University of Virginia Library

More War?

Le Duc Tho, asked the other day whether
he thought this would be the last great war,
replied that, "I am a communist. And
Marxist-Leninist ideology maintains that as
long as there is imperialism, there will be
war." So, it appears that we must come down
from the clouds of euphoria we have experienced
since the end of the Vietnam war
and face the overwhelming and depressing
fact that there will be more war...which
shouldn't be all that difficult for us. After all,
who even remembers an era of genuine peace?

Of course, we do not mean that we favor
or are resigned to perpetual imperialism. And
we are not altogether convinced that all good
communists will continue to look everywhere
for something to call "imperialism" as a
pretext for the initiation of other wars. But as
long as the attitudes of mistrust, contempt,
and confrontation exhibited in that remark
by Le Duc Tho persist in motivating men's
actions on either side, there will be war. And
as long as any real imperialist or any
self-proclaimed "anti-imperialist" can muster
a band of cadres to begin a fight, there will be
an antagonist to oppose him.

For now, though, we have a fragile peace,
and we deserve a bit of happiness. The
conflict has rent us apart as a nation like no
previous foreign war had done, and our
attitude of reconciliation should be directed
toward healing the serious spiritual damage
we have suffered.

A first step toward succor for our
dispirited nation is for us to become friends
with each other again. We must recognize our
differing perspectives on the way this war was
carried out, and, while mourning the tragedies
it brought about, we must not make it the
altar upon which we sacrifice our national and
international spirit of brotherhood. There
were, indeed, no heroes, but there were many
great personal sacrifices and no one group, as
Henry Kissinger said, has monopolized the
sacrifices.

The disciplined and dedicated men who
fought, suffered, and died in that miasma
which never defined their role or their
objectives deserve the undiluted support and
respect which they never received while the
war raged. And we should honor the men who
endured more than we could ever imagine in
foreign prisons, not to mention their families,
whose lives were caught in the impossible web
of unanswered questions and interminable
sorrow.

We must never forget the sacrifices of the
Vietnamese civilians, South and North, who
were caught on the battlefields of a war which
developed into something much bigger than
the question of the legitimacy of their
governments. Finally, we must face with
compassion the delicate matter of the
American who in good conscience could not
serve in a war which they did not understand
to be right. We need to reach some solution to
the question of amnesty which will neither
reward them nor reject them; not pardoning
those who fled in fear, but never spurning
those who followed their conscience. For we
will do no good to discourage in America the
desire of our people to act in accordance with
what they believe to be right.

The latest cliche is to ask rhetorically what
lessons we have learned from the terrible war
we are ending. It is futile to answer that yet.
Perhaps the only lesson we will learn is that
we never seem to learn anything from any
war. It is about time for us to realize that the
only way to avoid wars is to remember how
the previous wars came to be.

We need to remember how we got so
entangled in Vietnam without a Congressional
declaration of war.

We need to remember that there is plenty
of empirical evidence that the communist
leaders do abandon treaties, and that while we
should never hesitate to negotiate, we must
always negotiate from skepticism, not
naive optimism.

We need to remember that our own
national motives must be scrutinized before,
not while, half a million Americans are
involved in the fighting.

We need to remember our own American
propensity to deceive ourselves and for our
political leaders to deceive us with pleasant
half-truths when none of our options are
pleasant.

We need to remember, in short, that the
road to war begins as a footpath, and that the
first soldier to walk along it carries with him a
very serious commitment we should be sure
we want to make before we send him off.

We must not allow our optimism to
cloud our skepticism that things may go awry
in Vietnam as they have so often before. It is
a time for maximum restraint and maximum
vigilance.

Let us begin once again to trust one
another at home, to honor our pledges and
expect others to honor theirs abroad, and to
join with the real pacifists of the the
world–those who have borne the agonies of
battle–to stifle any bad faith or breach of the
peace by any party immediately. To tamper
with so precious a peace is a perilous course
which no party can afford to follow, and
which no party can afford to allow.

The war is over, and it is time for us to try
once again to understand how it occurred so
that we do not repeat the tragic course of
events that led from Versailles to World War
II now that the peacemakers have left Paris
once again.