Vietnam and Iraq: A Twice-Told Tale; Again, We Did Know Better

[unhappycamper]

Vietnam and Iraq: A Twice-Told Tale; Again, We Did Know Better
Ron Glasser
Posted July 23, 2007 | 02:40 PM (EST)

"Robert McNamara (secretary of defense) reflecting on the decisions of the spring and early summer of 1965 (decisions that sent us into war in Vietnam) recalled that "we were sinking into quicksand." It was, however, a quicksand of his and the president's making -- a quicksand of lies."
Page 243, Dereliction of Duty, by H.R. McMaster, Harper Collins



In August last year, I was asked to speak to a freshman class at UCLA about our war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The talk, based on a book I had written titled Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq, was to describe the national and personal costs of both wars, but specifically the astonishing numbers of severely wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who would have simply died in the jungles of Vietnam. Some 400 students, all science majors, pre-med or pre-law, the freshman elite of UCLA, filed into Schoenberg Hall for what had been listed as a mandatory 10 o'clock lecture.

The students didn't even begin to listen. I might as well have been talking about the First World War or the Battle of the Bulge. They sat there -- listening to iPods, reading the newspaper, talking on cell phones, text messaging someone or simply leaning back in their seats and looking at the clock on the wall, finishing their midmorning lattes -- as I explained about the 17- and 18-year-old medics in Vietnam carrying M&Ms to give to soldiers too severely wounded even for morphine, whispering that the candies were for the pain while they waited for the choppers. They were equally uninterested that U.S. casualties evacuated from Iraq and the war in Afghanistan required amputations in numbers not seen since the Civil War, and that after three years of war there was no answer to increasing numbers of devastating and irreversible brain injuries resulting from the shock waves of exploding roadside bombs.

Ten minutes into the talk, even those who had feigned interest had given up, sinking the whole of the auditorium into a stupor of self-absorbed indifference. Yet the week I gave my talk, the numbers of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan had passed 2,500 and the number of wounded had pushed past some 40,000.

I mentioned that early in the war the administration had used the relatively small number of deaths not only as an example of our troops' success, but also as an indication of the lack of risk they faced. But the death toll in this war was never the true indication of the severity of the fighting, nor of the risks involved. Unlike Vietnam, where the number of casualties to deaths was 2.4-to-1, in this war the ratio is 16-to-1. Because of better body armor and improvements in battlefield medicine, soldiers survive today who would have been dead in Vietnam. It is not the graveyard that is legacy of this war, but the neurosurgical unit and the orthopedic ward.

It was more then amnesia that had sent these 400 students into their reveries. It was a complete lack of communal or personal interest in those our government had sent, in their name, to run the most dangerous roads in the world. No one cared.

~snip~

For those of us who were part of Vietnam, the confusion, the growing exhaustion of the troops, the suffering, shifting about of priorities and objectives, the pronouncements of success that ignored the reality on the ground, the increasing numbers of casualties had begun to merge the jungles of Vietnam with the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan.


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