The Innocent Die
If your just there and covering it like it’s a ping-pong match or your simply writing the military briefing every day “Giant eight-engine B52 Stratofortresses thundered across the skies of Indochina on Sunday hitting targets in three countries…” That doesn’t tell you, the American citizen, what’s being done in your name. Yes, you have to do certain stories like that that report the battle and report the politics and report the negotiations but you also have to tell people what war does to the ordinary Vietnamese. I’ve covered a lot of wars, that was just the first one, and they have one thing in common, the innocent die. The innocent die.
The people who sent those soldiers, they go on live happy lives and retire in La Jolla or whatever. The soldiers who get sent, some don’t come home. Well they get another monument; they get their name on a monument in Washington. I went and saw Burr Willey’s name but you know, who builds the monuments to all those Vietnamese on both sides who never got home again? What about those two generations of Vietnamese women who never had husbands? Whose kids may never have seen their fathers again?