War's tangled web lives only in memory

[struggle4progress]

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - Never mind that dateline. It will always be Saigon to me, the place where I landed 40 years ago to cover a war that would eventually devour much of my youth and much of my country's innocence before it ended in bitter, bloody chaos three decades ago. <snip>

War has a way of looking simple going in - and generally turns out to be far more complex and costly than the architects ever thought possible. This one sure was.

The Vietnam War consumed the presidency of the brash Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, who sent the first combat troops. It brought young American protesters into the streets and helped topple Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon. A third president, Gerald Ford, inherited an orphaned war that ended in chaos and defeat on his watch.

To those who fought it, mostly young draftees on both sides, the war was unavoidable, a duty their country demanded of them. To those caught in the middle, the peasant farm families, it was an unending and deadly disruption to their lives. One and a half million Vietnamese perished in those 10 years. On the black granite wall in Washington, D.C., the names of 58,249 Americans who died in Vietnam are engraved.

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/11528869.htm