American Bravado by Renford Reese

Author:Renford Reese [Reese, Renford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Americas, United States, Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government, International & World Politics, Political Science, History & Theory, Specific Topics, Globalization, Social Sciences, 20th Century, Relations
Amazon: B003O68EY6
Published: 2008-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot—without national humiliation—stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibilities I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives—even after we have paid terrible costs. (Undersecretary of State George Ball, Memo for President Johnson 1965)

The Vietnam War took an incalculable toll on U.S. and Vietnamese societies. Like Hiroshima, the U.S. created this man-made tragedy. Americans should learn about, then reflect on, the more than 58,000 American lives and the more than three million Vietnamese lives that were needlessly taken in this war. What could be more terroristic? Every American should know the story of My Lai.

On a morning in March of 1968, U.S. soldiers stormed a hamlet called My Lai on a “search and destroy” mission of communist fighters. Instead of killing communist soldiers, they slaughtered upwards of 300 unarmed civilians, leaving their bodies in ditches. If American soldiers never learned the terroristic lessons of My Lai, then they were bound to commit similar atrocities in Haditha.

Just as I visited the Memorial Peace Museum in Hiroshima, I also visited the Vietnam War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) for this book. I was not there during the war, so I wanted to visit to get a firsthand look at the archives—not from an American perspective but from the Vietnamese perspective. What I saw in the museum was not doctored by U.S. propaganda; it was the raw characterization of barbaric and inhumane American activities. There were so many bombs on display—bombs that were hundreds of pounds. I saw actual fetuses preserved in jars that were badly deformed by the widely used chemical Agent Orange. There were displays of others who were blinded, burned, and maimed by the chemical. There were pictures that represented the thousands of children born with birth defects because of Agent Orange. There was the unforgettable picture of an American GI holding the decapitated head of a Vietcong while smiling in conquest and puffing a cigarette.

Since George W. Bush never fought in Vietnam and did not possess the gruesome memories of war, it would have been good for him to also have visited the Vietnam War Remnants Museum before committing U.S. troops into Iraq. It is a mind-boggling irony that the U.S. fights so hard to keep countries from possessing weapons of mass destruction and biological and nuclear technology when we are the only country to have dropped an atomic bomb and the only country (besides Iraq) to have used chemical warfare on a wide scale basis. Why is there always an exception for American immorality? Why is such wrong always rationalized as such right?

Cambodia

Many compare the tangled history of Cambodia to the country’s ubiquitous banyan tree. As writer Bruce Sharp eloquently says:

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