Pray for Peace

I was surprised by the op-ed “Welcome to Hanoi 2005” in last week’s Santa Barbara Independent.

That kind of a puff-piece might be expected in a People magazine in 1972, but surely, we must have learned something in all these 45 intervening years! The U.S., making Vietnam “free”?

It’s true we lost 58,200 servicemen in that war in an attempt to prop up a colonialist regime. We also dropped 2,000,000 tons of bombs on neighboring Laos: twice the total amount dropped on Nazi Germany in WW II, let alone all the tonnage on Vietnam and Cambodia. The USA “helped” Vietnam by killing three million Vietnamese.

Memorial Day was established by a Congressional Joint Resolution in 1950 to establish a day to pray for peace. I suggest we do that while remembering all the people who died in that tragic war.