OPINION:
My Vietnam War memories were securely filed away until recently, when I started watching those expat Southeast Asia travel videos on YouTube (“The Vietnam War was winnable,” Web, March 26). Up popped a statue of the late Sen. John McCain, sitting beside the lake he had crashed landed in. The lake is part of a park in the middle of Hanoi. I nearly fell off my chair. Apparently this is one statue that Black Lives Matter and antifa have not gotten to. Another surprise is that Ho Chi Minh City is referred to as Saigon, and apparently no one cares.
Vietnam, fortunately, is not China. The North Vietnamese army did not roll into Saigon and start killing everyone in sight. There was a 10-year Communist-reeducation ploy, but apparently the regime decided they had some of the best real estate on the South China Sea, and it would be best if they just let everyone get rich.
I spent a year in Long Binh, from 1971 to 1972. I was very lucky because my biggest regret was not being able to attend the Bob Hope Christmas show. Jane Fonda did the Hanoi tour during the spring, which did not help U.S. Army morale, and the North invaded the South to begin the final push, culminating in 1975.
The U.S. Army still had over 300,000 troops in Vietnam when I arrived in July 1971. It was at about 60,000 when I left in June ’72. The U.S. Army was so drugged out by ’71 they required mandatory drug tests and then medevaced the failures back to the U.S.
Vietnam was one of the biggest fiascos in my lifetime that, I am ashamed to say, I got forcibly inserted into. My draft number was 25. It had nothing to do with defending the country. Lyndon Johnson was totally incompetent, and apparently so was Harry Truman. If Truman had agreed to talk to Ho Chi Minh, those condos on the South China Sea could have gone up a lot sooner. Maybe I will live long enough to go back and apologize.
SAMUEL BURKEEN
Reston, Va.
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