From the Lion's Den: An Open Letter (and Invitation) to Vietnam Veterans [View all]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-a-ashwill/vietnam-veterans-travel_b_3176912.html

From the Lion's Den: An Open Letter (and Invitation) to Vietnam Veterans
Mark A. Ashwill
Posted: 04/29/2013 1:01 pm

"Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground, Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down..." Listening to this '70s antiwar anthem on a recent afternoon, 38 years after the American War in Vietnam drew to a quick and blessed close, I am staggered by the emotional realization of something I have known on an intellectual level for many years.

In few countries do these words ring truer, purer and more poignantly than in Vietnam, where over 3 million men, women and children died a martyr's death in a war of national liberation. In America, the cost of freedom can be found on the battlefields of Concord, Gettysburg, and Normandy. It also echoes throughout the mountains, valleys, and deltas of Vietnam.

A generation of young Americans went to Vietnam, willingly, unwittingly or by force of law, as pawns of a policy elite, itself a prisoner of a Cold War containment and exceptionalist mentality, ignorant of Vietnamese history and culture and, like those before them and those to follow, utterly incapable of seeing the world through other peoples' eyes.

When all was said and done, the U.S. government walked, or rather, scurried away, leaving behind a shameful legacy of death, destruction and human suffering on a Draconian scale that haunts Vietnam to this day. The ghosts of the American War in Vietnam continue to haunt the U.S., as evidenced by the number of veteran suicides, considerably more than the number killed in action, the broken lives of so many survivors and the country's costly inability to come to terms with its past as prologue.