FACES AND PLACES: How quickly we forget (05/14/00)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

How quickly we forget

Does the name Ilja Zaporozec mean anything to you? No? How about Peter Hussar or Michael V. Kuropas or Robert Sonbati or Myron Diduryk?

Those names are well-known in Washington. Hundreds of people view them every day. They're engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

There are more Ukrainian names on that wall. Many were listed in The Ukrainian Weekly during the 1960s and 1970s.

The Vietnam War ended 25 years ago. Hundreds of books have been written about this woeful military operation, but there is still no consensus among Americans regarding its nature or its need. And the debate continues. Did most Americans oppose it? Was it an immoral, stupid conflict that the United States couldn't possibly win? Did more than 58,000 Americans die in vain? Or was it a war against brutality and tyranny, lost because it was micro-managed by inept politicians in Washington rather than generals in the field? Most importantly, has history been distorted by those academics, media savants and Hollywood producers of the left who have controlled the debate from the beginning?

Our involvement in Vietnam began with President John F. Kennedy, whose policy was to "aid and assist" the South Vietnamese against the Communists. The war escalated under President Lyndon B. Johnson soon after the Senate passed, by 99 votes, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on the heels of Communist attacks on American warships. The president was authorized "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force" to help defend South Vietnam.

As more and more American troops and resources were committed to the struggle, the fighting took a disastrous turn. While the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA and commanders of rank in the services urged an immediate massive strike to obtain maximum results with minimum losses, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his civilian advisors had other plans. According to military historian Robert Leckie, they decided to "orchestrate" the war "with slowly rising volume like a symphony moving toward its conclusion," the so-called "slow squeeze." The approach bought precious time for the North.

In the air this policy of graduated response was called "rolling thunder." Mr. Leckie writes: "No flights were permitted north of the 19th parallel; South Vietnamese aircraft had to participate in some way in each strike; no reconnaissance was allowed before a raid and seldom after it; pilots who could not zero in on air targets the first time over were not allowed to return; and homeward-bound fliers with a few shots left in their lockers were forbidden to expend them against 'targets of opportunity' - that is, suddenly discovered enemy formations, vehicles or rolling stock - but rather compelled to jettison them into the South China Sea. An iron control was clamped down from Washington." It was not military personnel who "named the strike day or specified the number of aircraft and the size of the bomb, but Secretary McNamara assisted by the White House."

The hope, of course, was that the North Vietnam would give in and the Communists obliged with hints of submission leading to on-again, off-again bombing. North Vietnam took advantage of the "off-again" to rebuild. In 1966 the North Vietnamese had no jets, less than 20 radar sets, limited airfields and obsolete antiaircraft guns. Within two years the Soviets had installed a network of modern airfields which housed MIG-15 and MlG-17 jets, 250 SAM sites, more than 100 radar stations and 5,000 state-of-the anti-aircraft guns.

Meanwhile, the anti-war movement in the United States, often coordinated through Havana, was growing. Activists such as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda traveled to North Vietnam to reassure the enemy and to report back that American POWs were receiving excellent treatment. By 1969 only 40 U.S. senators were willing to sign a resolution condemning Hanoi for its brutality against prisoners of war.

Did the American people agree with the anti-war protesters as the media suggested? Hardly. As late as 1972 a Harris survey indicated that 74 percent of those polled agreed that "it is important that South Vietnam not fall into the control of the Communists." A peace treaty was finally signed in Paris in 1973, earning Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho the Nobel Peace Prize. Le Duc Tho had the grace to decline.

President Richard M. Nixon's resignation resulted in the election of what has come to be called the "Watergate Congress" of 1974. It was this Congress that refused continued assistance to South Vietnam once the North ignored commitments made in Paris and launched its final assault on Saigon in 1975. Writing in The New Republic, columnist Stanley Hoffman predicted that Hanoi would produce "greater security for its people." In refusing to vote for military assistance for Cambodia, Rep. (now senator) Chris Dodd declared that "the greatest gift our country can give the Cambodian people is not guns but peace." Speaking at the Academy Awards in 1975, Hollywood producer Bert Schneider declared: "It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated."

The Communist victory in Southeast Asia brought about the death of 2 million people in Cambodia, the flight of another 2 million people from Vietnam, the imprisonment of some 1 million of the South's best young leaders in "re-education" camps and the death of another 50,000 South Vietnamese in concentration camps. Messrs. Hayden, Hoffman, Schneider and Dodd, Ms. Fonda and the hundreds of other academics and Hollywood producers have never apologized for their infamy. On the contrary, they continue to insist that they were right.

Even the film "Killing Fields" tries to blame the gruesome destruction in Cambodia on President Nixon's bombing raids and to elevate Sydney Schanberg, The New York Times correspondent who believed the Khmer Rouge were liberators, to some kind of hero status. It would take years before Mr. Schanberg would unapologetically admit that he might have been misguided when he wrote: for "the ordinary people of Indochina ... it is difficult to imagine that their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone."

All ideas have consequences, and horrific ideas have horrific consequences. Has the looney left learned anything? Did not the Persian Gulf War show us how to fight and win? If the lead story in the May 1 issue of U.S. News and World Report is true, the answer is no. During the war in Kosovo, the White House, was back to second-guessing the military. Ironically every bombing sortie had to be cleared by Commander-in-Chief Bill Clinton. How quickly we forget the lessons of history!

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: mbkuropas@compuserve.com

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