REOPENING  OLD WOUNDS – AT 8:24 A.M. ET:  The United States makes a major gesture toward Vietnam, but many veterans will not be happy.  From The New York Times: 

HANOI, Vietnam — President Obama said at a news conference on Monday in the Vietnamese capital that the United States had agreed to lift completely its embargo on lethal weapons sales.

“The United States is fully lifting the ban on the sale of military equipment to Vietnam that has been in place for some 50 years,” Mr. Obama said.

Vietnam had long asked for the embargo to be revoked. The decision involved weighing Vietnam’s human rights record against the country’s need to defend itself against an increasing threat from China, its neighbor.

COMMENT:  It would have been so much better if Vietnam were a democracy, with strong ties to the United States.  It was heading that way in the late 1960s, with the United States and its South Vietnamese allies winning every major military engagement of the Vietnam War.  But, the political will in the United States collapsed, under the barrage of relentlessly negative reporting that often exaggerated our problems and minimized our successes.

Today Vietnam is a complete dictatorship, its people denied the better life they would have had if America hadn't withdrawn from Vietnam under the fiction that all was lost, and had continued material aid to those who had fought with us. 

It is 41 years since Americans watched on television as helicopters evacuated, in conditions of chaos, the last of our people from the United States Embassy in Saigon.  And we still are left with the question:  How does a country win every battle and lose a war?  Only one institution can truly answer that question – the American media, and that media has been silent, refusing to close a gaping wound, preferring instead to continue the fiction that the war was unwinnable.

May 23, 2016