An Unanswered Question Today
“Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, ' the first President to lose a war.' And we are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
John Kerry, statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1971
Those of my generation remember the news reports on John Kerry's haunting questions, at a time when it was obvious that the Vietnam war was a mistake. When a criminal in the White House would rather send American youth to kill or be killed than admit defeat. I keep thinking about it as I watch media reports on the increasing violence in the Middle East.
= new reply since forum marked as read
But it had an impact on many. It was discussed for a long time among my Jr High friends at the time. The words to the song were what really stuck with me.
I saw that at the Ballarat Road drive in when it came out.
And presents itself as an earworm every once in a while.
instead of providing tax dollars we now have private companies raising money for vets. Not saying that is a bad thing, have not heard there is a for profit motif, just that it should not be ... defense spending should carry through to care for vets as part of the calculus in our budget.
There was a documentary many years ago about how defense money was divided up to the most states so members of congress were more inclined to support defense spending as their state/locality would benefit. You're not going to vote against jobs for your constituents are you? S
ome in this new generation seem to be engaged with a little help from us older folks.
We're all in this world together 
commented to the guy arguing with me:
1. All wars are, at bottom, "political". The principle of ultimate civilian control of the military is tacit acknowledgment of that fact (which, for example, is why Truman famously fired MacArthur for insubordination during the Korean War). The alternative is the ascension of a military caste with all that implies for destruction of civil society.
2. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese/NLF clearly had a home-court advantage over the US forces with their 6000-mile supply lines. The North Vietnamese unfailingly referred to the Diem/Ky/Thieu governments as "puppet regimes", and so they turned out to be as ARVN was overwhelmed by the North's forces in a little over two years after the departure of the Americans.
3. The placement of "communist" North Vietnam under the USSR's nuclear umbrella proved to be decisive constraint upon the freedom of action of the US military. Although at least one ultra-militarist US General (Curtis LeMay, who later served as the arch-segregationist George Wallace's running mate in his 1968 presidential run) strongly advocated nuking North Vietnam, under the circumstances, LBJ understood that as a bridge too far.
4. Successive US governments, intoxicated as they were by their own Cold War rhetoric, contextualized the Vietnam War as a necessary component of a global war on Communism, but failed to understand that the forces arrayed against them in Southeast Asia had succeeded in melding their anti-capitalism to a fight for national liberation. The combination proved to be unbeatable.
5. To further complicate an untenable situation, the US military of that era was fraught with racial tension reflective of the turmoil in the broader US society.
6. The war-weariness of broad swaths of the American public, conditioned as it was by an apparently endless engagement (what we now call a "forever war"
by an army of reluctant conscripts, was accompanied by a growing unwillingness to fight by those very conscripts. By 1971-72, thousands of American soldiers were returning stateside addicted to hard drugs, and in extreme cases infantrymen and NCOs were killing ("fragging" their lieutenants, rather than risking their lives battling the NLF insurgents.
7. All told, a land war in Asia, the Vietnam War, proved to be an unwinnable quagmire as understood by a few analysts fairly early on (the early '60's) and by an increasing number of Americans as the years wore on.