To the editor:
I must respond to Albert Boynton’s letter “Should we apologize? Absolutely not!” in the June 2 edition.
As the United States attempts to revise the brutal history of its engagement in the Vietnam War, a war that took place 10,000 miles from our shores against a peasant people who posed no possible threat against this military superpower (which had, in 1945, used the world’s most fearsome weapons of death on the civilian populations of two cities in Japan), some facts are inescapable.
Over 6 million Southeast Asians were killed.
13,000 of 21,000 Vietnamese villages were severely damaged or destroyed.
Nearly 950 churches and pagodas were destroyed by bombings.
Nearly 3,000 high schools and universities were destroyed.
350 hospitals and 1,500 maternity wards were destroyed by bombing.
Over 15,000 bridges were destroyed by bombing.
There were 36,125,000 U.S. helicopter sorties during the war.
39 million acres of land in Indochina were littered with fragmented bombs and shells.
21 million gallons of extremely poisonous chemicals were applied in 20,000 spraying missions between 1961 and 1970 in the most intensive use of chemical warfare in human history.
Nearly 375,000 tons of fireballing napalm was dropped on villages.
I could add to an endless list of atrocities that the U.S. committed against a people who posed no threat to us.
I grew up during World War II. My dad and two brothers served in the U.S. Navy. My dad and one brother were in the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. They were engaging in fighting against the German war machine, which had devastated much of Europe.
Vietnam posed no such danger. The war that the U.S. fought there was an abomination. I have been to the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C. and saw the quagmire in which our young men fought and died. I have wonderful friends, members of Veterans for Peace, who are spending their lives trying to atone for the violence they committed when they were thrown into the maw of war.
Can anyone explain to me why the U.S. carried out a war crime against an innocent people?
Can anyone explain to me why the president of the United States recently visited Vietnam in a first peaceful (?) visit and offered to sell weapons to a country that we had ravaged?
Can anyone explain to me why the U.S. has approximately 1,000 military bases all over the world?
My son came home from the fourth grade one day and told me that his teacher wanted his class to memorize a new oath in which they promised to protect this country against its “enemies.” I called the teacher and told her that my son would take no such oath and that my country’s “enemies” were not his enemies nor mine.
The military talks about putting “boots” on the ground. It is interesting that the military can dehumanize a human being and send the so-called “boots” to kill and destroy people in countries that pose no threat to us.
The U.S. spends more money on waging war and preparations for war than all the other countries combined, including $4 billion destroyers right here in Maine. But very few people protest. And we call this a Christian nation?
