Will We Ever Pay Up For Vietnam Vets?

To The Reader’s Forum:

April 30th will mark fifty years since the Vietnam War ended. It seems like that was yesterday, and I don’t know where the time goes. That war was one of the most horrible, unnecessary conflicts in American history, and families still grieve for the loved ones they lost. I’m very, very fortunate I was too young to serve in that gruesome, scandalous quagmire.

Lyndon Johnson was hell-bent on ridding the world of communists, and he furthered that position by perpetuating the war in Vietnam. He embraced “containment theory”, and believed that if Vietnam fell to communist control, other nations in southeast Asia would do the same thing. As a result, over 58,000 young Americans died for no good reason whatsoever. Tens of thousands of soldiers never returned home to their families, and many of those never saw their babies for the first time.

If you’ve ever been to the Vietnam Memorial you’ve seen the ways people still mourn the fallen all these many years later. I’ve been there twice, and I’ve seen the aggrieved laying bundles of roses at the base of the granite slabs. Others made pencil rubbings of their loved one’s names from the letters etched in the stone. And needless to say, tears run like waterfalls.

Maya Lin was the brilliant architecture student at Yale who designed that memorial, and her submission won the largest design competition in American history.

We can thank Dow Chemical and Monsanto for producing the cancer-causing defoliant, Agent Orange for the war effort. In Jamestown, I worked with a Vietnam vet who was exposed to Agent Orange on a daily basis. He said he was often drenched from head to toe while filling tanker planes with Agent Orange in the jungle heat. Consequently, he developed a blood-borne cancer that his doctors at the VA said was caused by that toxic chemical. He didn’t have health insurance, and he was worried he wouldn’t live to see his children graduate from high school. His is just one of many stories along the same lines.

The Office of the Inspector General reported as many as 87,000 Vietnam veterans still haven’t received retroactive benefits for injuries and illness resulting from that war. And now that Elon Musk is firing federal employees every day, there’s a good chance they’ll never see the money they’re owed by law. Ironically, America has spent more on foreign wars than any other nation on the planet, but it won’t care for its own brave soldiers.

I wonder if our criminal government has learned anything since that appalling time in American history. If Pete Rose were still living, I’m sure he wouldn’t bet on that possibility.

Craig Malmrose

North Carolina

Formerly of Bemus Point