With at least a half-dozen of wifey's family having been "reeducated," as well as many friends both in the States and many still in VN, I have no illusions about the horrors ultimately visited upon Vietnam (and Cambodia) by the slimey likes of Kerry and Fonda and Kennedy. These people ruined and enslaved and killed millions. How do they sleep at night?
Shameful, indeed. The worst comment every made to me by a Vietnamese person was "Why did America abandon us?"
There is no good answer to that one. If a Viet asked me that, I should be embarrassed to death.
Remember when the Gulf War was winding down, and Saddam had loosed his defeated tigers on the Kurds in northern Iraq? His armor came forward and attacked the Peshmergas, driving them back, and his helicopter gunships mauled retreating columns of Kurdish civilians with rockets and heavy machine-gun fire. A news cameraman was with that column and videotaped much of the mayhem from the Kurds' perspective. In particular, there was one Kurdish woman weeping bitterly as she trudged along -- she'd just seen most of her family killed in front of her eyes within the hour by the gunships and tanks, and she wasn't so much crying as wailing her heart out as she walked. She had some English, and when the newsie stuck his camera into her face, she wailed at him, "Where are you Americans? Why don't you help us? Are we not human beings?!" I couldn't look at her; sitting in my comfortable living room in my comfortable house, I felt like a whipped dog. We "won" the Gulf War, but Saddam, may he burn in hell for all eternity, knew how to make the victory hollow by immediately murdering someone else.
I would like to think George Bush the Younger heard that woman's cry, too, and remembered her years later when it was time to make some decisions. I would like to think that, unlike Vietnam, we heard her and went back for her and her people, and for everyone else who had been brutalized and killed by the butcher Saddam.