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Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while
American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible
arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
Each day to facilitate the process by which the
United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his
life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something the
entire world already knows, so that we can't say we have made a
mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these
are his words, "the first president to lose a war."
We are asking Americans to think about that because:
how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you
ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to
do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if
you read carefully the president's last speech to the people of this
country, you can see that he says, and says clearly, "but the issue,
gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not
we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will
try to give it hope to be a free people." But the point is they are not
a free people now under us, they are not a free people, and we cannot
fight communism all over the world. I think we should have learned that
lesson by now.
But the problem of veterans goes beyond this
personal problem, because you think about a poster in this country with
a picture of Uncle Sam and the picture says, "I want you." And a young
man comes out of high school and says, "That is fine, I am going to
serve my country," and he goes to Vietnam and he shoots and he kills
and he does his job or maybe he doesn't kill, maybe he just goes and he
comes back, and when he gets back to this country he finds that he
isn't really wanted, because the largest employment figure in the
country - it varies depending on whom you get it from, the VA
Administration fifteen percent, various other sources twenty-two
percent - the largest corps of unemployed in this country are veterans
of this war, and of those veterans thirty-three percent of the
unemployed are black. That means one out of every ten of the nation's
unemployed is a veteran of Vietnam.
The hospitals across the country won't or can't meet
their demands. It is not a question of not trying, they haven't got the
appropriations. A man recently died after he had a tracheotomy in
California, not because of the operation, but because there weren't
enough personnel to clean the mucus out of his tube and he suffocated
to death.
Another young man just died in a New York VA
hospital the other day. A friend of mine was lying in a bed two beds
away and tried to help him but he couldn't. He rang a bell and there
was nobody there to service that man and so he died of convulsions.
Fifty-seven percent, I understand fifty-seven
percent, of all those entering the VA hospitals talk about suicide.
Some twenty-seven percent have tried, and they try because they come
back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam,
and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that
doesn't really care.
Suddenly we are faced with a very sickening
situation in this country because there is no moral indignation and, if
there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past
indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me.
The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as
serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of seven
hundred thousand lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of
all time.
But we are here as veterans to say that we think we
are in the midst of the greatest disaster of all time now because they
are still dying over there, and not just Americans, Vietnamese, and we
are rationalizing leaving that country so that those people can go on
killing each other for years to come. Americans seem
to have accepted
the idea that the war is winding down, at least for Americans, and they
have also allowed the bodies which were once used by a president for
statistics to prove that we were winning that war to be used as
evidence against a man who followed orders and who interpreted those
orders no differently than hundreds of other men in Vietnam.
We veterans can only look with amazement on the fact
that this country has been unable to see that there is absolutely no
difference between ground troops and a helicopter crew, and yet people
have accepted a differentiation fed them by the administration.
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