This quote came to life for me again in the past week, after watching parts of two different, public television documentaries on the Vietnam War. The main one was a new, 10-part series called The Vietnam War from Ken Burns. The other was from a couple of years ago called Dick Cavett’s Vietnam.
I was only in the single-digits old during the Vietnam War, so I didn’t understand then what was happening, either in Southeast Asia or in America. I only have a few real recollections of it. One was a day around 1970, when my family was watching a television scroll of calendar days next to numbers. (I didn’t realized this until many years later, but they were looking at the draft lottery, and probably wondering if a randomly drawn number would send a loved one to the war.) Another memory was the day the war informally ended, in April 1975, watching TV reports of the last people being lifted by helicopter from the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon.
So, watching parts of these documentaries was new information for me. It’s hard to understand even now how much of a dumb, tactical, human failure it was for the U.S. Tremendous, unnecessary sacrifice and loss of life, just to keep a small, remote territory from becoming Communist. But that’s the way it was then, Communism was our enemy, and we were blind to our limits to contain it.
What really struck me, however, is how similar things were to the (current) U.S. 'wars' in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also started out as something that would be quickly managed, and with a fair amount of support after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But again, we were blind to our limits to defeat an idea (terrorism), and the length of the wars and their eventual human cost, which turned American attitudes against it.
Not only are there general similarities, but as the Cavett documentary showed, there are fascinating similarities with the personalities involved then and now. I thought of a number of them within a few minutes as I was watching:
Lyndon Johnson = George W. Bush
Robert McNamara = Donald Rumsfeld
Dick Cavett = Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert
Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda = George Clooney (and Jane Fonda?)
Muhammad Ali = ? Unfortunately, no contemporary famous athlete compares to him, and no contemporary athlete suffered like him.
It’s was 40 years between the Vietnam War and the Iraq / Afghanistan conflicts. Did we learn anything from history? Now it’s been 50 years since the Vietnam War. Have we learned anything yet?
