Donald Trump observed his first Veterans’ Day as President in Vietnam and the country’s Communist leaders are apparently eager to keep ties with Washington robust, all suggesting that both countries are no longer tied to the past. But in American collective conscience, nothing else might evoke as much emotion as the mention of the word Vietnam. So much that a section of opinion in America argues that the rise of Mr. Trump has its root in the social divisions sown over the long and costly war in Vietnam.
Veterans Day on November 11 marks the anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, in 1918, but American discussions on war and strategy, not to mention politics, inescapably touches upon Vietnam. Numerous events over the weekend — film shows, book discussions and parades — commemorated the war. Vietnam continues to haunt America, as guilt, failure, ignominy and internal dysfunction. A 10-part, 18-hour documentary series The Vietnam War — a $30 million project, completed over 10 years — that ran through September reignited a range of questions. These days, American commentators repeatedly wonder aloud whether Afghanistan is America’s new Vietnam.
Vietnam war veterans returned to a tough situation back home — anti-war protesters condemned them while another section called them losers. Such sentiments were expressed by none other than Mr. Trump when he said of senior Republican Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war for five and a half years in Vietnam: “He’s not a war hero... I like people who weren’t captured.” Mr. McCain reciprocated the sentiments during a discussion on the documentary recently, on how affluent people dodged military service. They “found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur,” he said, and it just happens, that’s how Mr. Trump deferred drafting the fifth time during the Vietnam war. The first four times, it was for college attendance.
Perhaps to compensate for the inadequate appreciation given to Vietnam veterans earlier, America inaugurated a 13-year-long “commemoration of the 50th anniversary” of the war in 2012. More than 10,000 events have taken place to honour the Vietnam veterans.
Fighting communists
U.S. involvement in Vietnam started with an initial deployment of advisers in the early 1950s, grew gradually through the early 1960s and expanded with the deployment of full combat units in July 1965. By then, there were half a million U.S. soldiers there, trying to stop the the Communist North from unifying the country. The last U.S. solider left in April 1975 and the country was unified the next year.
As commemoration events spread to the nook and corner of America, the country is trying to rebuild the lost war as a period of patriotic sacrifices. A total to 58,200 names are engraved in marble on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. But there is little that is talked about the reasons or the calculations for sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to fight on a foreign land.
Nor is any mention of the sufferings that it brought upon the people of Vietnam and surrounding countries. More than three million people died, half of it Vietnamese civilians. It is estimated that the U.S. dropped 14 million tonnes of ordnance on the country. More than 10% of it did not explode. At least 1,00,000 people have died due to this since the formal end of the war. The U.S restarted diplomatic ties with Vietnam in 1995, and subsequently began funding a programme to remove unexploded ordnance. Among the measures taken by Mr. Trump in the last year is to reduce funding for that programme.
Varghese K. George works for The Hindu and is based in Washington
