How much time was spent in your history classes about the millions of Vietnamese people USA killed?

[NNN0LHI]

Did your teachers go into this subject in any depth? Did they mention The Christmas Bombings?

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1224-04.htm


Published on Tuesday, December 24, 2002 by the Boston Globe
The Christmas Bombings
by James Carroll

CHRISTMAS EVE seems made for memory. I remember being wedged among my brothers, all of us between our parents, in the crowded balcony of St. Mary's Church for midnight Mass. The aroma of incense, the hissing of a nearby radiator, the unpadded kneeler hard against my knees, my mother's rosary beads swaying below her tan gloves.

The best part of Christmas Eve was the cold, clean air coming out of church, the ride home in the car, the exotic feeling of being out so late. The worst part - how impossible it was to keep my eyes from fluttering shut even as my brothers debated whether Santa Claus would come to a house whose occupants were all away at Mass.

But as the music of bells and carols yield to the drums of a mounting military cadence, America about to go to war, another Christmas memory intrudes. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam. For people of a certain age, the thought of that unprecedented air assault, lasting from Dec. 18- 30, intermittently disturbs the tranquility of the otherwise holy season. How staggered we were at reports of the bombs falling day and night on cities across North Vietnam. Hanoi and Haiphong were especially hard hit.

American pilots flew nearly 4,000 sorties, including more than 700 by high-flying B-52s. Those ''area bombers,'' incapable of precision, had never been used against cities before. That they were used now was a sure sign that this was terror bombing pure and simple.

Washington said its penultimate air campaign was necessary because Hanoi had balked at the peace talks, but most of the balking was obviously coming from Washington's Saigon ally. Everyone could see that the bombing was a final venting of frustration and rage by a superpower faced with ignominious defeat.

The reason to remember the Christmas bombing of 1972 is not to feel morally superior to those responsible for it. Rather, it is to understand something basic to the experience of war. Here is the most important truth of this memory: Those who ordered and carried out the brutal attacks against population centers at the end of the Vietnam War would never have done so at the beginning. What Nixon commanded in 1972 he would have condemned in 1969.

The war transformed America's moral sensibility; the war deadened it. It had happened before. In 1939, the American president pleaded with the nations that had gone to war in Europe; ''Under no circumstance,'' FDR said, ''undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.'' By the end of that war, the US Air Force had defined itself as an instrument of urban destruction, replacing cities with piles of rubble (81 of Japan's largest 120 cities were obliterated from the air, even before Hiroshima). What Washington abhorred at the beginning was taken for granted by the end. snip


Or did they kind of act like this stuff never happened. In other words was it kind of like our entire country is in denial of what we really did?

Don

[Mojorabbit]

1. It wasn't history

when this ole fart was in school. It was happening real time.

[rinsd]

2. I had 3 years of history 15 years ago in HS.

First year was world civilizations that took us from Sumeria all the way to the Renaissance.

2nd year dealt with US history from the colonial period up thru the Civil War.

3rd dealt with US history starting with the Gilded Age to modern times with 1960 and beyond encompassing about 2 weeks worth of classroom instruction.

[PDJane]

3. Denial is rampant.

It's not just the historical record; the current crop of birth defects and illnesses from Agent Orange are almost completely ignored.

Of course, the toll in Cambodia and Laos was huge too, and Cambodia never recovered from the excesses of Pol Pot, who was also supported by the West.

It is that toll for which Henry Kissinger is wanted in several places as a war crime.

[JanMichael]

4. It sure seems that way.

I was in a college class back in 1990 and gave a talk about the number and tonnage dropped on Vietnam, N. & S., and half of the class was appalled and shocked. Oh and this was a senior level poli-sci course called "War and Peace".

It was, and remains, shocking how our knowledge of our own actions is so minimal.

[RebelOne]

5. I was out of school before Viet Nam happened.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

6. quite a bit,

Although this was in Orange County where Vietnamese students made up atleast a quarter to a third of the school in the 80's.

[gateley]

7. I was in high school during Viet Nam, and a I remember a nun telling us that

we were treating the Viet Namese the same as they were treating us -- tossing out of helicopters, etc. When I mentioned it to my parents they said that was nonsense. I believed her, though, and started looking at the war through a different lens.

She was the sole teacher I had who didn't parrot the administration's lies.

[Blue_In_AK]

8. It hadn't happened yet when I was in high school

but I know not much time was spent in my kids' history classes. I'm not even sure if they got to Vietnam. Everything they know about that war came from me.

[knowbody0]

9. pathetic

not unlike the slaughter of the indigenous peoples of this nation.

[JackRiddler]

10. Denial of this holocaust is rampant in the U.S.

And does not merit campaigns against anyone who espouses it.

[Flabbergasted]

11. Huh? Vietnamese died in the war?