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Why They Died

By Allen Leonard Meece

58,220 Americans died in the Vietnam War for various reasons. Their memories at the Vietnam Wall in Washington DC stand for something. They gave up their lives in a foreign place that wasn't threatening them.

Some died to protect California from an invasion by the "falling communist dominoes." My company commander actually made that proclamation during Navy recruit training in Milwaukee in the winter of 1962. The establishment defined, and still does, any socialism as Russian-style communism with a monolithic obsession to run the world just like capitalism wants to do.

Some died for the power surge they got when scaring socialist nations into subservience by showing that "civilized" people can become uncivilized and go berserk to intimidate victims.

Some died because they were physically hauled to a place where they shouldn't be, and given no option to live but to fight their way out. A federal conscription law said that healthy men had to go shoot peasants, period. The men thought it smarter to gamble their lives than become "felons" and go to a federal penitentiary for five years.

Some died to prove that they believed the propaganda. There is no shame in believing what the big shots say — once. There IS shame in NOT learning from reality and not questioning authority.

They died to gallantly protect democracy by waiving their "inalienable right" to freedom and equality. They submitted to involuntary servitude and gave their honor to the military which sacrificed them for rich peoples' ideology. Those idealistic men deserve respect. They deserve color guards and flowers laid on their gravestones by lovely women. There was no shame in their simple naivety. They were noble and fine. They believed the fallacy that they were protecting democracy. Time has shown that one goofy president harmed democracy more than any number of Vietnamese ever will.

They died to prove to the following generations how chauvinistically wrong it is to invade and try to run other peoples' countries. America withdrew from Vietnam in 1975 just as the French colonizers had withdrawn in 1955 — with nothing gained and many lives needlessly lost. We should have sent more diplomats instead of soldiers who might be with us now if we had.

We are still invading countries and pretending that we can run them better than their own people. We have to withdraw and leave them worse-off than they were before we "helped" them but now their oil fields are privatized for our big corporations. We force them to think like we do even if we have to kill them. That is not fair to our dead. It is telling them that we learned nothing from their sacrifice — that maybe they died for nothing.

Fortunately for humanity, there are organizations like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the next generation Iraq Veterans Against the War, who remember that sacrifice actually means giving too much for too little. We honor our departing veterans when we teach what they really stand for — peace.

Allen Leonard Meece was a sonar technician who served on a destroyer that was attacked in the Tonkin Gulf (USS Edwards DD950, 1964-66). He is the author of the Vietnam naval novel, "The Abel Mutiny," which is available from Amazon.com.