Smoking out Vietnam War truths

[bemildred]

No here is a "never forget" I can agree with.

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During the Vietnam era, the Pentagon took great pains to lie, spin, cover-up and bury the truth about the war. As someone who has spent the better part of the past decade investigating and revealing long suppressed information about US war crimes investigations that were kept secret and buried away, the Vietnam War 50th anniversary commemoration program's embrace of Nixon's quote didn't surprise me a bit.

In recent years, a sizeable and powerful segment of the military establishment - dubbed the "Crusaders" <3> by Vietnam veteran and professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Andrew Bacevich - has embraced a counterfeit history of the war.

Following the works of revisionist historians like Lewis Sorley, whose A Better War (like Nixon's No More Vietnams) claims the US military won the conflict in Vietnam but gave it away on the home front, the Crusaders and their fellow travelers have constructed the fictional history that Nixon always longed for and expunged the most salient feature of the conflict: Vietnamese civilian suffering.

Which brings me to Vietnam War historian Keith Nolan.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MC12Ae01.html