A
national veterans group launched a campaign in response to the Defense
Department’s “sanitized” commemoration of the conflict in Vietnam.
By Jon Overton
IOWA
CITY, Ia. — The notion that the general public might hold an ounce of faith in
Washington is strangely foreign nowadays, but near the start of the Vietnam
War, nearly 80 percent of Americans said they almost always or mostly trust the
federal government, according to data
compiled by the Pew Research Center.
Since
the disastrous debacle in Vietnam, trust in Washington never truly recovered
from that hit to the government’s credibility.
Hoping
to ensure that Americans do not forget that earth-shattering war, Veterans for
Peace held a service last month outside the Johnson County Courthouse on the
50th anniversary of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that launched the
Vietnam War.
The
organization drew attention to the federal government’s recently launched $65
million memorial campaign that the
veterans group feared would glorify the Vietnam War and glaze over its
troubling history.
“We
think, as Veterans for Peace, that this is going to make mythical the actions
of American soldiers and minimize the damage we’ve done in these cultures, the
killing we’ve done to all the people: agent orange, generations of suffering,
unexploded landmines that still plague [the Vietnamese people],” said John Jadryev,
president of Iowa City’s chapter of Veterans for Peace.
 |
| A crowd of supporters gathers before the Vietnam memorial service. (Jon Overton/Iowa Peace Network) |
In
response to the Defense Department’s initiative, Veterans for Peace launched a
campaign called, Full
Disclosure, which seeks to promote a more accurate view of the Vietnam War.
In
an official
statement, the veterans said the federal government’s official version of
events failed to acknowledge the suffering of the Vietnamese people, harm to the
troops who fought in the war, and the existence of widespread domestic protests
and unrest in response to the Vietnam War, among other disreputable facets of
the conflict.
Steve
Hanken, a member of Veterans for Peace, said he was unaware of the arguably
sinister nature of the war while serving in Vietnam.
“After
completing over 18 months in Vietnam and heading into my final extension — cause
I was foolish enough to make two extensions — I was still naïve, and I was
thinking that there was some moral reason that we should be there, but maybe I
was just not smart enough to figure it out,” he said.
Hanken
also spoke of an encounter with a purportedly retired soldier working in
Vietnamese schools for USAID. The officer told Hanken that his real job was to
track down and assassinate suspected members of the Viet Cong, often in their
own homes. Although Hanken didn’t believe the soldier at the time, he later
learned of several programs that conducted operations like those described by
the soldier in Vietnam.
Back
in 2003, the Toledo Blade reported
in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation that an elite U.S. Army unit, called
the Tiger Force was responsible for an untold number of atrocities in Vietnam.
“One
soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings,”
the Blade reported. “... Platoon members strung the ears on shoe laces to wear
around their necks, reports state. There was a period when just about everyone
had a necklace of ears ... A 13-year-old girl’s throat was slashed after she
was sexually assaulted, and a young mother was shot to death after soldiers
torched her hut.”
Members
of Veterans for Peace also connected the Vietnam War to more recent conflicts
where the United States has been involved. Jadryev, the Iowa City chapter
president, pointed to damage caused long after the U.S. military withdraws from
warzones like unexploded
landmines in Vietnam that still kill people today and parts of Iraq contaminated
by the use of radioactive weapons containing depleted uranium.
“We’ve
gotta start dealing with people the way we would want them to deal with us,”
Hanken said. “The things that you learn in the second grade for god’s sake, we
don’t know, or we've forgotten at least in the White House and in the Pentagon,
and in Washington D.C.”
Jon Overton is the Media Editor of Iowa Peace Network and an undergraduate at the University of Iowa studying Ethics & Public Policy and Sociology.
No comments:
Post a Comment