VINDICATION OF THE VIETNAM VETERANS YOU WERE RIGHT
AMERICA WAS WRONG

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The Conservative Voice
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by Resa Kirkland
January 07, 2005

One of my beloved Vietnam Veterans, Michael Galindo, sent me an email the other day with a humorous idea for a t-shirt:  If the Vietnam Veteran lost the Vietnam War, how come we don’t speak Vietnamese?

I laughed.  It was logical, it was reasonable, and it was undeniable.  But it got me to thinking a lot about my Vietnam Vets.  Actually, the real time war coverage of Gulf War II had already done that, because there before me were so many of the impossible paradoxes that these men had tried to deal with 30 years ago, played out in full color with no leftist slant.

What had caused the Vietnam Vet to shed many a bitter tear and fight for his broken heart with a vigor unique to his war was finally being made indisputably clear to the civilian pukes who had the audacity to judge and condemn these good and decent men placed into an impossible situation.

I was a baby when the war was going on.  I can remember being about six or seven, seeing the long-haired, scrawny, filthy and vile hippies, united in their utterly useless existence, carrying their placards, shouting angrily and smelling funny.  They were a sharp contrast to the few minutes of news reports a week from a steamy jungle in a strange land, and those focused, determined, and courageous men who were having the truth of what they were trying to do twisted, perverted, and bastardized by a media and film industry who hated them and all that they stood for, and for some reason beyond my child-like reasoning, had chosen to side with the bottom-dwellers of society.  Putting aside the sins of the politics and politicians who had put the khaki warriors in that strange place, it was plain to an innocent child—even back then—who was to be admired, who truly believed what they claimed to believe, who was honorably right and doing what was right--and who was wickedly, treacherously, despicably wrong.

I would listen to the moral dilemmas presented to these good and decent young American boys—stories of the VC using civilians as human shields, dressing up as civilians-or worse, forcing women and children to do their dirty work!--and pretending to be innocent by-standers just long enough for one of our boys to let his guard down and pay for it with his life, terrifying and demoralizing those who saw it, rendering them impotent as they struggled between the innate human need for their own self-preservation, and that decent, Godly side of Americans which can scarcely bring us to kill an innocent.

Oh what a wretched, horrible thing to ask of young men raised in a land of Judeo-Christian principles, a love for the individual human life, and the freedom to choose between right and wrong!  I remember, even with the limited understanding of a little girl, thinking as the soldiers tried to present their side, begging us to try to comprehend the situation they were in:  They’re right…what are they supposed to do when the enemy uses civilians as attackers, pretending to be just a pawn in the war one moment and murdering them the next?   It was an impossible situation, confusing and terrifying, and one that called for empathy, understanding, answers, help, or at least forgiveness, but was instead misrepresented and outright lied about to the world back home by the malevolent media and the Hollow Heads of Hollywood for decades to come.