A friend of mine, one of the few American academic scholars of Southeast Asia to serve as an infantryman in Eye Corps at the height of the Vietnam war, sent me an astonishing video of a presentation he gave recently. I wrote about it here. claireberlinski.substack.com/p/mcnamaras-mo…
He's been researching the crash of a C-123 transport plane that took off from Chu Lai, Vietnam, on Dec 17, 1968. All but 9 of the 45 aboard perished, including a friend of his. He has recently spoken to survivors and found out more about the cause of the crash. It is appalling:
He believes the crash was caused by the incompetence of one of McNamara's so-called morons--one of the 300,000 mentally disabled men were drafted and used as cannon fodder to evade the political horror of ending student deferments or calling up the reserves.
Watch his video presentation about this story, his involvement in the region, and the survivors, whom he very recently found. It's more than an hour long, but I've watched it four times--it's that interesting.
There's already more to this story, but I haven't yet got his permission to publish it. Yesterday he wrote to me to thank me for publishing it, which struck me as very misplaced: It's me who should thank him for giving me permission to publish it--it's his research.
The idea that he would thank *me* for being interested in this rubs me the wrong way. Very much the wrong way. I was born in May, 1968. Misconceived the war may have been--and as his presentation makes clear, this was *not* a wholly misconceived war--
every man on that plane was sent there on America's behalf, and thus on behalf of the five-month old infant I was when they died. I grew up in the blessed peace and with the glorious opportunities of the Pax Americana; as senseless as their death was,
my life is owed to the willingness of hundreds of thousands of American men who undertook risks like that, over the course of the past century, in theaters of combat around the world. Not all of these wars were wise or moral. But the American-led global order is why I'm alive.
If Americans don't concern themselves with stories like this, and remember the men, like CPT Morton Singer, who died in that plane crash, no one else will. Their memory will vanish--along with any lessons we can learn from this story, which will be relevant forever.
"Thank you for your service" has become an empty cliché; had I served I suspect it would annoy me greatly to hear it. I'm trying to thank them for their service--whether they would have appreciated it, I don't know--by doing what I can to share this story--
and place it in the context of a larger context.
War and peace are enormously consequential. This is why foreign policy matters; this is why the Pax Americana and its future matters; this is why the mental competence and integrity of the Commander-in-Chief matters--
War and peace are enormously consequential. This is why foreign policy matters; this is why the Pax Americana and its future matters; this is why the mental competence and integrity of the Commander-in-Chief matters--
and matter more than any other issue we debate and resolve democratically. No other political decision has consequences like this. Not even close, really.
The men who died on that crash were wholly unknown to me, as was this story.
The men who died on that crash were wholly unknown to me, as was this story.
Most of the men who died in that war are numbers to me: For exactly the reasons he explains in that presentation, I grew up only knowing a few Vietnam combat veterans well. The whole story should be better understood--
including the story of the *good* reasons we were involved in that war. But good reasons aren't good enough if you don't win.
We should still--all of us--be trying to understand that war:
We should still--all of us--be trying to understand that war:
Trying to understand whether the failure was strategic, tactical, conceptual, operational, military, political, diplomatic, moral--or all of the above--and asking whether we've fixed these problems sufficiently so that this is less likely happen again.
If I have followers who've never given much thought to that war and want to study it, which is very likely given that for many Americans it happened long before they were born, the book that most shaped the way I understand it is this one: amazon.com/Irony-Vietnam-…
But start by watching Alan's presentation. Stop it a few times to look at the documents on the screen. If you're American, remember that they did, in an important sense, die for you--that's what they believed they were doing. This is our history; they were ours; we should know.
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