Am I to deduce by your Vietnam Veteran cap that you served in the Vietnam War? May I say, of course, thank you for your service, and sorry for what you had to endure, and I would be interested to hear about it sometime, eagerly, but that’s it. Answering your country’s call to arms was honorable, but what your country did in Southeast Asia, by means of the guns it gave you, was not. Misguided would not even be the word, our leaders were warmongers led by munitions profiteers. Misguided was your role following criminal orders but you eventually figured that out.
Our profound national sense of shame for the Vietnam War was not even a question once the true nature of the conflict became revealed. As a result the war in Vietnam ended and our troops came home under a black cloud. Sorry, Mr. Veteran, about that cloud, nothing personal, but you could have considered the karma you brought unto yourself by participating over there. Anyway, you drew the short straw. Don’t now try to dress it up.
Don’t tell me now you could have won in Vietnam if it hadn’t been for the American people turning to peace. What? Left to do your job you could have killed millions more Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians enough to have subdued them? Is that what you’re saying? America’s decimation of those peoples wasn’t enough for you?
You [We] got your butt kicked by those determined Asians is what happened. Like every single anti-colonial movement in modern times, the occupied peoples prevailed. The American public pulled your asses out of that fire is what happened, lest you be killed but take 50 Vietnamese lives with you, many of them civilian. That was the ratio of our deaths to theirs. You apologized for that, and we’ll make you apologize again if you’re now going to change your tune.
Who would have guessed we’d have to give you nostalgic vets a kick in the pants again? What part of genocide, or atrocity, or travesty, or grand scale tragedy, don’t you understand? “Vietnam” as we call it, our war on the Vietnamese, was wrong, it was an incredible abuse of power, of our superior strength, of our incredible inhumanity. You were there.