The DOD rewrites history for millions of students on the Vietnam War.
In 2012, the Pentagon kicked off a 13-year program to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, complete with a sprawling website that includes a "history and education" component. Billed as a "public service" provided by the Department of Defense, the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration site boasts of its "resources for teachers and students in the grades 7-12" and includes a selection of official government documents, all of them produced from 1943-1954; that is, only during the earliest stages of modern US involvement in what was then called Indochina.
The Vietnam War Commemoration's educational aspirations, however, extend beyond students. "The goal of the History and Education effort," according to the site, "is to provide the American public with historically accurate materials and interactive experiences that will help Americans better understand and appreciate the service of our Vietnam War veterans and the history of US involvement in the Vietnam War." To that end, the United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration offers an interactive historical timeline.
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History is bunk
Take the August 2, 1964, "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". It was a key moment of American escalation and, by the looks of the Pentagon's historical timeline, just what president Lyndon Johnson made it out to be when he went on television to inform the American people of "open aggression" on the part of North Vietnam. "The USS Maddox was attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin," reads the entry. A later one mentions "US Naval Vessels being fired upon by North Vietnamese on two separate occassions [sic]." Case closed. Or is it?
With that in mind, I turned to Fredrik Logevall, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam and author of Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, a landmark study of American policymaking on Vietnam from 1963 to 1965. When it came to the Commemoration's take on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, he told me that "some context for this entry is sorely needed".
"There's little doubt in my mind that the administration entered the month of August [1964] looking for a pretext to flex a little muscle in Vietnam," he added. "Finally, it should be said the administration misrepresented what occurred in the Gulf, particularly with respect to the alleged second attack on August 4th, which evidence even at the time showed almost certainly never happened."
None of this essential context can, of course, be found anywhere in the timeline. Still, everyone makes mistakes, so I meandered through the Pentagon's chronology looking at other key entries.
Soon, I found the one dealing with My Lai.
On March 15, 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division's Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, ahead of an operation in an area they knew as "Pinkville." As unit member Harry Stanley recalled, Medina "ordered us to 'kill everything in the village.'" Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina's words only slightly differently: they were to "kill everything that breathed." What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn's mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: "Are we supposed to kill women and children?" And Medina's reply: "Kill everything that moves."
Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area's drinking water. It took a year and a half for a cover-up that extended from soldiers in the field to generals at the top of the division to unravel - thanks in large measure to veterans Ron Ridenhour and Ron Haberle and crack investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.
More than 40 years later, the Department of Defense is still operating from the same playbook. The Vietnam War Commemoration's interactive timeline refers to My Lai as an "incident" not a massacre, the death toll is listed at "more than 200" instead of
more than 500, and it singles out only Lieutenant Calley (who certainly had plenty of blood on his hands) as if the deaths of all those Vietnamese civilians, carried out by dozens of men at the behest of higher command, could be the fault of just one junior officer.
So much more including the bombing of Cambodia rewrite which triggered Kent State.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-02-190214.html
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