After a week of Vietnam remembrance stories from the corporate bootlicker media, culminating in today's marking of the 30th anniversary of the last American troops pulling out of Saigon, I found the stances of the two countries markedly different.
In Ho Chi Minh City, the natives bustle about on their mopeds, beeping in celebration. Here, we go through the usual honor-guard rituals of flag-folding and hand-holding.
This is not a small thing to me; a very dear uncle of mine did two tours in 'nam in the Marines, the second as a platoon leader. He went voluntarily -- unlike W., unlike Cheney, unlike Ted "I'm such a tough guy that I shit my pants and let it get caked in for ten days so the draft board would give me a psych deferment" Nugent -- because he had been told by his leaders that his country needed him.
He came back disillusioned and soaked in Agent Orange, doing drugs to kill the pain of having to do the things he did while he was there. He eventually died in 2001, right after his 52nd birthday, broke and burned-out, wasting away in a spare bedroom in his sister's single-wide while his transplanted liver went south on him, slowly, inexorably.
So I certainly feel for all those families profiled whose loved ones never came back, or who never even got any closure because they were MIA. It sucks. But it also sucks that the whole thing was preventable, that it never should have happened, that we visited unprecedented savagery on a nation that hadn't done shit to us, but refused to capitulate to us, no matter how dirty and scorched-earth we got on them.
What's amazing is how quickly the Vietnamese have forgiven us, and let it all go, and actually like us now. Think about it -- we carpet-bombed them for over a decade, killed enough of their civilian population to be counted in percentage points, and didn't even have the goddamn courtesy to be halfway gracious losers and throw them a freakin' bone -- and they let it all go, quite a while ago.
We still can't let it go; we still hang on to it furiously, tenaciously. We don't begrudge them, but losing sticks in our collective craw, so we can't admit it to ourselves. And it's a stain on our national soul, that dirty war, just as surely as slavery is, if not quite the same in degree. Reparation would have been a small chance to absolve some of that collective guilt, and we passed it up vaingloriously, because that's how we do things. As with slavery, that chance has long since passed, so we occasionally pick at the scab that has festered in its place for so long.
We had to work it out with a seemingly endless set of cathartic movies. It's a sad statement, a culture that can only assuage itself with Deerhunter and Platoon, rather than just looking itself in the eye and coming clean. Certainly it's not a unique phenomenon; Germany has its periodic spasms of post-Nazi nationalism, knowing better but needing to expunge its baser nationalist guilt somehow, someway. Still, sometimes you actually have to do things that demonstrate you're better than all the rest, rather than just repeating it like a mantra.
I respectfully suggest that if we want to do more with our commemorations of a dismal day which capped a nightmarish decade -- do something more than dick around with flag rituals and ogle cenotaphs -- we may pay a bit more attention to how we are collectively handling our current conflict, and the accountability of our leaders who may just be lying still, and always, while our brothers and sisters and uncles go hither and yon to chase shadows for a feckless little man and his pelf-grubbing henchmen.
And we may ponder for a second, in the service of our vaunted Judeo-Christian ethical code, which is centered really around but one golden rule -- do unto others as you would have others do unto you -- and wonder what exactly the Vietnamese might know that we don't. We lost three thousand people in a senseless morning of violence, and we've spent every minute since turning the world upside down in a reactive rage, and altered human history for all time. And we'll keep doing it for an undetermined amount of time, blood, and resources.
They lost three million people over the course of a brutal, unremitting invasion, after decades of colonialism -- and when it was all over, they picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and went right back to what they had been doing. That was their only option, so they took it.
We have all options at our disposal and strangely, we jumped at the worst one, even though we had supposedly learned our lesson from before.
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Take Care And Thanks
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Hi Heywood J.
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Hi Heywood J.
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Take Care And Thanks
Sterling Myers