(Col. Robert Faulkender signing his new book entitled Filtered By Time)

When I was in High School in the 1960s and early 70s, the Vietnam War raged in the Far East; we watched it on television every night and talked about it every day. My family supported the war whole-heartedly since it was the place the United States had determined to stop the communists from knocking over another domino. My father, a World War II veteran, fumed about the way the war was fought; it seemed that politicians decided the strategies and held the generals back from going for victory—Korea all over again.

To top it off, Congress refused to declare war as the Constitution demanded, and it seemed that the United Nations (whom we loathed as a cancer affixed to New York City) was consulted, cajoled, and appeased.

A number of my classmates were opposed to the war, gathering all their information, as did everyone else, from the nightly news with Walter Cronkite and from the pages of magazines like Life, and Time, and from the daily newspaper. The mass media, generally, were also opposed to the war and slanted their reporting accordingly. In several important ways, it has taken decades to learn what really happened, sometimes worse than reported but more often totally different or even the opposite of what was communicated by the reporters.

On July 30th Col. Robert Faulkender presented a program at Circa on his experience as an American military advisor in the Mekong Delta in 1964. In contrast to the accepted view of that period and that program, he argued that their work was largely successful and that resistance to their efforts centered in local Buddhist monks and communist insurgents. What he was called upon to do was humanitarian and self-defensive; the U.S. press normally made little effort to understand the mission or evaluate its success.

Although the TET Offensive was outside the scope of Col. Faulkender’s presentation, he noted in the  q&a that the results of the communists’ attempt to overwhelm the major cities of South Vietnam was an abject failure militarily but a mighty victory psychologically and in public relations. The American reporters, whether willfully or in ignorance, portrayed the offensive as a huge Viet Cong victory and a South Vietnamese/American defeat.

No military conflict of the 20th century was more controversial, or protested and resisted by millions of Americans, than the Vietnam War. I have noted over the years that any number of school teachers, including home educators, never get to the 1960s in their history classes. Several teachers I have spoken with in the last year have spent a great deal of time in that decade but have left out other important periods. Perhaps part of the problem is trying to cram United States History in a single year. In any case, the Vietnam war and its impact on our culture is now about four decades old. It’s good to re-examine what really happened and well past time to recognize the heroism and sacrifice of the American soldiers who fought as hard as any in previous wars, for less reward and little support. They bled and died the same as their fathers had in wars past. We don’t need massive revision of the interpretations of the war to remember the sacrifice of the troops.

Bill Potter