August 26
GUEST: Dr. Jerry Lembcke, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the College of Holy Cross, researcher on media and myth-making, and co-author of the new book, Dissenting POWs, From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today.
Monthly Review, An Independent Socialist Magazine
How does a country lose wars time and time again, squandering its national treasure and good name for nothing at all? The Vietnam War (called the American War by the country that freed itself) was particularly bloody, with up to 3 million Vietnamese killed. And then there was the loss of US lives, over 58,000 soldiers who came home in body bags. Looking back, the insanity of this campaign leaves any reasonable explanation of it in the dust of history.
There were those who showed immense bravery and opposed this war from the start. Some were celebrities like Jane Fonda, who traveled to Hanoi to talk to US prisoners of war. She is in Dr. Lembcke's book, as are the captured soldiers who felt the same way she did about the war. In fact, the war was finally ended because the war mongers in power as well as the generals had stopped trusting their own troops. There was an unexpected rebellion from within the ranks, from soldiers who at last refused to be part of the carnage.
I did my part in a small way to frustrate the US war machine from within. It was self preservation first, and some GIs did so much more. But I was a terrible soldier from start to the finish, leaving the military at exactly the same rank as I had entered, that of an E-1. It had taken me several field grade Article 15s to get there. My colonel told me, if we were in Vietnam, he would simply shoot me with his pistol. I told him that if we were in Vietnam, he would be dead already. And he would have been; he was such a bastard.
So Dr. Lembcke's book is not about me. His goal is to educate the American public about how the Vietnam War was resisted from within, even in the prisoner of war camps in Hanoi. We have had so many catastrophic military adventures since then. When will we ever learn?
