The Lessons We Haven’t Learned

We all like to believe that we learn something from the past, but I’m not sure that we as a country have learned from ours – particularly the tragic lessons we could and should have learned from Vietnam. Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed column in the NYT yesterday pointed out some those lessons as he wrote about the death of Robert McNamara. McNamara, who was Lyndon Johnson’s icy-veined, cold and rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths, has died at the ripe old age of 93.
Long after the horror of Vietnam was over, McNamara did concede, in remarks that were like rubbing salt in the still festering wounds of the loved ones of those thousands who had died, that he had been “wrong, terribly wrong” about the war. Herbert says that he felt nothing but contempt for McNamara’s confession. I can understand why.

Herbert was drafted in the mid-1960s as the build up for the war got into full swing. He speaks of having expectations of the recruits being a tough bunch, who would somehow all look like John Wayne, only to find on the first day of basic training at Fort Dix, N.J. that he was a part of a motley gathering of mostly scared and skinny kids who looked like the guys he had gone to high school with. And that was who was shipped off to Vietnam in droves. Youngsters 18, 19, 20 and 21. Many would die there and many others would come back scarred forever. I know that it is all still very vivid in my mind because my husband was one of the first to go. Fortunately, he was an officer and in the Air Force, so although his tour of duty was surely no walk in the park, it was better than being among the droves of kids in the army.

Johnson and Mcnamara should have been looking out for those kids, who knew nothing about geopolitics, or why they were being turned into trained killers who, we were told, cold cold-bloodedly smoke the enemy – “Good shot!” and then kick back and smoke a Marlboro. Many of those kids would end up weeping on the battlefield, crying for their moms with their dying breaths. Or trembling uncontrollably as they watch buddies, covered in filth, bleed to death before their eyes, or sometimes, in their arms.

Herbert writes that he was lucky – he was sent to Korea, which according to him was no walk in the park, but it wasn’t Vietnam. But no one could really escape the horror of Vietnam. Herbert got letters from home that were heartbreaking as he learned of friend after friend who had been killed there.

He asked the same question that many of us asked at that time and that many more are asking today – why? And for what?

McNamara didn’t know. Herbert writes that his sister’s boyfriend got shot. And a very close friend of his came back from Vietnam so messed up psychologically that he killed his wife and himself.

I totally agree with Herbert who writes that the hardest lesson for people in power to accept is that wars are unrelentingly hideous enterprises, that they butcher people without mercy and therefore should be undertaken only when absolutely necessary.

Kids who are sent off to war are forced to grow up too fast. They soon learn what real toughness is, and it has nothing to do with lousy bureaucrats and armchair warriors sacrificing the lives of the young for political considerations and hollow, flag-waving, risk-free expressions of patriotic fervor. Amen to that!!

As it turned out, McNamara had realized early on that Vietnam was a lost cause, but he kept that crucial information close to his chest, like a gambler trying to bluff his way through a bad hand, as America continued to send tens of thousands to their doom. How in God’s name was he even able to look at himself in the mirror, Herbert asks. And found myself asking the same question – not only about Vietnam, but about our current debacle in Iraq.

So, lessons learned from Vietnam? Apparently none.

McNamara, relying on intelligence reports, told Johnson that evidence of the attack on American warships by North Vietnamese patrol boats was ironclad, but in actuality the attack never happened. Does that remind any of you of the “slam dunk” evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction?

How many more young men and women have to die? More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam and some 2 to 3 million Vietnamese. More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq and no one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. There have recently been seven more Americans G.I.’s killed in Afghanistan – a war that made sense in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but are all but senseless now.

I agree with Herbert who says that, none of these wars had clearly articulated goals or endgames. None were pursued with the kind of intensity and sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice that marked World War II. Wars are now mostly background noise, distant events overshadowed by celebrity deaths and the antics of Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford, and the like.

When will we and the politicians realize that the obscenity of war seems to be lost in our world today? That is a truly sad legacy to leave to our children.