Bob Herbert: After the War Was Over

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07herbert.html

Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s icy-veined, cold-visaged and rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths, has died at the ripe old age of 93.

Long after the horror of Vietnam was over, McNamara would concede, in remarks that were like salt in the still festering wounds of the loved ones of those who had died, that he had been “wrong, terribly wrong” about the war. I felt nothing but utter contempt for his concession.

I remember getting my draft notice in the mid-1960s as Johnson’s military buildup for the war was in full swing. I’m not sure what I expected. Probably that the other recruits would be a tough bunch, that they would all look like John Wayne. I was staggered on the first day of basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., to be part of a motley gathering of mostly scared and skinny kids who looked like the guys I’d gone to high school with. Who looked, basically, pun intended, like me.

That’s who was shipped off to Vietnam in droves — youngsters 18, 19, 20 and 21. Many, of course, would die there, and many others would come back forever scarred.

(snip)
The obscenity of war is lost on most Americans, and that drains the death of Robert McNamara of any real significance.