What creeps me out about "Minnesota Remembers Vietnam"

Something about this TPT project creeps me out. Suppose we were not Americans, but Germans -- "good Germans," collaborators, military veterans, resisters, Holocaust deniers. Suppose we all lived in Dusseldorf and were asked to remember our "stories" about World War II. That's important, but most of us see that would miss the point of the War. Its essence was a set of genocidal government policies that might be masked, not revealed, by individual 'stories" of "Dusseldorf Remembers World War II."

I cannot disagree strongly enough with something Ken Burns and Lynn Novick wrote in the New York Times on May 29, 2017.

They wrote:

"Nothing will ever make the tragedy of the Vietnam War all right. But if we are to begin the process of healing, we must first honor the courage, heroism and sacrifice of those who served and those who died, not just as we do today, on Memorial Day, but every day."

Nonsense! Germans do not suggest a need to "honor the courage, heroism and sacrifice" of their soldiers who served and died -- of which there no doubt were many examples -- in order to begin the process of healing. Dusseldorfians would see that as ludicrous. 

Unfortunately, we, like Burns and Novick and TPT, do not see that as ludicrous in the U.S. context. No, the process of healing will begin for us when the war is finally seen for what it was. Stories of sacrifice and heroism of soldiers who killed and died -- not "served...and died," not even "fought and died," but "killed and died" -- in Southeast Asia will get us no closer to understanding what this war was about.

The Vietnam War was not The Holocaust, but our actions may have been closer to the acts of Nazi Germany than we would like to admit. Both governments perpetrated imperialist, racist, and genocidal policies. We financed the attempts of a colonial power to regain its colonies, we illegally invaded other countries, we violated numerous binding international laws, including the Geneva Conventions, and we committed massive war crimes in Indochina. 

This "honoring the veterans" contributes to the government's interest in making future wars more palatable to the U.S. public. It makes future wars more likely. 

John F. Kennedy once wrote a fellow soldier from World War II something he could never say publicly as a politician: "War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today." 

That's who Burns and Novick should be urging us to honor: the young men who refused to fight in this war, those people who were right about it. 

So where was I at the time? In the streets, in the face of my government's criminal leaders, and in federal prison.