COMMENTARY - SESSION 7
Comments on LESSONS LEARNED
by Steve Sherman

The panelists here echoed Chuck Hagel's sentiment that "most of us were not consumed with great geopolitical thoughts." All of them, in the context of their careers, had cause to rethink this war and consider the "lessons learned." Let's look at what they came up with:

"Pete" Peterson, the Vietnam Veteran Pilot/POW-turned-Legislator and Diplomat, said "The first lesson that I learned after Vietnam was no more Vietnams", which was greeted by the audiences' applause. What does that mean exactly? Only sentry duty at Fulda Gap and the 38th Parallel? Deployments restricted to "Meals on Wheels?" Peterson said, when he came back from Vietnam, “No more Vietnams.” And he also said, "'You know, I will never serve in another military conflict unless we have a declaration of war.' That was for me." which brought further applause. "I didn’t want us to enter into another conflict where we didn’t know the enemy, we hadn’t studied their history, had no clue what the objective was and we hadn’t answered the question that I think the first panel brought up. And that was the question of why. That question has to be answered before we engage our troops in any kind of future combat. And the only way to do that is by forcing public debate before, not after, the decisions have been made to go in." [more applause]

Chuck Hagel, the Vietnam Veteran Grunt-turned-Legislator, said "that there should be a very clear definition of the political objective before we ever commit a nation to war." The problem with these approaches lies in the fact that Senator Hagel's confreres have not used the term "Declaration of War" since Pearl Harbor. They will dance around it with phrases like "Police Action" or "Congressional approval and support for the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression" or "Congressional Joint Resolution Authorizing action for violations of U.N treaties and international law" but a Declaration of War is no longer in their vocabulary. This might satisfy some people in the peace-at-any-cost crowd, but does not offer a realistic option for the security of this nation in the modern world. As imperfect as it may be, what we have is all we can rely on for our defense. Hagel, fortunately, acknowledges that "I believe that the President of the United States should have all the options available to him and his team, to carry out the highest responsibility for a nation, and that is its national security."

Wesley Clark, the Vietnam Veteran Company Commander, later NATO General-turned Presidential Candidate, thinks "the basic rule for presidents is they try their best to avoid going to war. That war should be the absolute last, last, last resort.. . . The lesson is, don’t do war unless you absolutely, absolutely must. Vietnam was an elective war. So is Iraq." But on that note, so were Kosovo and bombing Serbia elective wars. And I wasn't aware that General Clark had protested to President Clinton that "we didn’t know the enemy, we hadn’t studied their history, had no clue what the objective was and we hadn’t answered the question [of why]." Was there an element of necessity here that I missed? Was there a secret Congressional Declaration of War? Presidential Candidate Clark opines a Clintonism “'When you can make a difference, you should.' The United States can make a difference in Darfur. We’ve got the military capacity to do it. We’ve got the leadership to do it. We should make a difference." How many body bags will it take to cancel that mission?

Bob Herbert, the Vietnam-Era Veteran turned-NYT Journalist-cum-military-expert, offers that "at some point we need to decide, as the grown ups in this society we need to do a better job in deciding what’s worth fighting for and why." Who makes that decision? Is it the New York Times? Is it the protester in the street? Shouldn't you credit Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon with seriously considering those questions? Shouldn't you extend the same courtesy to President Bush?

There is an undertone here that the wars happen because the President wakes up one morning on the wrong side of bed and says "Let's go out and bomb someone today." Herbert said "But if you look at the history leading up to, just take Vietnam and Iraq, that presidents listen to a very narrow, small group of people who are in favor of the war and that’s that. I mean I’ve read The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s great book twice, and I’ve been through it innumerable times." Clark offered that "I think the record suggests that the administration from 9/11, from that afternoon on 9/11, was leaning to get into war in Iraq. Not worried about what to do about Saddam Hussein. It was not about weapons of mass destruction. It was about wanting to go to war against Iraq." Hagel acknowledges the complexity of the issue, but one of his statements about balance of power ("It’s about a balance of power that is critical for our country as well as the fourth estate, and that is the press.") has a meaning which escapes me. The more one delves into the history of the Vietnam War, the more we can see how elected Presidents and their appointed advisors agonized over each step they took. Armed with hindsight, we may not like the decisions they made and, in many cases, the personalities of the decision-makers that came through their recorded work, but in every case they were far more in command of the facts than any journalist, protester or citizen-voter. And, unless you were to be doing that job full time, you could not accumulate sufficient facts to properly debate the issues involved. Bumper sticker philosophies and sound-bite journalism may impact on the process, but they do not add to the facts on the table.

It's one thing to say, as Senator Hagel did, "we have not forgotten, nor will we, the lessons of Vietnam." It is altogether a different matter to understand what those lessons should be.

A few asides:

To General Clark: The plan to close the Ho Chi Minh Trail, known as Operation El Paso, was not supported at DOD level. [1]

To Ambassador Peterson: Yes, there are "a lot of military things that are a positive that came out of Vietnam that nobody really talks about. . . . The smart bombs actually came out of Vietnam, or at least the idea." The response to the Easter Offensive included beacon offset bombing; Linebacker II included camera-guided "smart bombs." The possible application of this new technology to defeat a North Vietnamese Offensive in 1975 is rarely discussed because there was no one in Office willing keep our promises to our allies to forestall a North Vietnamese invasion. Regarding your statement "when you are in war, you really have to think about how do you re-engage that enemy after the war," I don't think we are to blame here. [Begin Rant here] We developed and offered a Post-War Program for Reconstruction in Indochina.[2] I believe that this was the basis for Nixon's offer of reconstruction aid. When North Vietnam decided to abrogate the Paris Accords and annex South Vietnam by force of arms, our offer was automatically removed from the table. Since we were unable to negotiate a binding agreement with Vietnamese Communists in 1973, I didn't see any particular reason for us to beat our head against the rock of Vietnamese obstinacy in 1993. I haven't seen any agreements we have negotiated since 1993 being anything other than one-sided. Why should we offer compensation to soldiers who claim to have been harmed by Agent Orange at a time when their government claimed they were never in the South? Why can we worry about human rights in Darfur, but not in Vietnam? [End Rant Here]

To Bob Herbert; if fifty-eight thousand American GIs "are certainly forgotten," what part of the blame does your profession acknowledge? Pindar wrote, "Unsung, the noblest deed will die." The main-stream of your profession deigns to sing such songs, in keeping with its political views.

Ambassador Peterson made the following statement: "I think the American people will endure just so much. I also think they are rather impatient. And I think their voices are being heard for the first time relative to Iraq. I think they have found they can be empowered if they speak. But they have to speak without the fear of retribution. And I think for the most part, why Americans have been so quiet is that if they spoke out, they were unpatriotic. The fact is, you are unpatriotic if you don’t speak out." Why is there an impression that protestors have moral and factual arguments on their side. During the Vietnam War, the "Silent Majority" maintained its silence, so Congress voted to undermine two decades of American policy and sacrifice. What we have seen in the Iraq War are people volunteering as airport greeters, collecting goodies to send to the troops and demonstrating their support in ways that were lacking during the Vietnam War. We have seen in this conference, a few people who grit their teeth and mouth the platitudes about supporting the troops, but the public at large dosn't want us to cut and run, they want us to do what is necessary and get it over soonest.

Between us vets, I want to commend Pete Peterson for having "made a conscious decision" to deal with the psychological issues stemming from the war. I make some of my peers unhappy when I suggest that the VA should get out of the compensation business (which in many ways encourages aberrant behavior) and use its resources to treat the veterans problems, using the resilience that Ambassador Peterson has demonstrated as a model to emulate. Unfortunately this is up to the Legislators to deal with and they would rather throw money at a problem than deal with their own guilt.

I didn't understand the sense of Chuck Hagel's jest. "This is not a swift boat ad." He recognizes that Vietnam veterans are not going to vote for a candidate just because he did or did not serve in Vietnam, but I hope he recognizes that we are not going to be taken in by a demonstrably false hagiography overlaid on well-known conduct that was detrimental to the well-being of ourselves and our comrades. There are non-veterans out there who claim that the swift boat charges were false. But any one who was sentient during his service in Vietnam understands the validity of the Swifties' charges.

I agree with Bob Herbert who said "I think that that war tore a hole in my generation and that hole has not healed yet. And I don’t think that hole is ever going to be healed."

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[1] 12. Memorandum From the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Wheeler) to Secretary of Defense McNamara, CM-2908-68, Washington, January 13, 1968. Quotes General Westmoreland as follows: "4. Regarding view (1), above, my concept for operations in Laos is outlined in Operation El Paso, proposed for October 1968. Preempting a Khe Sanh area assault by an offensive into Laos is neither logistically nor tactically feasible at this time." Foreign Relations of the United States, Johnson Volume VI, Document 12, RADIX Press CD ROM edition.

[2] Admiral Jeremiah Denton also mentions this. Edgar F. Puryear Jr., American Admiralship, Naval Institute Press 2005, p. 504.