Proper Homage
Most of the people I know who went to Vietnam with the military didn’t want to talk about it, especially with someone who hadn’t been. I hadn’t gone as a solider and never would have, since I believed the war to be illegal as well as immoral. I might have gone as a television news producer for ABC, by whom I was employed for much of the Seventies, but I didn’t and I can’t say that I miss having been there.
The war in Vietnam turned the corner on the idea that everyone thought slaughtering strangers in the name of an oblique notion -- in this case, falling dominoes — was a good idea. The Korean War hadn’t won any popularity contest, but a lot of people saw justification in it, mostly fed by the Red Scare-ism of McCarthy, Nixon, and the cowardly mass that backed them with fanatical fears and chilling silence.
Now World War Two, that was a good war. Maybe the last. But as wonderful as was our cause, the fact is that good ole WWII was as replete with horrors and ghastly mistakes as any other conflict that survives only on blood and pain. Consider that what most made the war good was that we were defending ourselves, retaliating for the attack on our sovereign selves at Pearl Harbor 59 years ago. What is more noble, after all, than to repel the aggressor and exact a just victory.
Well, it’s not so simple if you spend any time with history. You will read an awful lot about how Roosevelt knew that the Japanese were considering an attack against the U.S. or our Pacific interests. And you’ll find considerable speculation that he actually knowingly pushed them into the early morning raid on Pearl Harbor that Sunday in 1941. Did he know it would be Hawaii? Would he not have warned the fleet? Could he be sure that we could recover from whatever damage they might inflict? Or did he think that the attack would be against the Philippines and/or other Pacific possessions?
The Navy knew of the vulnerability of Pearl, but chose to ignore it. Years earlier, one of their own staged a mock attack against the ships in the harbor and the planes on the field. It also took place early on a Sunday morning. Of course, the officer who created the demonstration suffered injury to his career, and we lost 2400 men, five battleships, and 200 planes when the Japanese did attack.
But of course it was the Japanese who had made the biggest mistake. Their military and political leaders were more fatally egotistical than ours. The war in the Pacific was turned around six months later at Midway, but the Japanese didn’t surrender for another three years and millions of lost lives.
It is surely the right thing to honor those living and dead who fought in a war that we might be free, but to leave it there does not pay proper homage to their service. War is insanity, and we must all speak up against it as we actively seek alternative methods for resolving differences, whether they be on the West Bank, in Londonderry, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Kosovo, Somalia, East Timor, Chechnya, Bogota, Kashmir, Iraq, Sudan....
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.