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This article was first published in the April 18, 2018 edition of The Somerville Times.

By William C.  Shelton

For many of my generation the Vietnam War was the defining experience of our lives. Whether we were there, or here, what we chose to do about it, and how we came to understand it, influenced who we became. And who we became, divided us.

Fifty years ago, the 1968 Tet Offensive by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) marked a watershed in American opinion. So I determined that I would spend February in Vietnam.

Tết is the lunar new year, Vietnam’s most important holiday. Bombs bursting in air above the Hue Citadel on the eve of this year’s Tết were fireworks, rather than the American artillery that in 1968 destroyed much of the Imperial City. The Citadel’s occupants then were Viet Cong troops, but the Vietnamese who surrounded me this pleasant February night were warm, welcoming, and generous of spirit.

The next day, a young man drove me to Khe Sanh, where the DMZ met the Laotian border. For 108 days in 1968, two U.S. Marine regiments there held off two NVA divisions, with the support of 100,000 tons of U.S. bombs and 158,000 artillery rounds. About 5,500 Vietnamese and 1,520 Americans were killed. Although both sides ultimately claimed victory, the U.S. closed down the base that July, and the NVA took control of the region.

As I walked between a rusting C-130 and a Chinook, onto what had then been a cratered airstrip and was now a vast meadow, something felt jarringly out of place. It wasn’t so much the greenery, or the clear blue sky, or the absence of people. It was, it came to me, the serene silence.

And I was wracked with convulsive sobs.

Sometime later, a bird pecking for insects caught my attention. I was sitting on the ground, and my driver had withdrawn. I suppose that weeping American men of my generation are not an unfamiliar sight in that location.

Walking back toward the visitor center, I encountered a Vietnamese man who looked old enough to have fought the French, although we may well have been my age. We did not share enough language to have a conversation, but we communed. Mostly with our eyes.

I gave him my Vietnam Veterans Against the War button, and he gave me a corroded medal bearing the words, “Giải Phóng.” Google Translate tells me this means “Liberate.”

On the ride back to the coast, Mark Knopfler’s “Brothers in Arms” kept playing in my head. I turned to my driver and said, “I hope you appreciate how much your grandparents sacrificed to win your country’s independence.”

I sank into somber contemplation and reflected that I was probably really talking to my own nation’s young people. Except I couldn’t think of anything that we had won, or ever could have won. And Vietnam is as distant and irrelevant to them as World War I was to me in 1968. Both were a half century in our respective pasts, with Doughboys fading away then, one by one, and Vietnam Vets, now.

I still can’t fully comprehend how we could have made war on such a beautiful people who could, and should, have been our allies. Ho Chi Minh, who once worked in Boston’s Parker House, greatly admired the U.S. for having won its freedom from a colonial power. He and his colleagues drew on our Declaration of Independence and Constitution when drafting the first Vietnamese Constitution.

We were told at the time that we were fighting Communist aggression. That the Soviet Union and China intended to conquer a sovereign nation called “South Vietnam.” And if they succeeded, everything from the South China Sea through India would “go Communist.”

In fact, South Vietnam was an historical fiction, created when the U.S. government prevented democratic elections, repudiated the Geneva Accords, and provided one set of corrupt thugs after another with backing, arms, and money.

Even a casual reading of East Asian history would reveal that the Vietnamese and Chinese had been enemies for two millennia. Indeed, they went to war again after the U.S. withdrew.

Decades later, Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara acknowledged that the U.S. could have achieved it’s aims without ever having to fight. “Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.”

While true, this isn’t really an explanation. There was no excuse for such “profound ignorance,” since the necessary knowledge existed, including within the State Department.

A second explanation began to emerge with early opposition to the War. It was that the U.S. had, perhaps with good intentions, stumbled into supporting one side in a civil war.

Daniel Ellsberg, who had been a Marine infantry commander before he assembled the Pentagon Papers succinctly dismissed this explanation: “It always was a war in which one side is entirely paid, equipped, armed, pressed forward by foreigners.  Without the foreigners, no war. That’s not a civil war.”

Vietnamese who actually supported the Saigon government were scarce. And during the war years, an American in uniform could walk down Saigon’s Tu Do Street on a river of spit.

Over time, the explanation that best fit the evidence was that the U.S., with its “allies,” was intent on suppressing an anti-colonial struggle for national independence, as it had done successfully with elected governments in Guatemala, Iran, the Congo, and elsewhere.

But I’ve come to believe that the most truthful explanation is simpler and sadder. The primary motivation for the American War in Vietnam was to retain domestic political advantage.

Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s documentary series reports a comment made by John F. Kennedy: “Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at some point. But I can’t give up that territory to the communists and get the American people to re-elect me.”

In a 1964 recorded phone call, Lyndon Johnson told National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, “I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think we can get out.” The obstacle to “getting out” was vulnerability to Republican charges of being “soft on Communism.”

And once Richard Nixon was in office, he repeatedly told advisors, “I won’t be the first American president to lose a war.”

Whatever explanation we choose, we don’t seem to learn much from historical evidence. The pretext for sending combat troops to Vietnam was a fictionalized incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. We were subsequently told that withdrawal from Vietnam would produce a “bloodbath.” That bloodbath never happened, and now that we are no longer occupying their country, the Vietnamese seem to be quite fond of us.

The pretext for the Iraq invasion was fictional weapons of mass destruction. Dick Cheney told us that we would be greeted as liberators, create a “true democracy,” and it would all be paid for with oil revenues. Iraq is now an Iranian client state, held together by American money, in which being an American is risky.

The ensuing struggles for domestic political dominance have only become more intense and less principled. We hunker down within our tribes, much more divided as a people than we were fifty years ago.

And so it goes.

The Moving Wall Vietnam Veterans Memorial will be on display in Somerville over the next five days, November 10-14, at the Mass General Brigham Great Lawn at Assembly Row, 399 Revolution Dr.