From: Otis Willie <militaryinterest@pacbell.net>
Newsgroups: alt.vietnam.veterans
Subject: Emotions, anger still palpable 30 years after Vietnam
Organization: The American War Library
NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 17:29:21 EST
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 22:29:21 GMT
Emotions, anger still palpable 30 years after Vietnam
(EXCERPT) By BILL STRAUB January 22, 2003
Jim Beattie was headed north on Interstate-71 toward his home in
Cleveland in January 1973, when word came over the radio that peace
accords had been signed in Paris, ending the United States'
involvement in the quagmire know as Vietnam.
"I started crying," said Beattie, a Navy enlistee who served a
two-year hitch in Cholon beginning in 1968. "Crying for a wasted year
of my life and the deaths of so many friends."
It has been 30 years since representatives of the U.S. government and
their counterparts from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, popularly
known as North Vietnam, the communist government that controlled
territory above the 17th parallel, initialed the Paris Peace
Agreement, ending hostilities between the international superpower and
the impoverished backwater.
It was the longest war in U.S. history, extending from the time
President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched military advisers to South
Vietnam in 1955 to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964.
President Richard Nixon announced the peace agreement on Jan. 23,
1973, and it was signed on Jan. 27, leading to an immediate ceasefire.
The United States withdrew its combat troops on March 29, 1973.
Along the way, more than 2 million GIs were shipped across the
Pacific. The conflict cost 58,152 American lives. More than 150,000
were wounded.
In monetary terms, America's involvement cost $150 billion. The price
the nation paid in terms of prestige and national pride was
substantially steeper. The suffering of the Vietnamese people,
meanwhile, remains incalculable, and the scars of a lost war remain
embedded in the American psyche.
Eventually, little more than two years after the United States
abandoned the effort, Saigon fell, and the event America sought to
prevent, communist control of all of Vietnam, came to pass.
"It was t...
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---------------------------
Otis Willie
Associate Librarian
The American War Library
http://www.americanwarlibrary.com