Memorial Day 2007

by Jerry Bullock

I know, I am a week late to write about Memorial Day but anyone who knows me knows I am usually late. Last week we were in Cincinnati, Ohio. As I write this we are desperately struggling to get packed to catch an airplane in the morning to Spokane, WA. It is also my birthday and I doubt there will be any cake or candles on the airplane. I guess peanuts and a coke will have to do. Two editorials in the Wall Street Journal laid the foundation for these comments. Ernest W. Lefever, a fellow at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote an editorial piece entitled, "Vietnam's Ghost." He wrote, "Vietnam won't go away. It still haunts the American psyche like fragments of a twisted nightmare."

He went on to recall that at the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial Wall in 1982 protesters were heard to cry, "We killed, we died, for less than nothing." Then in 1988, President Reagan gave us a different perspective when he said, "Who can doubt that the cause for which our men fought was just? It was -- however imperfectly pursued -- the cause of freedom."

How can we truly begin to exorcise the ghost of Vietnam? Those of us who were there tend to avoid talking about it. War is Hell but it was not the hell of war that has caused men to suffer for thirty years from the experience. We have experienced war before but we came home from Vietnam to a nation who called us "brutal murderers of women and children." The cause of freedom had indeed been imperfectly pursued ... but not by the men and women in uniform.

Let me turn to the second editorial. It was written by Ken Mulholand, a manager of a Tampa engineering company who served in South Vietnam with Company A, 25th Aviation Battalion, 25th Infantry Division in 1967-68.

He writes: "Apologists for communist aggression will scream that to view America's involvement in Vietnam as a noble undertaking is not only politically incorrect but historically illiterate. ... They've got it dead wrong. Our involvement in places like Korea and Vietnam (today we add Iraq and Afghanistan) should be recorded as the most honorable and unselfish sacrifice any great power has ever undertaken. We were not after real estate, natural resources, the subjugation of people or anything else other than honoring our commitments and stopping the red tide that had already engulfed much of the world. People who escaped from the communist regimes in Vietnam, Laos, and of course Cambodia have testified with extraordinary eloquence about the hellish conditions that were every bit as horrifying -- and more so -- than the warnings of those derided by the press as 'Cold War hawks.'"

A reporter once asked Air Force Brigadier General Robin Olds whether or not it was possible to achieve a military victory in Vietnam. His answer rings as clear today as it did thirty years ago, "Oh, certainly, but we have not been asked to defeat the enemy."

So, 53,000 Americans died. We kill about the same number on our highways every year. Did they die in vain? Let us listen again to Mr. Mulholland . . . "There are those that say all war is wrong. I do agree that war is a horrible and frightening experience. The people who fight wars know this better than anyone else. But fighting a war is not as bad as submitting to the hell of living in a world dominated by fascism or communism (or by terrorist rogue nations). And the decision to go to war cannot always be as clear cut as the bombing of Pearl Harbor." On the other hand nothing could be much plainer than the sight of two marvelous buildings crumbling into dust carrying 3000 of our citizens with them to their death. How quickly we forget.

Thank you, Mr. Mulholland and Mr. Lefever. You have helped us all to put Memorial Day in perspective.