Our Sixties by Paul Lauter

Author:Paul Lauter [Lauter, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, History, United States, 20th Century, Social History
ISBN: 9781580469906
Google: nAo7EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2020-01-15T01:01:03+00:00

That evening buildings were destroyed, everything. Many people were injured and entire families were wiped out—from the youngest to the oldest. In one family, five generations were killed together, the baby inside its pregnant mother, the son, the mother, the grandmother and the great grandmother. In one family there were nine children, and their parents died. We spent that week digging out the shelters, looking for missing people. The smell of the dead was terrible. We collected the bodies in one place, and the wounded were taken to the hospital. To be fair, the Vietnamese didn’t send troops to invade America. Never, never forget. We remember the war. We remember our losses. All the little children—nine years old, thirteen, they had committed no war crimes for the Americans to come and kill them. When they died in the bombings, their eyes popped out from the compression. Their bodies were mangled. Small children and old people. They lived here, and worked their whole lives here. They never sent troops to America. They never took one plant, one leaf from America. Why did the Americans come to destroy everything, to kill the people, to kill small children, to kill even pregnant women—why? Don’t the American people even know why?

Americans had begun asking the same questions. Indeed, getting Americans to ask such questions was the major concern of the peace movement. The war-makers had the bully pulpit of the presidency, the assurances of success pronounced daily by the generals, and the patriotic suppositions about their country’s morality. Most Americans accepted those views, at least at first. They believed the messages of anti-communism inculcated by virtually every cultural institution in the United States. They knew the sacrifices young Americans were making on the fields of valor—or shame—in Vietnam.

We in the peace movement had … the truth.

That truth about the American mission in Vietnam had been framed early on in the struggle against the war by ex–Green Beret Donald Duncan: “The whole thing was a lie.”13 Now, half a century later, we have the knowledge brought by overwhelming, authoritative sources. Millions of Americans have by now seen the powerful film about the Vietnam War made by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. I question much about the film, especially its failure to portray accurately the antiwar movement.14 But Burns and Novick are clear about one thing: young GIs, dedicated to their country, were betrayed by the mendacity and incompetence of their leaders, civilian and military. While the film focuses on the American scene, it makes a parallel case, accurately or not, about the Vietnamese soldiers and their leaders.15 Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, William Westmoreland, and down the chains of command, lied and lied again to the men and women they sent into battle, to the American people, to the Congress, and often to one another.

The same conclusion emerged in serious exhibitions like that at the New-York Historical Society (2018), as well as in new scholarly articles and books based on recently available materials from US and Vietnamese archives.

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