For all the hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over what happened in Vietnam between 1968 and 1972, what did we actually gain and lose? Yes, we lost a lot of people but that is a superficial answer to the question I am asking and which is usually the point of these discussion. Those people were sent to die and did die for a more political/strategic reason."What would happen to Indochina and the rest of the world if Communism were to carry the day in Vietnam? The dove majority, in Mailer’s judgment, “simply refused to face the possibility.” The mass peace movement, its grown-ups, anyway, had compressed a hostility to the war into what he called a “hopeless mélange, somehow firmed, of Pacifism and closet Communism.” And the resulting national debate over Vietnam seemed to him twisted and fake: “The hawks were smug and self-righteous, the doves were evasive of the real question.”"
At 48 looking back over thirty years ago, I see the Vietnam War as a battle in the much longer, wider Cold War. That we seem to have won. Well, there is no going back to the USSR. We now trade with Vietnam and they want our dollars. Thailand, Laos, Cambodia did fall under a Communist hegemony. The fall of Vietnam did not hinder our winning the Cold War which depended so much on our prestige as the land of the free. Yet Vietnam gets waved about as a bloody shirt. What it does show - in my opinion - is that we, the people, got so bamboozled by our politicians working on our own self-esteem as the do-gooders who could do no wrong (hey, we saved the world from the Nazis!) and fears of Communism (they want to take us over and make us into pod people!) for their own purposes entrenching themselves into positions of power.
Let us just make sure we do not let them do it any longer (yes, those voting for Bush in 2004 fell for this) with Iraq and our "War on Terror". We are smarter than that. (And we are - look at the 2006 Congressional election).
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