Boots on the ground lead to boots in the ground

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A majority of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, support stepped-up military action against ISIS even though only one-third of those urging boots on the ground believe that we have a clear goal in sight. So, most Americans want us to commit soldiers to a more aggressive fight while believing we don’t have either a detailed plan of action or an end game.

If this sounds familiar, it is. Last week we were immersed in retrospective documentaries about the Vietnam War, which actually began unofficially in 1955, escalated into full-blown conflict in the 1960s and didn’t really end until the North overwhelmed the South in 1975, 40 years ago. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed. An estimated 3.1 million Vietnamese died, including civilians.

Many young men and women who served in Vietnam suffered both catastrophic physical injuries and enduring mental trauma. As we know now, it wasn’t their fathers’ war in Europe or the Pacific. The enemy didn’t necessarily wear uniforms or attack in formation. The soldiers did not liberate besieged countries and march down wide boulevards to the cheers of grateful, newly free people.

Thousands of our sons and daughters were shattered by the experience of jungle warfare; sadly, nobody could put all the pieces back together again. Rory Kennedy’s documentary, “Last Days in Vietnam,” revisits April 1975, when the North Vietnamese overran the south, forcing our troops and diplomats to run for their lives, abandoning hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who depended on American support or worked for American enterprises, including the government. Tens of thousands were killed or sent to re-education camps in the countryside, and many perished there as well.

It was an ugly end to an ugly war. In subsequent conflicts, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Iraq again and Afghanistan again, the word “quagmire” has always been invoked to describe an entanglement that sucks in human lives and billions of dollars with little gain. Vietnam was our first quagmire, but not our last.

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