I attended a Southwest Minnesota State University Gold College class this past week that went all the way back to my childhood.

Bill Palmer gave a very comprehensive lecture on the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1975. It included video clips of events such as Operation Rolling Thunder, Search and Destroy, the Tet Offensive, and the My Lai massacre.

As one of the younger class members, I don’t have many firsthand memories of the Vietnam era. I remember seeing war footage on television, but I didn’t know much about Vietnam or why there was a war.

My most detailed memory was the fall of Saigon, the South Vietnames capital, in 1975. I remember watching a news broadcast that showed helicopters being dumped into the harbor. I wondered why they were doing that to perfectly good helicopters.

My parents didn’t talk much about Vietnam. We went about our lives (school, community activities and the routine at home) as if a war wasn’t happening.

People couldn’t make sense out of Vietnam back then. It’s good to have a class in 2024 that puts it into a more complete perspective.

Palmer’s lecture went past the class time by about 20 minutes, but nobody got up and left. The information held everyone’s interest. I heard several people comment afterward that it was a really good class.

The class ended with conclusions about the war. Palmer said that a fundamental problem was that it wasn’t something that could be won. The Viet Cong were very well established in the Vietnamese countryside. It wasn’t possible to find and neutralize all of them.

He also pointed out that news of the war wasn’t always accurate. Americans were led to believe it was going well when it wasn’t.

Palmer noted that fear of Communism was the main factor that led to U.S. involvement. Communism was considered evil. It was thought that its leaders wanted to take over the world.

In reality it unfolded mainly in poor countries such as China, Cuba and Vietnam. Karl Marx never imagined that Russia would become the birthplace of Marxist Communism. He thought it would happen first in countries that were more industrial, possibly Great Britain and Germany.

Did America learn much from the Vietnam experience?

It was followed by tensions in the Middle East that built up during the 1990s and eventually led to the 911 terrorist attack. They prompted a massive war on terror that involved 20 years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It involved National Guard units so that there wouldn’t be a need for a draft. Leaders envisioned that a draft would be as unpopular in the 21st century as it was during Vietnam.

Several of my classmates shared stories about listening to the radio for results of Nixon’s draft lottery and worrying that they might get a low number. It all depended on someone’s birthday.

I don’t blame those who enrolled in college, became conscientious objectors or fled to Canada. I’m a pacifist who believes that it’s always wrong to kill another human being unless it happens by accident while defending oneself.

I think most soldiers in Vietnam had a goal to simply survive their jungle warfare experience. They didn’t have the same lofty goal of keeping the world free that the Greatest Generation had in World War II.

Palmer said public trust in government has never recovered to what existed before Vietnam and Watergate. He added that trust in the military has come back to a greater extent.

He noted how soldiers were treated as outcasts in the 1960s and 1970s. He said that’s it’s important to realize that they were just the tip of the spear, that people who held the handle of the spear were the ones who should have been held accountable.

It’s important not to forget about Vietnam. Palmer has been successful through his interviews and newspaper columns to get Vietnam veterans to tell their stories. They deserve to be remembered and thanked.

— Jim Muchlinski is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent