Honoring our Vietnam veterans

Tomorrow, Jan. 13, 2024, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., is hosting “A Celebration of Character and Courage” to honor Vietnam veterans.

This event at 4 p.m. ET honoring all Vietnam War veterans declares that “Commemorating their collective and individual service and the sacrifice of families and friends is a national imperative, as we strive to renew our nation’s commitment to its veterans, their families and a complete accounting for the 1,578 Americans still missing in action in the region.”

The facts are that 3.4 million Americans served in Southeast Asia (in theater) in the '50s, '60s and '70s, and 5.6 million living veterans (30% of all veterans) served during the Vietnam War era. It is hard for many who lived through that period to conceive that the Vietnam War ended for America on March 29, 1973, when the U.S. Military Assistance Command was dissolved and Hanoi released the last of its acknowledged American prisoners of war.

At that moment, South Vietnam was still a functioning country with its own government and armed forces. Tragically, after the Watergate scandal provided the Democrats with a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress in the 1974 elections, the U.S. government, with a congressional override of President Ford’s veto, passed a military budget that effectively disarmed our former South Vietnamese allies (no ammo, spare parts, fuel, etc.) and they were overrun by the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975.

Surely, at this point, all Americans can agree that fighting the Vietnam War was a mistake whether you were a “hawk” (and wanted to do what was necessary to win, failing to understand that the U.S. government was never going to make that deep a commitment), or whether you were a “dove” (and felt that America was on the wrong side defending against agrarian reformers and freedom fighters and it was none of our business).

Having made that acknowledgment, we should have long ago united as Americans to celebrate and honor our fellow countrymen who answered the nation’s call and were drafted or enlisted to fight for what their government told them was a just cause.

The Vietnam War ended up being a national heartbreak which caused far more suffering than it alleviated. Furthermore, the American people became distrustful of their own government in a way they never had before because all Americans felt they had been lied to and misled, whether they were conservative or liberal, “hawk,” “dove,” or indifferent.

This duplicity by the federal government caused a deep rift in the national psyche, a wound that has still not fully healed, especially for those tens of millions of Americans who lived through that national agony and lost loved ones to death, or severe physical and/or emotional damage.

58,281 Americans died in this conflict, and all our countrymen who served in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and the South China Sea were marked and changed by their experiences.

Most American deaths occurred in the years immediately following the dramatic escalation in American troop involvement after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. The American war deaths were: 1965 (1,928); 1966 (6,350); 1967 (11,363); 1968 (16,899); 1969 (11,780). So, of the 58,281 Americans KIA in Vietnam, 50,248 were killed between Jan. 1, 1965, and Dec. 31, 1969. These numbers explain why LBJ did not seek another term and Richard Nixon was elected president, promising to “Vietnamize” the war.

Of course, no one should forget that the Vietnamese suffered terribly, with at least 849,000 war dead in the North and at least 313,000 war dead in the South (not to mention noncombatant deaths of at least a million in each country).

The fact is our American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines fought bravely and well, never having lost a battle of battalion size or larger in the entire war.

Our nation let them down. We put them halfway around the world without sufficient support and backing at home to allow them to do the job they had been sent there to do. When they came home, they were too often vilified and shunned. It was, and is, a disgrace.

I thank God millions of our fellow countrymen have recognized their mistake and begun to honor and celebrate the heroism, dedication, devotion and bravery of our Vietnam veterans.

I acknowledge that this is personal to me. I was 18 and graduated high school in 1965, and those maximum casualty years included some of my boyhood friends and high school classmates. I attended a blue-collar high school and disproportionate percentages of our soldiers in Vietnam were drafted from the graduates of such high schools who were not getting collegiate deferments. Some of them did not make it home. I have thought about them over the years, dead before their 21st birthday, never becoming husbands, fathers, grandfathers. They sacrificed all their tomorrows because America asked them to, and we cannot dishonor their memory.

If you can, join me in watching the celebration at the National Cathedral (afa.org/events/cathedral). Resolve to express your gratitude to the Vietnam Veterans you know and their families and loved ones. I know from personal experience that it helps heal some deep wounds. I have made it a practice to express my gratitude to every Vietnam vet I encounter or can identify. They all seem very appreciative.

After I publicly acknowledged her husband’s service in Vietnam, one wife wrote me and told me that I could not imagine how much she and her husband appreciated it. She said she had not seen her husband weep since he had returned from the war until he tried to explain to her how it felt finally to be honored and appreciated instead of shunned and mocked.

Let’s redeem our nation’s honor by honoring these men and women publicly as often as we can. They deserve it.

Most of them are now in their 70s and 80s. It’s still not too late, but the opportunity is closing.