In a nation that valued education, learning, teaching students to think critically, Howard Zinn's Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal would be required reading along with the U.S. Constitution.
I wonder what my uncle, 1st Lt. James Raymond Hockett would have thought, if he had had the opportunity to read Zinn's book. How would Zinn's writings have tracked with Jim's first hand experiences?
Zinn writes:
In March 1966, President Johnson, talking about Vietnam with Columbia University Historian Henry Graff, said "proudly" (as Graff reported it): "I want to leave the footprints of America there." (pp 2-3, 1967 ed)
The most powerful nation in the world, producing 60 percent of the world's wealth, using the most advanced weapons known to military science short of atomic bombs, has been unable to defeat an army of peasants, at first armed with homemade and captured weapons, and then with modern firearms supplied from outside, but still without an air force, navy, or heavy artillery. (pg 3)
I came away from [World War II] with several conclusions:
(1) that innocent and well-meaning people ... are capable of the most brutal acts and the most self-righteous excuses, whether they be Germans, Japanese, Russians, or Americans;
(2) that one of the guiding rules for an air force in possession of large quantities of bombs is: "Get rid of them-anywhere";
(3) that the claims of statesmen and military men to be bombing only "military targets" should not be taken seriously;
(4) that war is a monstrously wasteful way of achieving a social objective, always involving indiscriminate mass slaughter unconnected with that objective; ... that anysituation ... where human life was being sacrificed, should be regarded with deep suspicion. (pg 5)
Scholars ... often engage in a form of self-censorship ... called "realism" ... to work only among the alternatives the most powerful in society put forth ... as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in a multiple choice test when we know there is another answer. American society ... sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak. (pg 7)
To compromise with politicians from the very start is to end with a compromise of a compromise. (pg 7)
... [N]o great power can be trusted ... when freedom and self-determination other nations are at stake. All great powers have at one time or another betrayed the desires of weaker nations, while accusing one another of persuading their own people of the justness of these accusations. We have been as gullible as citizens of other countries in believing the statements of leaders, and just as careless in neglecting to match these statements against the actual behavior of our nation.
...Unlike some other nations, we do not burn our history books. The facts are available; it is just that we don't see them. We are not blind; but we have a defect of vision comparable to that of the color-blind person, who ... [when] asked to distinguish numbers in a mosaic of colors cannot do so, although they are there. (pg 28)
...[W]idespread literacy ... has the unfortunate side effect of investing words with an importance so great that rhetoric can crowd out reality. Illiterate masses can be ignored, or dealt with by force. Literate masses can be deceived as all modern nations ... have shown. What is especially dangerous is that the leaders of the nations begin to believe their own oratory. A self-deception which invests the entire leadership of a nation ... with a powerful self-righteousness leads to sins which are uncalculated and therefore uncontrolled. (pg 29)
We should not be shocked-only brought to our senses. Governments do lie, and why should we ever have thought ours is an exception? (pg 35)
We have been deceived repeatedly by Johnson, Humphrey, Rusk, McNamara, and the rest on the matter of the killing of civilians. The have continually given comforting assurance that "military" targets are chosen. But we ought to keep in mind that when the bombing of a village is explained apologetically as an "accident," the accident is not that a village was bombed, but that the wrong village was bombed. (pg 59)
