Historical Reflection

In 1968, I read China on the Eve of Communist Takeover by A. Doak Barnett. It was assigned reading in a political science course at The Ohio State University. I packed that book with me when called to Army active training duty at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

At Fort Dix, the Army trained me to become an infantryman, to combat Viet Nam communists. I laid on my bunk, reading the book on a Sunday when we had a short break. The Drill Sergeant came by and screamed, "Are you learning to become a communist, private?"

He confiscated my book. Barnett, the author, described as a journalist, how the Chinese communists under Mao, surrounded the cities and cut off their supplies. Mao's strategy was to win the hearts and minds of the agrarian working people and to isolate the intellectuals in the cities.

When I looked at what we were doing in Viet Nam, I saw the immediate parallel. I had another book hidden in my footlocker, The Ugly American, a 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that depicted the U.S. diplomatic corps' failures in Southeast Asia.

To avoid being characterized as a traitor, I kept that book hidden. My self-education was going to get me into trouble because the U.S. Army was programming me with propaganda that ensured "The enemy had one life to give for their country."

At OSU, I read A Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall.  "Originally published in 1961, before the United States escalated its involvement in South Vietnam, Street without Joy offered a clear warning about what American forces would face in the jungles of Southeast Asia: a costly and protracted revolutionary war fought without fronts against a mobile enemy. In harrowing detail, Fall describes the brutality and frustrations of the Indochina War, the savage eight-year conflict-ending in 1954 after the Fall of Dien Bien Phu. French forces suffered a staggering defeat at the hands of Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists."

Later in life, attending an art opening, I met Professor Fall's wife, Dorothy, a fine artist who wrote about her husband, who was blown up in Viet Nam while on assignment with CBS News. I reviewed her book for The Examiner while I was the National Politics Examiner.

Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar, by Dorothy Fall (Author) is a masterpiece describing her husband in the context of being a family man.  I think of all of the "family men" and soldier boys who lost their lives in Viet Nam, pursuing a failed strategy. 

My fellow Americans didn't do their homework. What they got was propaganda. My generation protested as vigorously as they could, and eventually, we stopped. We didn't admit that America lost the war in Viet Nam, one in which we should not have embarked. 

We didn't admit that we launched an illegal war with Iraq. We haven't admitted failure in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Today, America should not "reset." America needs a thorough re-education, a new indoctrination in economics, leadership styles, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.