Unafraid by Jeff Golden

Author:Jeff Golden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: L&R Publishing
Published: 2008-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

26 CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The 9,943rd and last American serviceman killed in Vietnam, a 21-year-old marine corporal from Cheyenne, Wyoming named Matthew Kauth, died on St. Patrick’s day, March 17, 1967. The last troops were airlifted out to an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin two days later.

In the following month dozens of South Vietnam’s military and political leaders who hadn’t evacuated with the Americans were executed. The best estimates suggest that in 1967 the new government killed some two thousand Vietnamese for complicity with the French or the Americans.

The administration faced harsher criticism than any time since the Dallas shooting. A few editorials wondered how well Kennedy would bear the mantle of the first American president ever to lose a war. One syndicated cartoon showed in the left panel a terrified Kennedy shedding beads of sweat as he sprinted away from a beach labeled “Bay of Pigs.” In the right panel an identical little figure sprinted away from a map of Vietnam. Below the two panels ran the caption “THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE.”

Richard Nixon, still on the national banquet circuit for his party, offered to an Indianapolis audience the durable Santayana quote about the fate of those who can’t remember the past. He spoke of his personal sorrow at having to bear once more the bitter fruit of Democratic appeasement and capitulation to communism. “My friends,” he said, “nearly ten thousand of our boys have died in those far-off jungles and rice paddies. Ten...thousand! Just let me say, my friends, that it would take an enormous monument just to list all of their names.”

Kennedy said little about the toll that the bloody purge of South Vietnam took on him. Part of the April 2, 1967 entry of his office diary reads, “At the outset of any military adventure, back when the flags first fly and the happy bugles first sound, this must be remembered: there lies ahead, out of anyone’s sight, an unavoidable fork in the road where either path leads to more suffering and more death.”

For weeks much of the world watched the Kremlin carefully, wondering how and if the American withdrawal from the Cold War’s principal battlefield would embolden the Soviets. The observable changes over the next few months were not dramatic. The military leaders of Poland, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia all suppressed pro-American demonstrations in their capitals. Guerilla activities picked up temporarily in northern Laos and Burma, but the Soviets were unable to establish a firm presence there. In memoirs published many years later General Semenov describes his frustration at trying to turn the American withdrawal to their advantage. “We belatedly discovered,” he wrote, “that the American presence in Southeast Asia was our most effective organizing implement. We were like two blocks leaning against one another in the region — when one was removed, the other had to fall.”

Closer to home the Soviets proposed the installation of a new package of weaponry, including a battery of tactical conventional missiles, in Cuba. The President found out about the offer and its rejection directly from Fidel Castro.

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