It was very easy at the time for it to be ignored given the weight of the past two decades upon the country. A country that watched a generation get mauled in a pointless war fought for all the wrong reasons, while suffering the end of the golden age of economic power and terrible inflation, and to boot, having just had its President flame out in a blaze of authoritarian behavior.
My father and his siblings were the children of immigrants fleeing the instability of Eastern Europe. Proudly patriotic. My grandfather worked his whole life for a defense contractor and served as a county official and notary, the ethnic Democrat personified. There was no chance that my uncle was going to skip out on the draft, and he paid dearly for that. All that trauma meant that when it happened, most people were glad to not pay attention, and it allowed Pol Pot to run wild and destroy Cambodia.
For all we did wrong in the two decades in Vietnam, at least at the end we did a really selfless thing. We could've left them to die, and we didn't.
Lived thru this but didn’t know much of what you reported. Puts in high relief our current history.
Thank you.
It was very easy at the time for it to be ignored given the weight of the past two decades upon the country. A country that watched a generation get mauled in a pointless war fought for all the wrong reasons, while suffering the end of the golden age of economic power and terrible inflation, and to boot, having just had its President flame out in a blaze of authoritarian behavior.
My father and his siblings were the children of immigrants fleeing the instability of Eastern Europe. Proudly patriotic. My grandfather worked his whole life for a defense contractor and served as a county official and notary, the ethnic Democrat personified. There was no chance that my uncle was going to skip out on the draft, and he paid dearly for that. All that trauma meant that when it happened, most people were glad to not pay attention, and it allowed Pol Pot to run wild and destroy Cambodia.
For all we did wrong in the two decades in Vietnam, at least at the end we did a really selfless thing. We could've left them to die, and we didn't.