MICHAEL ARLEN: writer; author of ”Living Room War,” ”Exiles” and ”An American Verdict.”
It`s interesting to consider that the Vietnam War-contrary to what many people think-was a war that was entered into with probably more discussion and debate at the top levels of government than any other war we have engaged in. That doesn`t make it good or right or worth having entered. But it might make one a bit more modest in the stance one takes from hindsight-modesty in the face of history being a not ignoble demeanor in my opinion. If good and serious and generally decent people could make such mistakes, what are we doing (what seriousness, for instance, are we bringing to our monitoring of officials?) to prevent such mistakes in the future?
In the end, what I urge on your students is to live their lives in such a way that they not be burdened by what strikes me as democracy`s most notable drawback-namely, the seeming tendency of democratic peoples to be surprised by life. For if there is one false note in much of the distress and pain that have been expressed about Vietnam, it is this element of surprise, this ”Why me?”
”Why me?” is not a tragic cry, alas. Death or injury is awful, terrible. Death or injury in a needless event is even worse. But ”Why me?”
or ”How did I get here?” doesn`t help anything. ”Why me?” simply means one hasn`t been watching the road, as people for the most part are not watching the road now.
MALCOLM BROWNE: chief Indochina correspondent, Associated Press, 1961-65; Saigon correspondent, ABC, 1965-66.
Maybe the lesson of Vietnam was this: If you really want to win a war, you`re best off fighting it on your own with as little help from outside as possible. I watched South Vietnamese fighting spirit evaporate in direct proportion to increases in the level of U.S. aid, combat assistance and advice that was poured in. It`s just possible that Saigon would have waged a better war if we had simply stayed out.
Vietnam was like the Battle of the Somme in 1916, a conflict in which a lot of fine people on both sides were killed in vain. Like the Somme, Vietnam had no appreciable effect on history except to remind survivors that war is a tragic business never to be undertaken lightly.
GEORGE BUSH: director CIA, 1976-77; now vice president of the United States.
I believe the final view of our success and/or failure in Vietnam will not be established for some time. However, several lessons from our involvement in Vietnam come to mind. They are:
– We must ensure that any major foreign-policy commitment has the full support and understanding of the American people, for it is through their sons and daughters and their tax dollars that our power and influence are projected. Without such support, a protracted U.S. involvement cannot succeed. – The U.S. must have a clear understanding of the historical processes at work. The U.S. viewed the Vietnam War as the first step in China`s drive to expand its influence throughout Southeast Asia, forgetting the long history of fighting between China and Vietnam. In fact, Chinese-Vietnamese hostility reemerged soon after our withdrawal.
– The U.S. entered the Vietnam War viewing it as another Korea. In fact, the causes for the war, the topography and the methods used by the enemy were very different.
– The U.S. essentially fought the war for the South Vietnamese. In future conflicts of this type every effort must be made to encourage the beleaguered people of a country to fight for their own survival, as is being done in Afghanistan and Nicaragua.
PHILIP CAPUTO: writer; author of ”A Rumor of War”; served with U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, Vietnam, 1964-67.
The U.S. learned in Vietnam that there are limits to its power and that to exceed those limits invites tragic consequences.
The American soldiers who fought in the war did so out of a sense of duty to their country, but their country betrayed them by sending them to an unconscionable war.
JIMMY CARTER: president of the United States, 1977-81.
This war had a devastating impact on the American public, creating a sense of confusion over purpose and a buildup of mistrust in our high government officials. More important, many precious American lives were lost. To honor these brave men and women and all those who willingly answered their nation`s call, we must give our solemn pledge and pursue all honorable means to establish a just and lasting peace in the world, that no future generation need suffer in this way again.
J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT: U.S. senator from Arkansas, 1945-74.
The principal lesson of the Vietnam War is that the U.S. should not intervene in other countries with military forces unless that country is a serious threat to our own security. We should not use military force to dictate the political system of another country-especially small countries that wish to have a system different from ours.
BARRY GOLDWATER: U.S. senator from Arizona, 1953-65, 1968-86.
The best thing I could tell your students is that when you decide to go to war, you must at the same instant decide to win it. It`s just like having a fight with another fellow: If you go into it halfheartedly, you`re going to get the daylights beat out of you. That`s about what happened in Vietnam. We had some brilliant victories over there, but we also had some dreadful decisions made in Washington relative to our efforts.
JOE HALDEMAN: novelist; author of ”The Forever War” and ”Study War No More.”
Somewhere in Vietnam there may be a man about my age who 19 years ago, with a single action, killed all of my squad and put me in the hospital for five months. If I could meet him today, I hope I would be enough of a man to shake his hand and buy him a drink. He was a soldier just as we were, and that day he was a better soldier.
Somewhere in Maryland there might be a very old woman who deep-sixed my request, as a conscientious objector, to serve my country for six years in the Peace Corps rather than two in the Army. If I met her today, I hope I would be man enough not to spit in her face.
I guess that`s what I want our children to know.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: with the Foreign Service in Vietnam, 1963-66; member of the White House staff 1966-67; on the staff of the Paris peace talks, 1968-69.
It is important that in learning the lessons of Vietnam we not lose faith in ourselves. We continue as a nation to stand for something special in the world, and we must not lose our optimism and confidence. The values and ideals that we stood for were correct, but it was the wrong war in the wrong place-a place we did not know.
Many of the current crop of Vietnam movies make the war seem exciting and glamorous. Tell your students that in the movies it`s just acting, but in Vietnam, as you know personally, it was the real thing.
MELVIN R. LAIRD: secretary of defense, 1969-72; domestic adviser to the president, 1973-74.
I believe the most important lesson learned from the Vietnam conflict was that the advice of President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955 should have been heeded when he stated that the U.S. should not be involved in land warfare and land conflicts in Southeast Asia. If Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had followed this advice, there would have been no Vietnam.
TIMOTHY LEARY: producer of psychedelic celebrations, 1965-66; wrote and acted in the film ”Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.”
It was a disastrous, insane, imperial invasion of a weirdo Third World country. It will leave a deep scar in the American soul for one generation. Trust the CIA, not the military, for estimates about military events.
JOHN S. McCAIN III: prisoner of war, Vietnam, 1967-73; now U.S. senator from Arizona.
Following the end of U.S. involvement in Indochina, Gen. Maxwell Taylor stated the conditions under which he thought it was appropriate to commit U.S. troops overseas. I subscribe to Gen. Taylor`s criteria and believe these maxims must be adhered to in the wake of our misfortunes in Vietnam. First, the objectives of the commitment must be explainable to the man in the street in one or two sentences. Second, there must be clear support of the president by Congress. Third, there must be reasonable expectation of success. Finally, there must be a clear American interest at stake.
ROBERT S. McNAMARA: Secretary of defense, 1961-68; president, World Bank, 1968-81.
The U.S. must be careful not to interpret events occurring in a different land in terms of its own history, politics, culture and morals.
HARRY C. McPHERSON JR.: special assistant and counsel to the president, 1965-69.
There are lessons to be learned from Vietnam. It may be that one of the most important of them is that powerful nations may stumble, though their intentions are good, that tragedy and failure are often the lot of man, even of the citizens of a great and favored nation. such as ours.
JAMES A. MICHENER: novelist; author of ”Tales of the South Pacific,”
”Hawaii,” ”Centennial” and ”Texas.”
It is terribly dangerous for a democracy to try to wage an overseas war without formally declaring it and involving the entire population in it. We tried this gambit in Korea and got away with it. We tried again in Vietnam and found ourselves in a terrible tragedy.
THOMAS H. MOORER: chief of naval operations, 1967-70; chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1970-74.
The Vietnam War was a political war that imposed restraints on the military that prevented use of the power that we had readily available.
President Johnson made three points: (1) We will not overthrow Ho Chi Minh; (2) we will not invade North Vietnam; (3) we seek no wider war.
Tell your junior high students that when they grow up they must never permit politicians to enter a war they do not intend to win.
NICHOLAS PROFFITT: Newsweek bureau chief, Saigon, 1972.
The most important things for today`s young people to understand about the Vietnam War are:
1. The Vietnam War was a failure. Not just because the United States did not come away with a victory but because all wars are failures. When a nation goes to war it means that leaders on both sides failed to resolve their differences by peaceful and civilized means.
2. War is not glamorous. Junior high school students are of an age when young boys (girls seem to have much more sense) are inclined to see glory in war. They play war. They watch war movies on television. They spend hours drawing pictures of tanks and airplanes and bloody battles. Try this instead: First draw a picture of your father lying dead on the ground; then draw a picture of your mother burying your baby brother or sister. Does war still look glamorous?
3. There were no ”good guys” or ”bad guys” in Vietnam. There were good people and evil people on both sides. You know the story of the American Revolution. To most of the Vietcong, we Americans were the British. They were the Americans.
4. There was and is no Rambo.
RONALD REAGAN: governor of California, 1967-74; now president of the United States.
Those Americans who went to Vietnam fought for freedom, a truly noble cause. It is a cause that continues. You and your comrades-in-arms who faced danger and death in Vietnam fought as well as any Americans have fought in our nation`s history. Vietnam was not so much a war as it was one long battle in an ongoing war-the war in defense of freedom, which is still under assault. This battle was lost not by those brave American and South Vietnamese troops who were waging it but by political misjudgments and strategic failure at the highest level of government.
The tragedy-indeed, the immorality-of those years was that for the first time in our history our country and its government failed to match the heroic sacrifice of our men in the field. This must never happen again.
GARRY TRUDEAU: creator of the comic strip ”Doonesbury.”
The most important thing for today`s students to understand about the Vietnam War is that while their country entered into the war for moral reasons, it also got out for moral reasons.
WILLIAM C. WESTMORELAND: commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, 1964-68; chief of staff, U.S. Army, 1968-72.
The Vietnam War was a limited war, with limited objectives, prosecuted by limited means, with limited public support.
Therefore, it was destined to be (and was) a long war, a war so long that public support waned and political decisions by the Congress terminated our involvement, resulting in a victory by the North Vietnamese communists.
The military did not lose a battle of consequence and did not lose the war. The war was lost by congressional actions withdrawing support to the South Vietnamese government despite commitments by President Nixon.
ELMO R. ZUMWALT JR.: commander, U.S. naval forces, Vietnam, 1968-70;
chief of naval operations, 1970-74.
The most important thing for young people to recognize is the immense challenge to our democratic way of life as this globe struggles to adapt to burgeoning populations, polluting environments and dwindling resources. And all in a world in which there is no overall rule of law.
