By Mark Ashwill
Buffalo, NY – The recent smear campaign against Sen. John Kerry, launched in the dog days of August by the oxymoronic "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," is not just another chapter taken from the Karl Rove book of dirty tricks - attack your opponent's strength, tear him down through lies and distortions, then question his patriotism. It is a sad and sorry rerun of an old culture war, like one of those "magic" birthday candles you can never seem to blow out.
It's payback from aging and embittered veterans who cannot forgive Kerry for using his formidable credibility and eloquence to speak out against the war and wartime atrocities while he was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace.
It is about John Kerry, war hero, war opponent and diplomat par excellance, working alongside John McCain, former POW and guest of the Hanoi Hilton, and others for reconciliation, trade and in the national interest to normalize relations with our former enemy, Vietnam.
It is about the chickenhawks currently in power who supported the Vietnam War in thought but not in deed, and who avoided shedding any of their own precious blood - red or blue, through student deferrals and service in the "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard.
It is residual bitterness about the only war that the U.S. has ever lost - "organized modern technology versus organized human beings, and the human beings won," as historian Howard Zinn put it.
The diehards still don't get it, choosing to live in ignorance and in the past. For the Vietnamese, the "American War," as they refer to it, was a struggle for national liberation that would have resonated with the early Americans of the late 18th century. As Ho Chi Minh, who quoted from our Declaration of Independence in declaring Vietnam's independence from France on September 2, 1945, noted, "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom."
The truth is this, as Kerry, Western New York's own highly decorated Steve Banko, and many other thoughtful Vietnam veterans have observed: soldiers fought mostly for the love of one another, for sheer survival, and in the fervent hope that they would not return to their families and the country they loved in a flag-draped casket.
When all was said and done, the U.S. government walked away, or rather scurried away, tail between its legs, leaving behind peace with dishonor, and a disgraceful legacy of death, destruction and human suffering on a Draconian scale that haunts Vietnam to this day. What we owe Vietnam, the country, we can never repay, although there are many Americans in the U.S. and in Vietnam today, who are contributing mightily and in myriad ways to the physical and spiritual healing process.
If this were a perfect world, the United States would be held accountable for the 3 million Vietnamese who died in the American War, for the countless thousands of victims of Agent Orange with debilitating and monstrous deformities, for the children who are maimed or killed each year while playing with unexploded ordnance. The United States would pledge to learn more about the rest of the world rather than assuming others are, want to be, or should be like us.
Americans have learned very little about Vietnam or the Vietnamese. The books and movies about the war center mostly on the experience of being an American in Vietnam and shed little light on Vietnamese realities or perceptions. Vietnam scholar Neil Jamieson once wrote: "To better understand ourselves, we must understand the Vietnam War. To understand the war, we must understand the Vietnamese. We must learn about Vietnamese culture and Vietnamese paradigms in order to untangle the muddled debates about our own." Most U.S. policy makers and Americans in general have yet to learn this lesson about Vietnam and other countries and regions of the world, including Iraq and the Middle East.
Dr. Ashwill is an administrator, instructor and Fulbright adviser UB. He is also founder and executive director of the U.S.-Indochina Educational Foundation, Inc. (USIEF). His forthcoming book, Vietnam Today: A Guide to a Nation at a Crossroads, is published by Intercultural Press, Inc.