In April and May of 1975, four friends and I did a 200-mile ski tour through the Wind River and Gros Ventre mountains of Wyoming. For 18 days in that pre-cell-phone time we had no contact with the larger world. Our lives revolved around the arduous, straight-forward task of moving through snow-covered mountains, sometimes in below-zero Fahrenheit temperatures, with all the necessities of food, shelter and survival on our backs. It was a great tour that we finished in Jackson Hole with the usual relief from the exertions and discomforts of demanding adventure, anticipation of the soft comforts and pleasures of civilization, instant nostalgia for wildness and the pristine clarity and simplicity of backcountry living, mixed with a perceptible reluctance to re-enter the "real" world, where the words empire and democracy are used interchangeably. Even out-of-the-mainstream backcountry skiers know they are not the same. We finished the tour the first week of May 1975 and were naturally curious about what had been happening in the world.
We found newspapers, magazines and TV full of stories and iconic photos of the fall of Saigon and the frantic, incomplete helicopter evacuation of Americans and South Vietnamese from the rooftops of that beleaguered capital. The longest war in American history had ended while we toured, and we could not have returned to more welcome news. We were relieved and celebrated accordingly. One of our tour comrades had been a combat Marine in the jungles of Vietnam and had brought home some knowledge about life and death and humanity that a human being shouldn't have to learn. From its beginning, the war in Vietnam had been a disaster for America—for its military, economy, society, democracy, 58,000 dead American soldiers and their families and the hundreds of thousands more wounded. The Vietnam War also tarnished and in some cases destroyed the credibility, integrity and even the public service careers of many American leaders, including Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and William Westmorland. By 1975, only the foolish, the obsequious or the craven even pretended to believe the words of these dishonest, deluded men.
Two years earlier, in what must be counted its lowest moment, the Nobel Foundation inexplicably and bizarrely awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Henry Kissinger and Vietnam's Le Duc Tho for ending the Vietnam War. The war, of course, was not ended, and, while the enduring toady to power Kissinger reveled in the status of the prize, Le Duc Tho had the personal and professional decency and integrity to refuse the prize on the reality-based grounds that his country was not at peace.
The Vietnam War was a shameful, distressing and pivotal event in American history. Its consequences are with us today. As early as 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. said: "But the physical casualties of the war in Vietnam are not alone the catastrophes. The casualties of principles and values are equally disastrous and injurious. Indeed, they are ultimately more harmful because they are self-perpetuating. If the casualties of principle are not healed, the physical casualties will continue to mount. ... We have also placed our nation in the position of being morally and politically isolated. Even the long standing allies of our nation have adamantly refused to join our government in this ugly war. As Americans and lovers of democracy we should carefully ponder the consequences of our nation's declining moral status in the world. ... America has ended up supporting a new form of colonialism covered up by certain niceties of complexity. Whether we realize it or not our participation in the war in Vietnam is an ominous expression of our lack of sympathy for the oppressed, our paranoid anti-Communism, our failure to feel the ache and anguish of the have-nots. It reveals our willingness to continue participating in neo-colonialist adventures."
King said that in 1967.
1967!
When we ended our 1975 tour and saw the photos and read the accounts of America's ignominious retreat from the rooftops of Saigon we were elated that it was over and chagrined to know that America's humiliation was well deserved. Those of us who opposed that immoral war naively (and, in truth, arrogantly) believed the United States had learned a hard lesson it would not forget. Obviously, we were wrong. Apologists for the current debacle in Iraq will tell anyone who will listen that Vietnam and Iraq have nothing in common, but they are cut from the same cloth of "neo-colonist adventures" just as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, et al are cut from the same dishonest cloth as Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, Westmorland, Kissinger et al. Indeed, the Strangelovian Kissinger is still brought in for cameo roles as an advisor to the current "stay the course or maybe not" administration. It is unlikely that any member of the Bush administration will be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but it is certain that, just as Saigon "fell" to the Vietnamese, Baghdad will eventually "fall" to the people of Iraq and America will suffer another discomfiting retreat from a country it should never have invaded in the first place. And there will be stories and iconic photos of evacuation, whether chaotic or orderly, violent or silent. America was not greeted as a liberator when it arrived in Iraq and will not be remembered as one when it is forced to leave. We can but hope it takes less than 10 years and fewer than 58,000 dead American soldiers for this to happen.
