True Story - Vietnam War

[PopSixSquish]

My high school history teacher served as an Army Journalist (eghads just like Al Gore)in Vietnam. One day in class, he showed us slides of pictures he took. There was one in particular of a bridge with a couple of GIs standing on it and another extremely young-looking GI sitting beside the bridge on the riverbank. Now this was near a village which had been "secured" (pay attention to that word in " ") and was going to become some sort of base.

The teacher paused at that point and then his voice broke as he said the following sentence. "The moment after I took this picture, that young GI on the riverbank was shot and killed by a sniper"

You could have heard a pin drop in the classroom. The teacher had tears streaming down his face. Almost 25 years later.

Why do I post this story? I don't know, but given some of the threads and posts I've seen on DU lately, I think we all need to remember that in Vietman there was no front, it didn't matter where you were.

Kinda like Iraq today. Just food for thought

[IkeWarnedUs]

1. Thank you for sharing this story n/t

[Eloriel]

2. Of course.

I was only an Army wife, whose husband came home. And the sister of an Air Force scope dope whose brother came home. Both of them in 1 piece, unharmed. Mostly. And MY wounds aren't healed yet, which I can tell all too often when some of the news out of Iraq is too, too familiar.

I think those Vietnam war vets who supported this war -- and there were plenty -- are still probably trying to believe that what they went through was necessary and important. I wish it were so. They were betrayed.

But for the rest of us in my generation, the absolute horrors of that war -- that unecessary war of lies -- were most definitely in our minds as we protested and tried to stop this one. We didn't want ANYone to go through that again.

See Dammit. I can still weep buckets.

I'm not a pacifist, not by a long shot. But -- well, we just didn't need to send any Americans to kill any brown-skinned people anywhere for no reason. Again. And have them come home broken, maimed, dead, emotionally and psychically destroyed or crippled. Or even"just" with memories that haunt 25 years later -- bad enough to make a grown man cry.

And how DOES one ever get over seeing someone alive, young, vital one minute and dead, killed out of the blue the next? How does one?

Eloriel

[trof]

6. Heard a 7 year POW intern speak Tuesday.

At the beginning of his speech I thought of several questions I wanted to ask when he finished. Like "How do you feel NOW about why you were there and the horror you went through? The politics of it? Have you read McNamara's book? Ellsberg's "Secrets"?" At the end, I couldn't. He still believed in why he was there and what he perceived he and the others had accomplished. I just did not have the heart to ask.
:-(

[GalleryGod]

3. The Ancient and Exotic City of Hue was particularly lovely

B-)

[Ernesto]

4. Yes it WAS

Just before TET I passed thru the city of Hue on top of a USMC 6-by. A month or so I passed thru after the shit hit the fan: what was left was not pretty..... Now AWOL has his own little Vietnam. The people keep a diein'

[Bandit]

5. So was the ancient and exotic city of Baghdad

Hue is again what it once was but I can't say the same for Baghdad.

[monchie]

7. Tears came to my eyes as well...

And I was immediately reminded of a guy named Buddy. We graduated the same year, 1968, from a Catholic high school outside Philly. Like me, he was a small kid, and I always suspected that led him to do things that would prove his manhood. Me, mostly I didn't give a shit about stuff like that.

I was looking forward to attending college in September and knew I'd have a draft deferment for the next four years. At the time I really wasn't either for or against the Vietnam War; it was sorta just there and irrelevant to me since I wasn't going to have to worry about it till 1972...by which time it would surely be over.

I'm sure Buddy could've gotten into college at that time. He was reasonably intelligent, did fairly well in school as far as I knew, and tuitions were much more reasonable back then and financial aid more plentiful. But Buddy decided to enlist in the Marines. I didn't understand it, but it fit in with his personality.

He wanted to be a man...a REAL man.

Immediately after graduation, like many of my classmates, I spent a few days at the Jersey shore in Wildwood for "senior week." Buddy was staying a few doors down in the same motel, and one night several us ended up in Buddy's room, drinking beer and watching TV, which that night was featuring John Wayne in "The Sands of Iwo Jima." As the American flag filled the screen at the end of the movie, Buddy and his buddy--another classmate, with whom he was enlisting under the Marines' "buddy system"--wobbily stood up and saluted.

That image is my last memory of Buddy.

I already knew he was scheduled to be inducted in September. Through friends, I heard sometime around January that he'd been shipped to Nam...around March or so, I heard he'd been wounded. In June 1969, almost a year to the day since I saw him saluting the TV screen in that Wildwood motel, he was dead.

You know, I'm not a pacifist. Heck, I wasn't even against the Vietnam War until it was almost over...when I found out how much our government lied to us in order to create public support for the war.

But when I think of people like Buddy, or that young soldier in the teacher's photo, whose lives were snuffed out because a government lied to us about war, I have to demand two things before I support a war: 1. The government has to have damn good reasons for the war; and 2. The government better not be lying to us.

In the Iraq war, the Shrub junta failed to live up to either of my demands.

[ChimpyMcSmirk]

8. That's so sad

My Father is a Vietnam Vet and everytime I hear about the war it makes me so sad. My dad left Vietnam in 1972 and to this very day he doesn't talk about anything that happened over there.