Gerald McCarthy: Haunted Marine, VVAW Activist, College Professor
Portside
Liberal opinion holds that the Vietnam War was a mistake. The right continues to see it as a noble cause. Author Michael Uhl calls the slaughter in Vietnam planned and deliberate, saying that the United States would not tolerate then or now efforts by people in the Global South to escape the imperialist trap. Uhl writes as a participant, first as an intelligence officer and then as an historian, to paint a merciless and highly detailed picture of US policy at its rawest.
Michael Yates presents an analysis of how the war was conducted, what its consequences have been for the Vietnamese, how the nature of the war generated ferocious opposition to it (not least by a brave core of U.S. soldiers), how the war's history has been whitewashed, and why it is important to both know what happened in Vietnam and why we should not forget it.
This Memorial Day, let us remember the men and women soldiers who have suffered and died from war-caused conditions called variably soldier's heart in the Civil War, shell shock in the First World War, PTSD in the Vietnam War, and moral injury in the Iraq War...Let us not forget those who died from the nightmares of war - at their own hand.
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