The American War (what the Vietnamese call it)
[letter sent to NPR--December, 1999]
hi
During the week of Nov 8, you aired a Talk of the Nation
with Melinda Penkava and two gentlemen discussing the
'rules of war'--a fine oxymoron if there ever was one. At
one point, there was an exchange between a German and a
British gentlemen--the latter in high dudgeon about 'how
dare he compare the Vietnam involvement to the Nazi's in
World War II', set off initially by a discussion of lack
of war crimes tribunals for the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre.
What I found appalling in this whole program was the lack
of mention of even the most basic, generally accepted facts
about Vietnam.
An objective assessment of the situation would have
described our involvement as "the failed US invasion of
South Vietnam". Most of the war was fought there and most
of the bombs were dropped there.
The human costs of this terribly wrong, utterly criminal
adventure by the US were horrifying. And they have been
conveniently forgotten by the country--the US--that
perpetrated them. They have certainly not been punished--
even a symbolic way.
The US killed approximately 1 million Vietnamese soldiers
and a staggering 2 million Vietnamese civilians,
primarily in the South. Perhaps another 1 to 2 million
people (mostly civilians) perished if missing persons and
persons in surrounding countries (Laos, Cambodia) are
included. Finally, about 60,000 Americans were killed and
an equal number of Vietnam veterans committed suicide in
the intervening years. The US action created 5 *million*
Vietnamese refugees, out of a total South Vietnamese
population at the time of 15 million. The US destroyed
about 25% of the forests and mangrove swamps in the country
with carcinogenic defoliants, thousands of tons of which
remain there to this day. We scraped 10% of the countryside
down to the mud with battalions of giant bulldozers. We
dropped fiberglass anti-personnel bombs because the glass
fragments were harder to find with X-rays after they
had sliced into living human bodies.
The US/Vietnam war was a horrible US war crime. The large
majority of people we killed were innocent civilians--millions
of them. We tore the limbs off of millions of others who
survived anyway. To this day, 10,000 people a year die in
Laos from unexploded cluster bombs. For comparison, this was
a thousand times worse (in simple numbers of people
killed) than anything done by Slobodan Milosevic and the
Serbs.
I find it embarrassing and disgusting to have this horrible
US crime again humanity swept under the carpet year after year,
by the supposedly civilized commentators in the country that
was responsible for it.
And we didn't even win. So the 'moral' of the story is not
that winners never get accused. It's that the world's richest
country has no morals.
cheers,
marty
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Martin I. Sereno, Associate Professor
Cognitive Science Department 0515
University of Calif., San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0515
URL: http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~sereno/
email: sereno@cogsci.ucsd.edu
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