How Do You Ask The Last Man To Die?

by Dennis Green

John Kerry, in his testimony before the Fulbright Committee, in 1972, as a returned Vietnam Vet, said, “There are men dying there now, so that we don’t have to admit what the rest of the world knows, that it is a mistake. How do we ask men to die so that President Nixon, as he said in his own words, doesn’t have to be, ‘The first American President to lose a war.’? How do you ask the last man to die in Vietnam?”

I watched an old news clip of that testimony the other day, and it drove me to tears, remembering in a rush my fight to help end that war, seeing my own students drafted to fight and die there, seeing the returning vets, coming to UCSB on the G.I. Bill, and the tortured looks on their faces, seeing them today, in their sixties, still suffering the trauma and illnesses from that war.

I am also doing research for a story about President William McKinley, who opposed our entry into the Spanish-American War because he had served at Antietam in the Civil War, and seen, “Stacks of the war dead bodies.” And time after time we have gone into these unnecessary wars, squandering treasure and lives, in a seemingly childish lust for adventure.

In every instance, there was some bogus incident pushing the U.S. into war. “Remember the Maine!” was the cry of William Randolph Hearst to Teddy Roosevelt. But the Maine, it has been proven, was not blown up by a Spanish torpedo, but by its own boiler and ammunition stores. The Gulf of Tonkin incident got Vietnam efforts into a Surge. WMDs got us into Iraq. And now what is it, precisely, that keeps us in Afghanistan?

The Fulbright hearings into the Vietnam conflict didn’t even BEGIN until 1971. And we were not out of there until 1975. Today, Senator John Kerry is Chairman of the Senate Defense Committee, and recently ordered the release of 1,000 pages of testimony and investigative evidence about Vietnam. He appears poised to call for hearings into our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if such hearings begin, we are likely to hear some very startling things.

The hearings into BlackWater mercenary contractors were very disturbing, enough so that the company changed its name, if not its ways. The murder of innocent civilians in Iraq was only the worst of the charges against them. A number of U.S. soldiers have been charged with similar crimes in Afghanistan.

We will hear more about the use of drones in Pakistan, probably more than the Generals would want us to know. We’ll even get some intelligent news analysis on PBS from Need to Know, the Charlie Rose Show and on CNN from Farid Zakharia. And we will be reminded that when the media turned against the war in Vietnam, when Walter Cronkite told us it was unwinnable, LBJ decided to retire.

President Obama has left himself an exit strategy from Afghanistan, but will he use it? If he does not, his presidency, whether it ends in 2012 or 2016, will end in disgrace. He will be even more discredited than the man who got us into all this mess — President George W. Bush.

And the only thing that might stop John Kerry is a Republican takeover of the Senate. Don’t let that happen. My Libertarian leanings and he deaths of relatives and friends in combat have made me fiercely anti-War!

©2010 Dennis Green