March 29, 2024
Was Vietnam worth the cost?
By Charles Farlow
Vietnam Veterans’ Day is annually observed on March 29. It commemorates the hardships suffered and sacrifices made by nine million Americans during the Vietnam War, and their families who supported them before, during, and after.
Through the years I’ve done a great deal of research and introspection about the war, to understand the war’s pathology from beginning to end. I’ve returned to Vietnam twice for visits and research, and Vietnamese and American friends and veterans have provided their perspectives. The net result of these efforts yielded an unequivocal verdict: the war was a grave self-inflicted injury on our nation on many levels, a “Greek tragedy” writ large, that changed our country forever and whose negative impact still haunts us.
It was a monumental misjudgment of geopolitics and foreign policy, willful ignorance of Southeast Asian nationalists’ motives and alliances, racially motivated hubris, corporate greed, and many missed opportunities for diplomatic solutions along the way. The war grew from small, discreet beginnings and then escalated into a conflagration with a life of its own. It caused a generation of Americans to lose trust in their nation’s institutions and tore painfully at the nation’s social fabric, opening fault lines in our society that are still divisive. On the economic front, it has been argued that the billions spent on the war carried tectonic consequences that continue to plague our national financial stability. There is simply no upside to be found from any objective look at the facts of our Vietnam debacle.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/was_vietnam_worth_the_cost.html
