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Veteran offended

On May 24 the Eagle reprinted a column from the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Proud WWII vets opposed Vietnam War” (page 4). This I found highly objectionable printed just before Memorial Day.

In 1968 I was an adviser to an Infantry unit of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam. One morning in May I arrived at the regiment headquarters and saw Pvt. Binh, my driver, had been crying. He told me that the night before the North Vietnamese Army had come into his hamlet and accused his mother of having a son who was helping the Americans. She was tried, convicted and beheaded. Her head was stuck up on a pole as a warning. I asked if he wanted to go back to his job as an infantryman. He told me if he saw a “VC” he would be able to shoot and kill him, but if he stayed with me and we saw some Viet Cong, I could call in the Air Force, Navy air and gunfire, Army gunships, artillery and maybe we could kill them all. He stayed with me.

Some of the people mentioned in the column opposed the Berlin Airlift, U.S. involvement in Korea and other actions during the Cold War as well as Vietnam. It’s ironic that in Vietnam the people targeted for killing by the Viet Cong and NVA were anybody who worked for the news media, school teachers and government workers — the very groups here who supported the communists. Don’t forget the millions of dollars the former Soviet Union sent to the United States to support the “antiwar groups,” which was revealed after the collapse of the USSR.

I think the Inquirer article was an attempt by a former anti-military (draft dodger?) to justify his own thoughts. There were 2.6 million service personnel in Vietnam who are survived by more than 20,000 Gold-Star children. By printing that article, you are telling those people that their fathers were stupid to follow the orders of the civilians in government. Of the 2.6 million, fewer than one million are still alive. But today more than 15 million (men?) are claiming to be Vietnam War veterans.

Editor’s note: The columnist, Christina “Chris” Lombardi of Philadelphia, is an award-winning journalist and writer. She is not a draft-dodger.

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