Vietnam: A perspective

Visiting Vietnam, you can’t avoid wondering about the dreadful war in the 60s. The United States started sending troops to Vietnam to support French in 1950’s. Over the following 25 years, the conflict escalated. Five million people died. The reaction in the West was violent. Soldiers died. People came out in force to oppose involvement. I marched with the protestors.

The West lost; depending on whose version you read. Go to the war museum in Hanoi or visit the old palace in Ho Chi Minh and see for yourself how the Vietnamese saw us. It is not pretty. Is their view valid? Of course. Is our view valid? Yes. With war, there is no winning: everyone loses. There can be no moral support for war.

The US saw it as a noble cause. It was not. It was an effort to maintain Western superiority in a land where culture and community had been established centuries before the west even stopped picking the fleas from their armpits.

The Vietnam was a venture that only shamed the West. One of LBJ’s claims was that we needed to support South Vietnam’s independence. Not true. Stop the Commies. Play dominoes. Be careful. They might topple and our influence will be lost. That drove them. So we sent young men from the USA, Australia and other countries, fresh from high school, to fight thousands of miles away against a people no one understood.

China had established itself in its own image. It differed from the West’s view. Markedly. Ideologies: we cannot afford to to allow others to develop in a different way to ourselves. This lies at the base of the twenty first century’s hatred of Islam. A vexed question. War is never a solution.

As I wrote in a poem in 2016, why?

We who are lying in the fields of war

Can no longer cry out for freedom.

We who are dying as the spoils of war

Can no longer lift up our guns.

Does anyone hear the wail of our moaning?

Does anyone see us march on? Unafraid?

We whisper unheard from the silences of night

Suspended forever in realms without light.

Our heart is gone; our sacrifice unseen

As time grinds on and our hopes explode.

What remains? The bones of our youth.

Unknown? Unnoticed?

Tell us why?