November 10, 2009

     On this day in 1982, the New York Times reminds us, the Vietnam War Memorial opened.  I was there.  I cried, I've cried every time I've visited it since--every year or two.  Part of it, of course, is that I covered that war as a reporter for CBS News in 1966-67.  I lost friends here.       But part of it too was that I wasn't sure why we'd fought that war.  I was just a kid during World War II, but I knew we had to fight it.  I remember Bill Mauldin, the famous cartoonist of that war, saying once, years later that he wasn't sure it had made the world a better place or anything grand like that "but of course we had to kill Hitler."  And of course we did.      Vietnam?  Well, they'd beaten the French, but so what?  They wanted to be independent, but wasn't that why we'd fought the British?  They were Communists, of course--at least the North was--but were they Communists who could harm us? Not likely.  Didn't have the weapons, the reach.  About like Afghanistan today.      Does anyone remember why we fought there?  Don't all raise your hands at once.
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