"The war became his personal nightmare. Nothing he did, none of the tools at his command — the power of American weapons, the forces of technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers — could stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies, the Vietcong. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.

...He wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind —walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare." -NY Times Obit

He knew the war was futile yet he continued to participate, to escalate, to engage. He could've protested. He could've advised LBJ not to escalate. He could've resigned his post at this exact moment of recognition. He didn't. He followed orders. He chose ego and denial over truth.

Is he guilty, yes! Are others guilty too, yes! So what's your pont, Lind? There is no more or less. There only is what is...Guilt, Failure and Complicity.

A haunted man is a guilty man. The eyes never lie.

Most wars are avoidable. Many achieve nothing but death. Vietnam was bad because there were so many opportunities to avoid it or end it once it had started.

Ho Chi Minh came to Paris in 1919 as a 24-year-old seeking President Wilson's help in freeing the colonial peoples of the world after World War I. Wilson didn't see him. Wilson gave up on all but one of his 14 points during the peace conference. The British and French gave him his League of Nations but the Senate prevented US participation. What if Wilson had seen Ho and agreed to champion the colonial peoples of the world?

During WW2, Ho and his forces were our allies against the Japanese. We sent aid of all kinds. Many OSS officers (the precursor to the CIA) met Ho during the war and wrote glowing reports calling him the "George Washington of SE Asia." Ho followed Washington's successful strategy of not holding territory and avoiding a lot of direct contact with US forces. He kept his army together and came into villages at night when US forces left. If we had developed a better relationship with Ho after WW2 the whole war might have been avoided. Some scholars have speculated that FDR did not want France to return to SE Asia after the war but he never told Harry Truman of his post-war plans. Thus, we supported the French during their war against Ho in the 1950s.

A UN-sanctioned vote in 1956 after the French defeat gave 80% of the vote to Ho Chi Minh. We refused to recognize the election and supported a different government in the south. If we had supported the election and Ho and given him aid perhaps there would have been no war. Senator McCarthy's witch hunts of the State Department in the 1950s had thinned out many of the old Asia analysts creating a blind spot in the department. When the Kennedy administration came to power very few people in the State Department knew much about Vietnam.

During the "adviser" phase of the war in the early 1960s American officials met with the North Vietnamese looking for some answers. Ho Chi Minh would ask them what Benjamin Franklin asked a British diplomat during the war for independence: "How long are you willing to fight? We are willing to fight forever."

The deal negotiated by Kissinger and Nixon in 1973 was essentially the same as the one they could have had in 1969. They hoped for 5 years of independence for the south. Taking the deal in 1969 would have meant that South Vietnam would have fallen during Nixon's 2nd term and thteatened his other foreign policy initiatives. Instead, it fell just 2 years after the deal during Ford's administration. Maybe Watergate wasn't the only reason Nixon resigned.

Vietnam was a waste of 58,000 US lives and 3 million Vietnamese lives. It occurred because of ignorance, stupidity, willful stubbornness and cold, calculated politics. Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon and all their subordinates have a lot to answer for.

He Fucked up LARGE! How many other war-mongers of the last century have had the balls to stand up and admit it? That's right, none. His Mea Culpa will live on. Did Stalin say he was sorry for the 30 million dead before a single German boot touched the ground in Soviet Russia? How about Mao? Upwards of 50 million people died under his watch... Hitler? Well, we all know what happened to him. This guy was a lightweight, a clerk in the giant machine. If it wasn't going to be him you can bet your butt-plug it would have been someone else that was just as impelled toward such foolish and impotent goals. At least he had the good grace to feel guilty about it.

In a sea of napalm, forever. LBJ was there to welcome him to the barbecue, as demonic dogs sodomize him while jerking hard on his ears. They walked in on the stretched, living, salted skin of Nixon's face.

If not for this man, I might know what it is to have a family. My father and over 58,000 other Americans and countless Vietnamese rest a mite easier now.

I do not care whether he was sorry. He should have been sorry. He should have been haunted. When you commit mass murder, what there is of your soul should be crushed by it. Fuck "good grace."

After a certain death and damage count, it's too late for forgiveness of any kind. Some things only God can forgive, and if there is one, I'd like to think he wouldn't. It's great that he was so honest about it, though. The words of the damned are good warnings. And future leaders will look at his damned face and think twice before taking a step toward being that. One hopes. But he's damned.

We need to look back further. It was Eisenhower who articulated America's goal in Vietnam which was to prevent the North from unifying the country under communism. After the blistering McCarthy attacks over "Who Lost China?" this was an almost inevitable course of action.

Kennedy tried to avoid a large troop deployment through the Strategic Hamlet Program which was a disaster. Whoever headed the Saigon government diverted American aid from its purpose to build up patronage networks and fight internal enemies.

McNamara, as part of the effort to identify what went wrong which consumed his later years, went to Hanoi in the mid-1990s and met with his Vietnamese counterparts. This was a controversial trip and one he should be commended for making. The Vietnamese pointed out bombing made no difference in terms of crippling their war infrastructure, it was a rural country with "no good targets." Many in Washington had reached that conclusion long ago.

Hanoi also agreed had the U.S., under LBJ, left with a neutral government in the South, rather than initiating a troop escalation, they would have respected it "for a while."

This is unlikely. As Daniel Ellsbery pointed out, "When one side is entirely financed and equipped by foreigners, it's not a civil war." Had the North taken over the South during the latter half of what should have been Kennedy's first term, Nixon or Barry Goldwater would have campaigned on an anti-communust crusade in 1964 that might have made McCarthy look genteel.

Such a turn of events would have made both our reapproachment with China and the arms reduction deals with the Soviets in the 1970s unlikely. I agree with Lind, future historians will not view the Vietnam War, tragic as it was, in isolation but in the larger context.