The next HBO/Spielberg/Hanks WW2 miniseries is a go...

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Red October1984

I do not admire the enemy.

In one of Agatha Christie's mysteries written during the war her characters have an interesting conversation about admiring the enemy, or rather its reverse. One of the characters asks why they hate the Germans. Another character says "We have to, or else we wouldn't fight them." Of course by that time Germany had conquered most of Europe and was working on Britain, so the British saw what Nazi aggression had done to Poland and France, and had good cause to fight. The Americans felt the same way about the Japanese, again with good cause.

But what about the Germans? They were told that the invasion of Poland was a reaction to Polish aggression, and that France and Britain had declared war on Germany for no other reason that Germany had defended herself. Playing any wargame from the German side, or watching movies like Das Boot, gives us something of the commonality of fighting men. Watching Letters From Iwo Jima made me look at the common Japanese soldier, especially the scene where the commander translates the letter from a dying American to his mother.

A great many people still rail about how our own government forced us to lose to little Vietnam. Those damned hippies ruined everything. Today I agree with the anti-war protesters; we should never have been there in the first place. I was just a radioman on a destroyer. I didn't pull the trigger. I did receive the messages from the marines, though. Two bunkers knocked out. Five trucks destroyed. Thirty-three bodies counted. Thirty-three people I never met, who never did anything to me. I didn't pull the trigger, but I was indirectly responsible for their deaths. Of course they would have killed our marines and soldiers, perhaps willingly, and that's justification enough for killing them first. On the other hand we justified killing the Germans and Japanese in WW2 because they were the aggressors. They were the bad guys. They started it.

But who started Vietnam? The Warhawks would tell you that Ho Chi Minh started it, because he and his Communist buddies wanted to rule Southeast Asia. Others will tell you that it was Ho Chi Minh who won the election, and his enemies took the southern half of the country and then asked America for help. War supporters will tell you that Ho was a Communist. Anti-war types will tell you that the Americans refused to help the Vietnamese in their fight to get rid of the French, so the Communist Chinese were the only ones who would sell him weapons, and that he had to become a Communist to garner that support. War supporters will tell you that we went to the aid of a legitimate South Vietnamese government. War protesters would tell you that we helped set up that government, and when he proved to be ineffective we helped engineer his overthrow and then gave full support to his replacement.

I'm not saying who was right or wrong, because my opinions are just that. What I'm saying is that while everybody has opinions, and some of them are strong to the point of being extreme, the reality is that in my war there was no clear aggressor; no one cause you can point to and say "We were there because these people attacked us." We weren't there for self-defense, and we weren't there for revenge. We were just there. We hated the Vietnamese. We called them gooks, slopes, slants and worse. And we used those terms on all of them, not just the "enemy". They were useless little yellow people, and they all looked the same. We were there because our government told us to go there, told us this was the enemy, and because we were good patriotic Americans we believed them, and we believed in the cause. When some Americans started to point out that "the cause" might not be so just, they were vilified and called traitors, anti-American and even closet Commies.

Several years ago I met one of those Vietnamese transplants. It was in my hometown of Redondo Beach, California. He owned a gas station, and we had an interesting conversation about the war and its aftermath. He was about my age, and seemed to be a real nice guy. If I still lived there we might have become friends.

I once saw a picture of a Vietnamese farmer in a rice paddy with a plow hitched to a water buffalo. The caption said "At night he might put on black pajamas and fight with the Viet Cong against our troops." When I read that my first thought was "Of course at night he might put on black pajamas and help in the fight to drive the round-eyed foreign invaders out of his country." A couple of years ago I was fortunate to be turned onto a book by a former North Vietnamese soldier, and was surprised to find that his experiences paralleled those of many Americans, right down to having his own people think of him as some sort of freak. It's called The Sorrow Of War, by Bao Ninh. I highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Sorrow-War-Nov...ar+by+bao+ninh

My point is that before you "despise the enemy", make sure of who the enemy really is. Be absolutely sure that the people telling you that you need to fight for your country, family and honor don't have their own hidden agenda. Make sure the "enemy" really is a danger to you and yours, and not just a scapegoat.

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”
-James Madison

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
-Hermann Göring