Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wouldn't have gone there unless I thought the objective of a free and independent South Vietnam was a worthwhile one," he continues, "and it's fairly obvious that we didn't pursue that role at all effectively." Nevertheless, Smithies stresses American advisers' accomplishments in such areas as improving rice strains--"whatever side you're on politically, this was a useful thing," he says--and the importance of combating "the impression that everyone connected with Vietnam was a scoundrel...
...Vietnam War meant different things to the different people whose lives it affected. For the peasants of Vietnam, who for decades lived with the war's full horror, the violent death of family and friends became an everyday experience, the destruction of their native countryside a fact of life, and refugee camps often the only homes that remained after invading forces turned their villages to ashes. For many Vietnamese, the war was also a struggle for liberation, for national independence, for freedom...
...American government and military leaders who chose to treat Vietnam as a test case in their theory of falling dominoes, the war was a trial of will power. Only by remaining obdurate in the face of overwhelming resistance, they believed, could the United States remain true to its national destiny; and only through continuing, escalating application of force and cruelty could that resistance be contained...
...American soldiers who carried out these men's orders. Vietnam was a strange land where they killed people with whom they had no reasonable quarrel, and where 55,000 of them were killed in their turn...
...left to heal. For the American government that inflicted these wounds, the end of the war is a defeat, a humiliation, a stigma, to be minimized in the eyes of the world and forgotten as quickly as possible. But for all President Ford's admonitions that we put Vietnam behind us, we cannot forget it. Too many innocent people died there, too much of our knowledge of the United States and the world derives from events there, too much of our own lives--as students growing up in the America that bombed harmless villages--has been bound up with Vietnam...