When I came to college at the University of Maine in 1966, I enrolled in ROTC. I had been a supporter of the Vietnam War when I was in high school, and had written op-eds in the school paper and local newspapers and even, with the help of my Japanese foreign exchange student friend, in the Asahi Shimbun in Osaka, Japan.
I looked forward to graduating and serving in the army as a lieutenant. It was at a class that the ROTC had when I heard the instructor casually mention that there had been a plebiscite scheduled to be held in the temporarily divided country of Vietnam to allow the Vietnamese people to choose their own leader (the 1954 Geneva Accord). This plebiscite never happened after John Foster Dulles told President Eisenhower that the Vietnamese people would likely choose HO Chi Minh. After all, Ho had fought alongside us against the Japanese occupiers and was a hero to his countrymen. But Ho had proclaimed himself a communist and Eisenhower, at Dulles’ suggestion, called off the election. Eisenhower stated that “possibly 80% of the people would vote for Ho Chi Minh”. The instructor had no problem with our decision to thwart democracy in the name of cold war paranoia, but I was shaken to my core because I had never heard of this and could not believe that the US could betray our own professed and sacred ideals. I loved and believed in the principles of the Declaration of Independence. I still do.
Over time I checked this story and found that it was true and that the nation that I sincerely believed would support self-determination of all peoples was committed to defending a colonial regime. It took a while, but I became a war resistor and my youthful vision of my own country as the hope of human values was eventually replaced by the realization that our government was nothing better than the friend of oppressors, dictators, kings, and despots worldwide as long as money could be made for big business. Although I had been an outstanding cadet, I quit ROTC after two years, and worked to end the war. I lost all my youthful illusions about my country and have watched in anguish as young men are still recruited to die for nothing more noble than old men’s bank accounts.
I am grateful that I learned the truth here rather than in uniform overseas, where many of my contemporaries figured it out and came back as bitter broken men. By resisting the war, my professional career was hurt, my father (who had been a sergeant in WWII) was disappointed in me, and in many ways my adult life has suffered from a deep skepticism that I still have. I worry that the nation has learned nothing of value and new generations are being lied to and manipulated by billionaires whose own children are protected from the wars that are regularly whipped up to justify defense expenditures and alliances with corrupt foreign rulers. What of value came from the death of thousands of good young people in Viet Nam?