Letter to the Editor
Letter to the editor of The Chronical
By Larry Kershner
The Obama administration has committed to a $65 million 13 year propaganda program to adjust US thinking about what the Vietnamese call the American War. Observing the 50th anniversary of this war, President Obama stated, “we pay tribute to the more than 3 million men and women who left their families to serve bravely….fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dearly as Americans”.
We might ask what ideals he is referring to. Almost 60,000 Americans died while killing 4,000,000 Vietnamese. Most of those we killed were civilians living in the South Vietnam we supposedly were there to protect. The book “Kill Anything that Moves” by journalist and historian Nick Turse documents at least 400 My Lai-type occurrences during the ten year war in which U.S. troops massacred Vietnamese civilians.
The Pentagon in this propaganda move would also like us to forget that Richard Nixon criminally sabotaged the Paris peace talks in 1968. There are recordings available in which LBJ calls Nixon’s actions treason. Thousands more on both sides died unnecessarily as a result of Nixon’s actions. The government would also like us to forget that many people in Vietnam are still dying from unexploded ordnance and the third and fourth-generation effects of Agent Orange. Nineteen million gallons of the lethal herbicide was sprayed over six million acres. Since then an estimated million children have been born with birth defects including children of US personnel who were exposed to Agent Orange.
Members of the Veterans for Peace have launched an educational campaign to counter the lies and historical misrepresentations coming out of the Pentagon. More complete information can be obtained at http://www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org/ . The Obama administration seems willing to say that there is a 50-year statute of limitation on mass murder and treason.
Local chapters of Veterans for Peace and the Fellowship of Reconciliation are into our thirteenth year of weekly peace vigils each Saturday at noon in front of the Centralia Library. People will occasionally come up and thank me for my service. To those who would thank me for my service I say, “I know you mean well but I was forced by my government into a situation where I had to kill people who were protecting their homes and their children from a foreign invader. This is not something I am proud of.”
US troops have been at war for 222 out of the 239 years since 1776. Pause and consider what that says about the “heroic ideals” of which President Obama spoke. The Full Disclosure Campaign is a Veterans for Peace effort to speak truth to power and to present a clear alternative to the Pentagon’s current efforts to sanitize and mythologize the Vietnam War thereby legitimizing further unnecessary wars.