In these early days of presidential primary season, virtually all the Republican candidates are calling for vigorous military action against our enemies, real and imagined. Obama is weak! Carpet bomb ISIS! Our military will be so strong no one will dare challenge us!
Such talk makes me ill. Almost 50 years ago, I was in Vietnam, a UH-1 (Huey) helicopter pilot for the U.S. Army. For a year, from 1968 to 1969, I flew missions as part of a crew (two pilots, a crew chief, and a gunner). We always flew by ourselves, a single ship, sometimes in air traffic jams around huge airports like Tan Son Nhut (Saigon) and Bien Hoa, sometimes alone in the sky for miles and miles, eventually landing in a soccer field next to a school, on a bare piece of dirt alongside a canal, or on top of a mountain. We went into the southern Highlands, Song Be, out to the coast, Phan Thiet, and deep into the Mekong Delta, Ca Mau.
Many times we would land to be greeted by kids. Smiling, happy kids, in awe of our aircraft, eager to see it, and us, up close. These young fellows below are middle-aged men now, if they are still alive, which I most dearly hope they are.
Vietnam was hot so I often flew at some altitude, into cool dry air, to escape the heat. The green fertility of the tropical country was overwhelming, nature unleashed to grow as much and as fast as she could manage.
Losing altitude made the damage to the country sickeningly apparent. Vast forests had been sprayed with Agent Orange, leaving bare trees and lifeless soil. Arclight strikes, massive raids by fleets of B-52 bombers, left miles of bomb craters disfiguring the landscape.
The U.S. then had, and has now, the mightiest military in the world. At the peak of the war, when I was there, we had well over 500,000 troops in country. (Compare this to the Iraq war, when our strength peaked at 170,000 in 2007.) As for carpet bombing, by the time the war was over we had dropped over 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia -- this is twice (yes, TWICE) the total of all bombs dropped in Europe and Asia in World War II. We lost over 58,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. Estimates of total deaths caused by both sides range from 1.5 to 3.5 million people.
After all this, we lost. No other outcome was possible. The Vietnamese were fighting for their own country, spurred by hopes of independence and freedom from foreign domination. The Vietnamese fighting on 'our' side gave up, having nothing to fight for; their own government was unbelievably corrupt and at the end fled to the U.S. and Europe with tons of gold.
The widespread destruction I witnessed in Vietnam convinced me that never again would the United States commit so many resources to such a senseless and foolish war. How wrong, how very wrong, I was. Now, in 2016, some Americans want to do it all again. They want to waste dollars and lives in a vain attempt to, what? Fulfill some hapless leader's egotistical fantasy? Prove to ourselves that we are tough and fearsome? While the rest of the world cries out, the Emperor has no clothes.
