnamese who had supported our cause still resides in my mind as it does in the minds of most of us alive at that time.

Much has changed in the world since 1975. Yet, our current war reminds many of us of that war of our youth. Then, our leaders created a bogey man (in this case the domino theory of nations falling to Communism) and offered up our young people to defend us against this bogey man, who, thankfully in our leaders’ eyes, was in a foreign country, just as the” War on Terror is being waged on foreign soil”. In Iraq we had two bogey men – Saddam and WMD, one of whom was real, one wasn’t. The Pentagon Papers revealed many of the lies we were told during that war; we know some of the lies told in this one, but not all of them yet. We were not prepared for the guerilla war fought in the jungles of Vietnam; we were not prepared for what came after the day “Mission Accomplished” was announced in the Iraq war. We had My Lai; this war has Abu Gharaib.

And some things have changed. We all knew a couple of kids who were over there or had left for Canada. Now, with the demise of the draft, few of us know any of the professionals in Iraq. I can’t recall soldiers in Vietnam complaining of being ill-equipped the way our men in Iraq are. And who can forget the impact of television thirty years ago. The networks brought the war into our living rooms every night; we saw row after row of caskets pictured in the press and on TV. Now, the ‘news’ programs treat the war as just another ‘real’ show with no attempt to really bring it home to us. And, ironically, Vietnam is now one of our trading partners (most of the shrimp we eat come from there).

It took years for the anti-war movement to gather steam and start having an effect. Let’s hope for two things. It takes less time and fewer casualties for the people to seize back their government. Thirty years from now we are not in another war in a foreign country such as Vietnam or Iraq.