Journalism Is Not Even The First Draft Of History

Is the argument here that the 20-year war was a success, with all promises met, and that people didn’t lose their lives in the final days? https://t.co/08bFk5LAaz

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 30, 2021

What I remember about Vietnam (in no particular order):

Protests

The war on TeeVee; nightly.*

Dr. King’s Riverside Church Sermon

The helicopter in Saigon

The wall in D.C. (i.e., the 50,000+ dead)

The boat people (pretty sure my auto mechanic was one of them)

The end of the draft (my 18th year)

My brother-in-law who was a Green Beret Captain telling me he was there 15 minutes when he knew 2 things: 1) it was the most beautiful country he’d ever seen; 2) we had no business being there.

That the chaos in Saigon fit the war perfectly.

I don’t remember deaths in Saigon a la the airport in Kabul. Then again, the Vietcong weren’t known for their IED’s. That was a staple of Afghanistan; so, again, a fitting end (the helicopter was the symbol of the American effort in Vietnam).

Is there an argument here? Yes: journalists make lousy historians. Odds are the end of the war in Afghanistan will barely be remarked on by December. The departure from Saigon was more ignominious, but it didn’t blank the ignominy of the war.

*This was before video. Film was shot in Vietnam, flown to New York City, processed, edited, and broadcast to the country. There were only 3 networks at the time. The war was in our living rooms, Monday through Friday, complete with enemy “body counts,” for a decade. A Doonesbury cartoon summed it up. A military officer is reporting the daily body count to HQ. He stops to ask B.D. (the character of the strip in this episode) what day it is, then turns that date into the “official” body count for the day.

We won’t learn the lessons of Afghanistan because we didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam. We have been fed a creed that trillions for infrastructure is too expensive, but trillions for war is never enough. We must do violence for women in foreign countries, but we must do violence to our own in our country.And on and on and on…