Is there some special reason the phrase, “Well done, and welcome home” is important to Vietnam veterans?
You bet there is. See, when we got home, we didn’t get much of that, even from our own families in many cases. We got a lot of ridicule, contempt, and even hate because of the lies told by the left, especially the anti-war movement and the press. We were called names and spat at – I, personally had garbage and food thrown at me in the Seattle airport when we returned from Nam. There has been so much falsehood and mythology spread about us that many of our countrymen, and even our children, think we’re all a bunch of psychos and mass murderers-in-waiting.
I know vets who have been denied jobs, or even admission to colleges because they are Vietnam veterans. I, personally, know veterans who have never told anyone they are veterans! A female friend who recently lost her husband of more than 30 years didn’t know he’d been to Vietnam until after his death. My own father, a WWII veteran, once scoffed at me and my generation, saying, “At least my generation didn’t get our asses kicked by a bunch of Gooks.”
The fact is that we won that war by any measurement you may choose. When the last American combat troops were pulled out, the enemy was not on the battlefield. We inflicted more than a million KIA’s and probably ten times that many wounded – and that’s just the North Vietnamese Army! The Viet Cong (guerrillas from the South) lost several hundred thousand. Then, two years later, the North came roaring back down and ran over the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam), but there were no US combat troops or aircrew involved in that! It was a different war!
And yet, I bet you 90 out of every 100 Americans you ask would tell you that was the first war America ever lost. Bullshit! We won it, then the left – the news media, Hollywood, professors, and people like Jane Fonda, Walter Cronkite, and John Kerry – convinced our families and our children that, not only were we a bunch of psychos, we were bums who got our asses kicked.
As you can see, I have a good deal of pent-up hostility on this matter. Well, maybe it’s not so pent-up.
NOTE: My use of the word “Gooks” is not meant as a pejorative or insult to the people of North or South Vietnam, nor of the unified “People’s Republic of Vietnam.” It was a phrase we used at the time because it is very difficult to slaughter people without dehumanizing them somewhat. (It was also, of course, the word my Father used in that instance.)
I submit that, in the VAST majority of cases, the dehumanization came AFTER the violence. For your information, other terms used for the Communists were, “Goonies,” “Slopeheads,” “Slopes,” “Zipperheads,” “Zips,” “Luke the Gook,” “Charlie,” “Victor Charlie” (from the American phonetic alphabet for VC), and probably others I don’t remember. It was an awful time, filled with awful things. A little relatively benign racism was one of the least of these. [WAR]
rebsarge 