Charlie Daniels was one of my early introductions to “country” music. I got to see him “up close” at the 1976 Carter Inaugural Ball – we were on the same side politicly then. We didn’t end up that way – but his music still resonates. Still in Saigon
Call to Duty
For my generation the Vietnam War was the turning point of our youth. In the early sixties, we were the generation called by President Kennedy – “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”. Our generation saw Martin Luther King march. We watched (in black and white) him stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and tell us his dream – our dream too. Those leaders spoke to us and called us to service. And we believed.
I was young, born in the last years of the “Baby Boomers”. And while I was too young to march for Civil Rights, I could still feel the call to action. America was moving: rockets were launching from Cape Canaveral, cars and televisions pulled us all together; we were a nation on the move. And we were defending freedom throughout the world, in Berlin, and in Taiwan, and in Vietnam.
When the President was shot, we were stricken. The young leader was gone. But his successor, Johnson, showed even more promise. He passed the Civil Rights law, and he promised a “Great Society” where our nation would take care of all. Sure, he did it in the voice that once stood for prejudice and hate, the Texas drawl that was familiar from others in Senate filibusters that stopped progress. But Johnson WAS progress – and even with the loss of Kennedy we knew there was hope.
Vietnam
So I was shocked when I went to see Johnson in 1967 at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Dayton. Shock, because there was a line of black turtle-necked students in the front row, who stood up and chanted. They interrupted the President of the United States. They were protesting the War in Vietnam, a war that I thought was part of our “defense of freedom”. I didn’t know what those Antioch College students already had figured out. Vietnam wasn’t about “defending freedom”. It was a war we couldn’t win.
I was eleven at the County Fairgrounds that day. I was eighteen when the final frantic helicopters left the US Embassy in Saigon. Our leaving that war was just as ugly as our fighting it, with desperate refugees hanging from helicopter landing skids and equipment shoved into the sea. To take then-President Ford’s statement out of context – “Our long national nightmare was over”, (he said that while pardoning Nixon, but it definitely fit Vietnam better). Whatever the reason we entered that war, we sacrificed blood and treasure for years only because no one wanted to “lose the war”.
That’s a lousy reason to fight a war, because you don’t want to be the “loser”. And it’s an even worse reason for Americans to die.
Afghanistan
In the past few weeks the Biden Administration made it official: the United States military is leaving Afghanistan. We started there on October 7th, 2001, nearly twenty years ago. Our attack was for all the “right” reasons. Al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11th. The governing “tribe” of Afghanistan, the Taliban, allowed Al Qaeda to use the country as their headquarters and staging ground. The US demanded that the Taliban turn over Al Qaeda, but the Taliban refused. So the United States attacked.
Our goal was to destroy Al Qaeda, and capture it’s leadership. It took years to accomplish that goal, culminating with the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May of 2011. But once we started, the US also determined to drive out the Taliban, and replace them with more moderate Afghans. And that has kept us engaged in Afghanistan for twenty years.
It’s really not much different than Vietnam. The US waged war on a foe that was fighting on their home territory, with nowhere else to go. Short of total destruction of the Taliban, or the Vietnamese Communists, there was no way to win. It took us fourteen years to realize that in Vietnam; it took almost twenty in Afghanistan.
Value of Sacrifice
There is no easy way to leave a war, to explain what the sacrifice was for. But in war, when there is no clear way to win, it is better to leave than to demand even more sacrifice – for nothing.
Both Vietnam and Afghanistan left the US with significant damage. It’s not just the count of dead and wounded, but the warriors damaged by wars that had no clear enemy, boundaries or goals. For those, their war does not end. They’re minds are still in Kabul, or Kandahar; or still in Saigon.
As Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address:
“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
