'The Purposeful Killing of Civilians in War: Voices From Vietnam'. Sep. 2017, M Hastie: "The legacy of the American War in Vietnam has only one truth, not many as Burns and Novick try to convince us of. The truth, IS the Lie, a Lie that was so immoral, that it resembled the final solution in Nazi Germany. If one does not believe this, just ask millions of civilians in Vietnam. Leave your own reality behind, and stay in the room and listen to human suffering that nearly wiped out three generations."

 

My Lai Massacre, 49 Years Later, 2017, M Hastie: "The important thing to remember, is that the My Lai Massacre was a military operation that had a predictable outcome. You do not bring the enemy to the peace table by just killing military combatants. You ultimately bring the enemy to the peace table by killing innocent civilians [is the common wisdom from Churchill to Kissinger etc. - proven wrong in practice though, HS]. They are military targets. The primary goal of the aggressor nation is to break the will of the people, and its ability to defend its homeland. This strategy is as old as warfare itself.

It is now March 16, 2017, forty-nine years after the My Lai Massacre. Since the end of World War II, my lifetime, as I am now 72, the United States has bombed 30 countries. The atrocities have never stopped. What happened at My Lai is extremely important to understand, because atrocities during the war were U.S. Policies! My Lai is a metaphor for the entire Vietnam War. My Lai was NEVER an aberration. The most important realization that has come out of writing this article, is that it always comes back to me, because My country did this. I cannot divorce myself from this reality. When I came back from Vietnam I finally had to face the truth, that I was the enemy in Vietnam. That realization was to eventually put me in two psychiatric hospitals. My core belief system was completely dismantled. I felt like a stranger in a strange land. And, whenever I tried to convince people that We were the barbarians in Vietnam, the more people avoided me." 

 

Insane Truths: a Vietnam Vet on “Apocalypse Now, Redux". March 2017, Mark Hastie: "At Auschwitz, 1.1 million people were murdered. In Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, those killed were four times higher than that concentration camp. That reality cannot be processed by anyone who thinks the United States is the greatest country in the world. Their core belief system could not handle this head on collision." 

 

"In the United States,'' writes the author of this deeply disturbing book [Then the Americans Came: Voices From Vietnam. 1994, M. Hess - Recommended by Hastie], ``while public attention has focused on the American soldier as a victim of `misguided' policy, there seems to be little concern or even curiosity about the people of that faraway land who were the object of our country's apocalyptic wrath. Hess traveled the length and breadth of Vietnam in 1990 and 1991, listening to the recollections of men and women who lost family, limbs or sanity--sometimes all of these--during the 1965-1973 war; who witnessed the bombing of schools, hospitals, churches, temples, ferryboats, and animals; who survived beatings, rape and torture, and saw the mass slaughter of civilians by U.S. ground troops.

 

It is difficult to imagine a more powerful indictment of American military conduct in Vietnam than these testimonies (supplemented with photos of many of the speakers) by people who suffered irreparable damage from American weapons and toxic chemicals. One of the victims remarks, ``The Americans cannot repay the debt, because it is too big.'' Link Review 

 

The Grotesque Immorality of The US War Against Viet Nam, June, 2017, Brian S Willson: "As a Viet Nam veteran (...) we were nonetheless serving as cannon fodder, in effect mercenaries for reasons other than what we were told. When I came to understand the true nature of the war, I felt betrayed by my government, by my religion, by my cultural conditioning into “American Exceptionalism,” which did a terrible disservice to my own humanity, my own life’s journey. Thus, telling the truth as I uncover it is necessary for recovering my own dignity."

 

'Napalm Sticks to Kids', Oct 2017, by Mike Hastie: "Millions and millions of Americans watching the Burns/Novick Documentary on “The Vietnam War,” just don’t get the profound pathology of the LIE, and the horrifying conclusions it had on millions of people in Southeast Asia." - "The primary goal of the aggressor nation (The USA)is to break the will of the people, and its ability to defend its homeland. This strategy is as old as warfare itself.

Marine Corps basic training cadence chant during the Vietnam War:

Napalm Sticks To Kids

We shoot the sick, the young, the lame,
We do our best to maim,
Because the kills all count the same,
Napalm Sticks To Kids.
Napalm son is lots of fun,
Dropped in a bomb or shot from a gun,
It gets the gooks when on the run,
Napalm Sticks To Kids.
Drop some napalm on a farm,
It won’t do them any harm,
Just burn off their legs and arms,
Napalm Sticks To Kids.
Children sucking on a mother’s tit,
Wounded gooks down in a pit,
Dow Chemical doesn’t give a shit,
Napalm Sticks To Kids." Read article

 

'I Walked Pointless in Vietnam', Oct 2017, Mike Hastie: "The philosophical denial part of me died a long time ago. And, for the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, who were killed in that war, along with millions who were wounded, and the physical and spiritual destruction of those countries, it will be a genocide that haunt the ages. The most powerful military force the world has ever seen, bombed the holy hell out of three of the poorest countries in the world. That is an immorality that is almost beyond comprehension.

America, you will get away with nothing…"

 

Does Vietnam Even Matter Any More? Does Ken Burns? "There's no scoping out," the author writes. "That is intentional." Oct. 2017, by Robert Freeman: "Notice that this level of focus, above the tile-level view that Burns insists we see, renders an entirely different understanding of the War. It is an understanding that Burns does not want us to have. He is, after all, a master documentarian, the best in the business, and if he had wanted us to have this vantage he could certainly have provided it. He didn’t."

 

The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?, 2016, by John Marciano: "A devastating follow-up to William L. Griffen and Marciano’s 1979 classic Teaching the Vietnam War, The American War in Vietnam seeks not to commemorate the Vietnam War, but to stop the ongoing U.S. war on actual history. Marciano reveals the grandiose flag-waving that stems from the “Noble Cause principle,” the notion that America is “chosen by God” to bring democracy to the world. The result is critical writing and teaching at its best."