I don’t know whether to thank or curse Ken Burns and PBS for bringing back the ghosts of the Vietnam War – exhuming feelings and memories that I had buried deep in the past.
TO WATCH THE SERIES CLICK HERE
I can again see the ghost of Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk who doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze on a Saigon street in June, 1963. He was protesting actions of the US-supported South Vietnamese government. Although the nation was more than 70 percent Buddhist, French and American military had supported a Christian-dominated government that severely limited religious freedom and Buddhist participation in society. His last words were, “Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngô Đình Diệm to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally. I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organize in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.”
When it became apparent that the Buddhist majority would oppose the government, the US supported a coup by the South Vietnamese military and ramped up the American troop presence to fight against a North Vietnamese government spawned from resistance to French colonialism. Simply stated, we took a side in a Vietnamese civil war. The Soviet Union and China took the other side.
An American Quaker pacifist, Norman Morrison (no relation that I know of) became my second ghost. He poured kerosene over himself and lit his fire under the office window of Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of defense. At least half a dozen other Americans and far more Vietnamese committed similar self-sacrifices to protest the war.
Those ghosts urged me to abandon the blind trust of American foreign policy and wars that was taught in our public school history books. If we were on the side of freedom, justice and fairness, why would people commit such horrific suicides to bring attention to the actions of the South Vietnamese government that we enabled?
The war soon became personal. By the time I finished high school in 1965 I knew that boys who graduated one or two years ahead of me had already died in Vietnam. I got a draft deferment because I went to college. Then came the lottery. I drew #51 – sure to be drafted for a war that I did not believe in – to invade a nation of people who had done me no harm and try to kill them before they killed me. I didn’t want to go but didn’t want to go to Canada or dodge the draft some other way…what to do??? In 1969 I went for my draft physical and flunked it because I was a few pounds underweight – 6’1″ and 123 pounds. I’m still not convinced that their scale was right but didn’t argue. 48 years have gone by since that physical exam and I still wonder what I would have done if I’d passed.
Today, I am haunted by the ghosts of those who gave their lives serving in our armed forces, and those who died fighting on the other side. They are joined by ghosts of American college students killed by American soldiers during an anti-war protest at Kent State University. The government of Vietnam estimates that two million of the ghosts were civilians whose lives were lost in the no man’s land of war.
We don’t see many protests against today’s sanitized wars. Precision munitions, guided from safe locations, assure that most of the death and suffering is among foreigners. The men and women (some barely older than boys and girls) who fight our wars are volunteers. They don’t complain much. Can they trust the rest of us to send them to war only in support of self-defense, freedom, justice and fairness?
I hope that others will also watch the PBS documentary and apply whatever lessons you find to 21st century America. Those who are as old as me are likely to find some ghosts of your own – including friends and family who died in the war. We have enough of them. We do not need more ghosts.