Winning the WarCarlton Sherwood, who produced and narrated the terrific documentary, Stolen Honor, is back with an
article in Front Page Magazine that should have John Kerry and Jane Fonda apoplectic. Some of the POWs and their wives who were featured in the documentary, are now forming
a new group to educate Americans on what really happened in Vietnam.
For example, contrary to the assertions of Cronkite and others in the mainstream press, the American military had nothing to do with the fall of Saigon, much less losing the war. The last American combat unit left Vietnam in August 1972, nearly three years before the 1975 Communist invasion. The U.S. military remained undefeated in battle throughout the Vietnam War.
Instead, it was Congress or, more specifically, the nearly two to one Democrat majority in the Senate (61 to 37) and the House (291 to 144) in 1975 that voted to cut off all military funding to the Saigon government that was directly responsible for the defeat of South Vietnam. Congressional Democrats literally abandoned our South Vietnamese allies and it was they, not the U.S. military, who were responsible for the carnage that followed, the slaughter, imprisonment and forced "reeducation" of millions of innocent civilians throughout Southeast Asia by an avenging North Vietnamese Army.They have a decent chance of turning opinion around. There was a lot of talk about John Kerry's 2004 campaign opening old wounds, but I think they needed to be reopened, because infection had set in. For a lot of us, including myself, it was necessary to be confronted one more time with the memories of the Vietnam era, to take a second look at that John Kerry/John O'Neill debate on the Dick Cavett show with the benefit of hindsight and decide once and for all who was really right. Did those of us who were anti-war back in the 1960s and 1970s still want to align ourselves with the Jane Fondas and Walter Cronkites? Or had we finally grown up and realized that the truly admirable people were men like
Bud Day and Paul Galanti?
There are cracks appearing the wall of disinformation about Vietnam. Amazingly, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the New York Times published
this article on "The War We Could Have Won".
Precisely because Vietnam has changed for the better, we need to recognize what a profoundly ideological and aggressive totalitarian regime we faced three, four and five decades ago. And out of respect for the evidence of history, we need to recognize what happened in the 1970's and why.
In 1974-75, the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Hundreds of thousands of our Vietnamese allies were incarcerated, and more than a million driven into exile. The awesome image of the United States was diminished, and its enemies were thereby emboldened, drawing the United States into new conflicts by proxy in Afghanistan, Africa and Latin America. And the bitterness of so many American war veterans, who saw their sacrifices so casually demeaned and unnecessarily squandered, haunts American society and political life to this day.
