A Primer on Vietnam

Since the Vietnam War is now popular history, thanks to the always reliable PBS,  I intend this for those who do not know much about it and for those who might consider the possibility that they were mistaken in those days - all eleven of them.

The South East Asian nation of Vietnam split into North Vietnam and South Vietnam in 1954.  Four hundred thousand people fled their homes in the North. Somewhat fewer went North. The North was ruled by people called Communists and they decided to take those four hundred thousand people back from the South along with the whole danged country.

Now the people in the South did not want that to happen.  They had heard bad things about the Communists; that is because Communists routinely do very, very bad things to people they don't like.  And there are lots of people they don't like because those Communists are rather hard to get along with and people don't like being treated that way.

You see, some Russian Communists had the idea in 1917 that it would be nice if everybody was the same; that way everyone would have everything they need and everyone would be happy.  It sure sounded like a nice idea, so they tried it there and, well, it didn't work out so well because the Communists starved everyone who disobeyed their orders to be happy. Then the same thing happened to  millions of people in China, North Korea, Albania, Poland and many other countries.  So the South Vietnamese fought the North Vietnamese to keep that from happening to them.

About ten years before that America had fought Germans and Japanese who also did lots of bad things and we learned that its best to fight people like that before they get too strong.  Along about the time Communists had starved maybe as much one hundred million people they didn't like, America decided it was time to stop the Communists from doing that anymore. After all, the Communists might have decided to do it to us. We don't have to worry about that anymore and for sure we can't have any Communists in the U.S. (yes?). But back then - since South Vietnam was the  place they were trying to take over at the time, American leaders decided to stop them there so that they couldn't do any more bad things, like starving people or putting garbage bags over their heads.  Of course if we had stopped them there many more Vietnamese would be alive today.

In 1964 American leaders decided to fight very hard in South Vietnam to keep Communists from always looking for  new places to starve.  But fighting requires armies  which have to want to fight.  But many of the young men in 1965 did not want to fight.  You see, they had not had to look for work when they were 14 years old like their parents had to and they had not been around during that last big war and didn't believe anything bad could or should happen to them.  So they went to college instead and learned from very wise people who thought Communists were good. They thought that because Communists said they wanted to do good. Some of the young men got very mad at the country which had given them good lives - that was called being sensitive and "relevant".  They did not want to fight for it because they wanted to live long lives and marry college women. They were very intelligent and gifted, you see.  And they were right! After all, we might never have had Billy J. Clinton for our President if they had all done their duty.

So they yelled at our leaders and spit on the many young men who decided to do what their country asked.  That made the men who fought very sad.  It made the North Vietnamese Communists very glad. They became even happier when a pretty American movie star encouraged them to kill Americans. So they won and starved many  thousands more people.  But just to be kind they let alot of them get in boats and cruise around and sun bathe before they starved..

That's pretty well the way it was; at least it appears that way to people with common sense.Jack