Vietnam, Lessons learned, 1  

Back in 1969, just as I was finishing my internship, I was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. My experience there made a painful and indelible impression on me. It exposed me to the horrors of war, the death, suffering and destruction it causes, both immediate and lasting. For years I was unable to talk about Vietnam without becoming upset. As our collective memory of that debacle has faded, we seem as a society, as a world, as individuals to keep making the same mistakes. Someone needs to remind us of the lessons we should have learned from Vietnam.

 

For years I’ve avoided talking or even thinking about Vietnam, but as I get older – I’m 81 now – I feel like I have to say something, to try and articulate some of what I’ve experienced, and felt, and learned – hopefully.

 

My wife Sarah gets upset when she sees how much attention is paid to the Ukraine and Israeli-Hamas wars, and how little to the other conflicts / crises in the world: Haiti, Congo, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, just to name a few. It reminds me of how I felt watching the news during my tour in Vietnam. Just as now, there were conflicts all over the world, Israel, Ireland, Africa, and it seemed like no one cared. Many of the younger people were “Hippies,” into finding different kinds of pleasure: free love, drugs. “If it feels good, do it,” was their slogan. They demonstrated over our involvement in Vietnam, but it was because they thought it was a waste. We were fighting and dying for them, and they were either apathetic, or joining the resistance. What upset me instead was how we were destroying their country and killing a generation of Vietnamese.

 

What Sarah pointed out to me was that we (as a society) care more about people who look like us – white, middle class, and preferably able to speak English. It’s a form of racism. So when there’s a genocide going on in Rwanda, or in Vietnam, we don’t care as much about the people there – in, as our former president so eloquently called them, the S-hole countries.

 

Our ability to empathize is greater towards people with more things in common with us.