Lary Bloom
Writer, Editor, Teacher
The Bloom Blog
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Monday, January 02, 2006
Vietnam/Iraq
Many years ago in an antique store, I bought a stack of old magazines. Among them was the October 20,1967 issue of Life. The cover showed a United States prisoner of war in North Vietnam. He was sitting in his cell, beneath the words "Clean, Neat."I bought that copy because I knew that one day I would write a book about a childhood friend who never returned from the Vietnam War. He might have been taken prisoner, or might have been killed when his fighter jet crashed over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. No one yet knows for certain. Now that I've taken up that book project, I have been reviewing materials collected over the years.
The issue of Life contains an editorial about Vietnam. I reprint a paragraph of it here in the hopes that those who conduct our present war, many of whom did not have the advantage, if that is the word, of actually knowing combat (or even reading history), might at last make the connection between Vietnam and Iraq.
"Life believes that the U.S. is in Vietnam for honorable and sensible reasons. What the U.S has undertaken there is obviously harder, more complicated than the U.S. leadership foresaw. And in 1967 we are having another hard, complicated year out there. There is the encouraging fact of the Vietnamese elections...there is straight military progress...We are trying to defend not a fully born nation but a situation and a people from which an independent nation might emerge. We are also trying to maintain a highly important...strategic interest of the U.S. and the free world. This is a tough combination to ask young Americans to die for."
In terms of historical perspective, this editorial appeared a few months before the Tet Offensive, and, in the years following the publication, more than 30,000 U.S. soldiers, sailors, and airmen were killed.
An oddity about that magazine issue: It also contains a history of the Middle East -- and points out that in the early part of the last century, shortly after piecing together the new state of Iraq, the British threw up their hands, convinced that unity there was a hopeless cause.
Posted by:Lary Bloom at 4:25 AM
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