I have posted the following paragraphs from my Navy memoir on a previous occasion:
Helicopters on the roof
“…After the fall of the South Vietnamese government, stories leaked out describing the hardships suffered by people we left behind. The saga of the Boat People was covered extensively. However, the plight of former RVN military personnel and civilians who had worked for the Americans was largely ignored. Sometimes, it seemed as if government officials, journalists, academics, and ordinary citizens conspired to push the story to the back pages. In today’s vernacular, they wanted to “move on”. This was understandable, I suppose—the country had just endured a national humiliation. Yet, we knew that senior RVN military officers and civilian officials were being tortured and executed. We knew that many more people were sent to “re-education” camps in the countryside where hard labor and political indoctrination hastened acceptance of the new reality.
What about Trinh? In the turmoil after the war, was she able to reunite with her children? She had worked for the US Army—was she persecuted? Or sent to a re-education camp? What about Dai-uy Be? On my last day at Ben Luc, Be looked me in the eye and said, “We are freedom men”, adding that he was proud to have fought alongside such a good friend. Did he end up against a wall?
On those occasions when I think about my Vietnamese friends and comrades, people like Trinh and Be, the guilt and the shame are so overwhelming that I struggle to breathe. I know I didn’t do anything wrong. I just left. And that’s the problem. We all did. We did as we always do—we got on our planes and helicopters, and we left. And when we did, we abandoned people who had invested everything—their safety, their futures, their entire lives—in us.
Americans do not think of themselves as a treacherous people, but our recent history teaches us that we are. We think of ourselves as a generous and kind people, not people who are careless and sloppy with the lives of others, lives that have been put in our hands. But the pattern repeats: We demand trust and obedience. Then, when the going gets tough, or when we become distracted, or when we grow tired of making sacrifices, we leave. It happened in Vietnam and Iraq, and it will happen again in Afghanistan.”
Of course, it did happen in Afghanistan when the Biden Administration painted its masterpiece at the airport in Kabul, an event characterized by spectacular ineptitude, cynical indifference, and cravenness. You say you don’t get the disgust part. What reaction other than disgust can one have when confronted by the scenes we witnessed in August 2021?
Your exposition leads us in many directions, and that’s fine. I intended to make a point about our abandonment of Ukraine. As Sir Winston explains so eloquently, we make a fatal mistake when we fail to confront evil. Or confront it far too late as we did in 1941 by which time the men who signed the petition of the Oxford Union were serving at sea in the North Atlantic, in the air over Britain, or in the desert at El Alamein. Just as they were, we will be levied a toll, and it will be paid by young men like my grandsons. That is not progress.