It was our first reality check on war. Every night, the news would stream the names of those soldiers who were either killed, missing or had become prisoners, across the screen, in what seemed to be never ending. There were no clips of the "Donut Dollies", the women of the USO seeing our troops off, only stark cold reality. We learned then, by the coffins returning home, by the pictures of the little girl running, screaming down the road as her body was covered with napalm, by the men returning home, that war is hell.
Hollywood would no longer glamorize war. The images of John Wayne and Audie Murphy valiantly driving off into the sunset in their jeeps were replaced with Robert Duvall and John Voight trying to hold on to their sanity. For the first time in the history of the US, our soldiers were not greeted with a hero’s welcome, but were advised to not to wear their uniforms when they returned home.
I was still a kid when the Vietnam War ended in 1975, but old enough to have the images of the nightly news burned into my brain. I remember going to the airport to see my uncle off and then being there when he returned. There was a change, subtle, yet still enough where a young girl can pick up on the difference. To this day, if he talks about Vietnam at all, there's a change in his demeanor, but him talking about Nam is rare.
Thirty years after that war, a war that sent home thousands of men to struggle with the hell of war, you'd have thought our government would have learned. Instead, there's arguments about how much to fund the treatment of those returning from Iraq. Walter Reed should never have happened, there should be no need to make campaign promises of increasing the healthcare/mental healthcare of the returning soldiers. We should have already had that in place.
Our country has seemed to learn some things and conveniently forget about others when it came to Nam. We learned that we should support our troops, however, their idea of supporting our troops means allowing them to be fed to a plan that gives no clear mission, no set goal in accomplishing the mission. Hussain's long dead, we should have been pulling back our troops, instead we're sending more.
Soldiers in Nam saw those who once were their allies, start turning against them, to a point where distinguishing the "enemy" became harder to do. Yet in Iraq, we've seen the turning point where those who welcomed us as liberators, now turn against the occupiers. We accomplished the mission, but we stayed anyway. Instead of helping rebuild a country, our government raped the treasury, built bases and continue to send more American and coalition troops and Iraqi civilians to their death.
Our government has learned to play on our mistakes of the past. The you're either with us or against us, calling into question the patriotism of those who opposed the war, began to split the country. Indeed, they learned lessons from Nam, but the wrong lessons.
As our soldiers return, they'll be faced with repairing their lives. No soldier will be untouched by it. Some will come back to lost marriages, lost jobs and a loss in identity. Others will come back in worse shape, with months, if not years, of rehab. And then others, won't be back at all.
Look into the eyes of a Vietnam Vet. You may have to look deep, but you'll see it, even if it's a brief moment, the haunted look, the memory of a war long ago. We've let these men down and it seems our government still hasn't learned, the lessons from Nam.
Update: Meteor Blades pointed out something extremely important that I deliberately did not address in this diary.
For the first time in the history of the US, our soldiers were not greeted with a hero’s welcome, but were advised to not to wear their uniforms when they returned home.
Quite true. But let's not repeat the lie that antiwar protesters spit on them.
I never saw it occur, so I cannot validate whether or not it did happen. My mention of how the soldiers came home was the perceived treatment that they've received. We've as a country had vowed that we wouldn't allow our soldiers return to that perceived treatment again, however, there are politicians who would point to these perceived instances to justify that American people should support the war, thus supporting the troops, and if we weren't for the war, we didn't support the troop. By being able to twist events, they were able to stifle some voices, who otherwise would have spoken up against the Iraq War.