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In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South
Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the
United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one
American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos, by linking such loss to
the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is
to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of
hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We are probably much more angry than that, and I
don't want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I am
outclassed here. I know that all of you talk about every possible
alternative to getting out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know you
have considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and
I am not going to try to dwell on that, but I want to relate to you the
feeling that many of the men who have returned to this country express
because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about
Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort
by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any
colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese
whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put
to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them
from.
We found most people didn't even know the difference
between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice
paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning
their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything
to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the
United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they
practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force
was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or
American.
We found also that all too often American men were
dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We
saw firsthand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt
dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a
one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the
highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by
American bombs as well as by search-and-destroy missions, as well as by
Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to
blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save
them. We saw America lose its sense of morality as it accepted very
coolly a Mylai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers
who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting
anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on
the lives of Orientals.
We watched the United States' falsification of body
counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while
month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to
break. We fought using weapons against "Oriental human beings," we
fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this
country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater,
or let us say a non-third-world people theater. And so we watched while
men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken,
and, after losing one platoon or two platoons, they marched away to
leave the hill for the reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched
pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas
because we couldn't lose and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't
matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so
there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881s and Fire Base 6s
and so many others.
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