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On Lifting the Trade Embargo Against Vietnam

By The Clarence Fitch Chapter of VVAW

We believe that the United States war in Indochina was a turning point in American history. We believe that the conduct of that war exposed to us and to the American people the contradictions and hypocrisies which lie at the very foundations of American foreign and domestic policies. We believe that the failure to understand and clarify these true lessons of the American experience in Indochina continues to fester in the American body politic. This failure has led directly to such dishonorable and disgraceful episodes and activities as: an embargo which punished the Vietnamese people for successfully defending their homeland, and which prohibited American scientists and veterans from studying the health effects of exposure to herbicides which afflict so many of our own brothers and sisters; our governments political and military support for the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; the long cruel hoax on the families of the Americans missing in action played by our government and by unscrupulous POW activists. This failure has contributed indirectly to both covert and open U.S. intervention in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and contributes even now to American policy in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia.

We believe that our failure as a nation to come to terms with the American experience in Indochina is a contributing factor in the continuing isolation and alienation of Vietnam veterans. We believe that this alienation represents a failure to reconcile ourselves to the country which enlisted and drafted us, to the people we tried to destroy, and to our own experiences. We believe that one part of this reconciliation process requires that we recognize, understand, help heal and rebuild, and finally forgive the people who became our enemies by fighting for their independence.

We welcome the end of the embargo. We support the complete normalization of relations between our government and the countries of Indochina. We urge generosity in aid for reconstruction, especially funding and logistical support of war we left behind, which even now maim and kill Vietnamese, some not even conceived when we left Saigon nearly twenty years ago.

We hope that by all this and more we can begin to complete the process of reconciliation. We have already spent half our lives on this journey, and we have along way to go.