I've got an Uncle Bob who means the world to me, and who's had such a rich life that I could interview him on a dozen different subjects.
All the conversations would be filled with both fun and insights, and in fact, I remember one such occasion when he had us all in stitches and he said, "Never forget! You can't get an Uncle Bob at Walmart!"
Since then, in our family, we roll out that expression whenever we marvel at his remarkable influence on us.
For the first of many interviews I hope to do with my uncle, Bob Verderber of Lincoln Illinois, I chose to have him tell us about the era that shaped his early adulthood: the Vietnam War era. I've always been confused about why my generation knows almost nothing about that war. In fact, if I was a conspiracy theorist, I could imagine that keeping us uninformed about that war, probably made it easier to get us into the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We didn't know the lessons that should have been gained by Vietnam. Here's my uncle Bob to tell us about the things he experienced and the perspectives he gained...
SOUNDCLOUD
Uncle Bob's honesty and deep feelings made me feel it was even more important for us to take an opportunity to dig deeper into information about this era in America's history. Have you ever noticed that all the American history books stop at WWII? I believe part of the reason for that is the complexity of the story.
So I did some homework for us all and I've collected some interesting facts that might give some backstory to Uncle Bob's observations.
To start with, did you know that the Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular war in the 20th century? It was easy to see why. It seems to me that we came into the war riding the hubris from WWII and racked with fear of communist domination.
Hubris and fear seem a bad combination to build on.
In my opinion, the decisions the U.S. made were a slippery slope of doubling-down, over and over again, to recover after previously ill-considered decisions.
See what you think. Look at this timeline:
The sparks that ignited the Vietnam War actually started after WWII when the allies decided that Vietnam should go back to being a French colony. (The Japanese had taken over Vietnam during WWII but a tremendous power vacuum opened up when the Japanese left after losing the war.) Predictably, there was a Vietnamese revolutionary and communist, Ho Chi Minh, who wanted freedom for the country of Vietnam. His forces began to battle the french at every opportunity and seeing a communist movement gaining momentum, the U.S. started sending aid to the french in 1950.
That forced Ho Chi Minh to go looking for his own advocates and he easily gained support from communist China and the Soviet Union.
When the French lost an important battle to Ho Chi Minh's forces in 1954, they abandoned the idea of holding on to the colony and fearing the communists would roll over into South Vietnam, the U.S. more openly stepped in to help the south avoid elections to unify the country (fearing the communists would win). From 1956 to 1960, the U.S. tried to support the person they installed as the ruler of South Vietnam. (Another misstep as he was later exposed as a terrible leader, hated by his own people and executed in 1963.)
In 1959 Ho Chi Minh declared all out war in order reunite the entire country under one rule.
Image Source: http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vietnam_War
In 1961, U.S. military advisors decided to take a direct role in the war. It was all downhill from there as circumstances drew our forces deeper and deeper into the fight. Famously, in 1964, two US Destroyers were attacked by the North Vietnamese and in response to that the first official U.S. troops arrived in Vietnam to begin major bombing campaigns in North Vietnam, to which Ho Chi Mihn responded with the Tet Offensive, attacking more than 100 cities in South Vietnam.
From 1965 to 1969, President Lyndon Johnson put limits on U.S. troops, not allowing them to attack North Vietnam directly, as the idea was to help the Southern Vietnamese get strong enough to fight the North rather than having the US win the war for them. This policy lead to utter pandemonium for U.S. troops as the jungles of Vietnam were nearly impenetrable, and laden with booby traps and ambushes. Sometimes they ended up being attacked by the people they thought they were fighting for!
Image Source: http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/category/photographers-showcase/
President Nixon was next up to try his own policies and began saying that he was withdrawing US troops in 1969, but all the while, escalating incursions into neighboring Cambodia as a last ditch effort. Unfortunately, the North Vietnamese soon started the march across the border toward Saigon and in 1973 the famous airlift of the last U.S. personnel in Saigon was necessary, leaving the country to officially become unified as a communist country.
The U.S. had lost the war effort completely and lost an important chapter in the Cold War, leaving its reputation as a world power in tatters.
The consequences of the Vietnam war were many and varied. The Vietnam War cost the United States 58,000 lives and cost 1-2 million Vietnamese deaths.
Many U.S. citizens were so dismayed about the way we were drawn into the war that the war resulted in congress enacting the War Powers Act in 1973, which required the president to receive explicit Congressional approval before committing American forces overseas.
The domestic consequences sent shock waves through generations, families, campuses and communities. Students objected to the draft (the average age of the American soldiers in Vietnam was 19, 7 years younger than WWII soldiers) and because one could avoid the draft if you were in college, 80% of the American soldiers came from the lower classes.
Image Source: https://www.pinterest.com/treasurebox123/flower-child/
This was the first war where Americans watch body bags being taken out of the jungle right in their living rooms on the television.
There was a lack of coherent meaning of the war. The innocent Vietnamese peasants being killed in the crossfire and the American chemical warfare destroying the environment. Tensions increased as demonstrators all over America felt they were being ignored. During the growing war protests Ohio National Guardsmen open fire on student demonstrators and killed 4 at Kent State University.
Image Source: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ictcs/
My Uncle Bob is a self-made man who thinks for himself. After doing this research, I can see why his feelings about the war would have been emotionally confusing and intellectually taxing. Everything made sense and nothing made sense.
I'll close with the following famous photo from those tumultuous years. I think it says a lot:
Image Source: https://www.pinterest.com/treasurebox123/flower-child/
Most of my information came from one of three good sources:
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraid=18
http://www.ushistory.org/us/55d.asp
http://www.ducksters.com/history/cold_war/vietnam_war.php
Read more at: http://www.ducksters.com/history/cold_war/vietnam_war.php