 host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. The title of our program today is War and Peace in Vietnam, Choices and Consequences. My guest is Chuck Crumpton. Chuck is a friend of mine and an attorney who prefers to think of himself as an arbiter and a mediator, which may have something to do with his topic today. Chuck and I have had prior programs discussing Vietnam, its history, its present, and its future. And I think we could probably talk forever over drinks and a jazz bar in Ho Chi Minh City at some point. But we could talk a lot about Vietnam, what it's gone through. Chuck first went to Vietnam as a post-graduate student in the 60s and has returned many times since then. That experience has been defining for him. Today's program will focus only as much as we can in half an hour on the US Vietnam War, what happened and why, and forgiveness. And Chuck, welcome again. It's good to see you and our continuing discussion of Vietnam, which affected my life as well, because I was a college student in the 60s. And Vietnam was a major current event in my life. But I'd like to talk about you. First of all, where is Vietnam? Where and what is Vietnam? Can you tell me a little bit about it? Vietnam is just below China on the eastern coast of Asia, on the Pacific Ocean, has a bunch of islands. It previously was very active in the Spratly Islands and others that China is now asserting control over and building military installations. The South China Sea, is that what you call it? Some call it the South China Sea. Some call it the East Sea, depends on your orientation. Yeah, OK. And so it's a country that kind of sprawls down the coast. It does. It's mostly coastline. It's fairly thin country, a little bit like kind of a skinny peanut. And it has over 90 million people, which is almost double the population during the American war years. It has one of the fastest growing economies in the world. How did you ever get there in the first place? Tell us briefly how you got there and went back and forth so many times. I was in my senior year of college in 1968. One of my good friends from Madison, Wisconsin, where I grew up, came up. And he said, Chuck, are you going to join this group called International Voluntary Services? Kind of an international Peace Corps? I said, why? And he said, because it's draft exempt. And those are my two magic words. That is instant gratification for 1968. 1968. So that was the height of the Vietnam War. It was literally right around the lunar offensive that he came up, and we talked about that. So I applied for Laos. A bunch of the volunteers quit in protest of US policy, and I wound up going to Vietnam, which is. So by chance, you didn't choose it? By chance. The best thing that's ever happened to me. And I'll apologize in advance. There are going to be times when I get a little choked up. It's become my second home. I have family. I have friends. I have people who are at the very center of my life and my heart. How did you, when you went there, what was it like? The war, you were doing volunteer type services. Was this teaching? Yeah, I started off like a lot of Peace Corps type people teaching English. Some other friends were starting to work with homeless street kids, and I got into some of that as well. I worked some with Army Civil Affairs, doing projects, building volleyball, and badminton courts and sports. So with the military? A little bit on the Civil Affairs side. Tried to stay completely away from the military end of things. You could not. I mean, you could run, but you couldn't hide. If I went out to the countryside on the weekends, I'd be going up on my motorcycle, and I'd see the rolling huge balls of orange flame eating up the forests in the countryside. Where was this? This was in Central Vietnam. The city is Quynh Yen, which then was 100-something thousand hours in the millions. It's building resorts and doing all those things that bring tourism. Which would be welcome in Vietnam, because it's one of the most hospitable countries in the world, has great food, has great people, has great places to visit, and things to do and see. And how close was this to Saigon? Or how close to the 17th parallel, which is what divided the country post-war? Almost midway in between. And on the coast? It was right on the coast. Okay, yeah. Okay, and so there were American soldiers there, and there were, and there was fighting going on nearby? There was fighting very nearby. I've run into a number of people who were stationed at Phu Ca out in Vindan province, and I would go out to NK in the countryside on the weekends. We were developing Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops. We were working with the farmers, with the Vietnamese voluntary service, kind of like our Vista over here. And that helped me develop both rural and urban relationships and experiences. Okay, and the group that you were with, it was like a civilian corps. Was it that was doing good things for the local folks? Well, we were trying to. I mean, we were basically listening, paying attention. We didn't come with any answers. We basically came with one question, which is, how can we help you? Okay, so, and you didn't know anything about Vietnam before you went there? I didn't know the language, the culture, nothing. Okay, and so you landed in Vietnam. There was a war going on. You did this volunteer works, draft exempt, okay? I understand that very well. Now, what was your understanding of why we had U.S. troops in Vietnam? What was the historical understanding that you had at the time and maybe have now? It's a great question, because those are two very, very different things. I knew very little at the time. I knew what the media disseminated, which was essentially the military and political line. We were there to fight the evil threat of communism, which is a long way from what was really going on there. So there was the domino theory? Well, for Eisenhower, it was the domino theory. It was interesting, because as the president who most understood war pros and cons, he was the one who absolutely would not commit militarily to supporting the French. That didn't happen, actually, until Kennedy, Nixon, and others later on, and Johnson. But we poured probably over two and a half billion dollars into support of the French war colonization in Vietnam. So we didn't learn from that mistake either. Yeah, we didn't learn. So this was post-World War II. Correct. And Eisenhower was the president, and there was a fear. China had just gone communist, if you will. I mean, the Communist Party had just prevailed and was ruling in the mainland China. And there was some fear, is that it, in America that the rest of Asia would go communist and somehow that would be very bad for the United States? Is that what it was, sir? I think that's a fair statement of what the rationale, the justification that was offered was. There was a serious misconception that communism was monolithic, that Russian communism and Chinese communism had anything to do with each other, which they didn't. And in fact, they were fairly antithetical to Chinese with no more except Russian domination than the Russians with Chinese. The Vietnamese had had extensive experience with the Chinese because the Chinese had occupied Vietnam for over a thousand years up until the 10th century. And Vietnam actually sort of culturally convinced them to leave, although they did win a military battle on the Bac Dan river that was given credit for helping to convince the Chinese to leave, but it took a thousand years. With the French it only took a hundred, with the Americans it only took 20, with the Russians it took almost another 20. But they're good at that. So the reason at that time, and that's what I learned when I was in college too, is to fight communism. We had to stop communism from taking over Asia. Is that still the, in your mind, the real justification or has anything changed? I mean to me, I haven't heard anything else, but is there any other reason in your mind now after going back and forth and obviously a great part of your life is focused on this area? Any other thoughts about this? The response to that, I think, Colonel Sherman Potter on Mesh has a word that he uses when a theory that has absolutely no justification in reality, you know, horse pucky. It's a good word. It is one of the grossest misconceptions of both communism and of international relations politically and economically ever. And it unfortunately convinced Eisenhower against his better judgment to commit monetarily that monetary commitment and relationship. Although de Gaulle, after the French lost at DnB and Fu in 1954 in a speech in Cambodia, warned the Americans, get out. Don't make that mistake again. You know, it took us a hundred years to learn. Don't go there. Unfortunately, Kennedy and after him, Johnson were convinced by what John Kenneth Galbraith, probably our most brilliant economist maybe ever called the military industrial complex, which rose to power then and has now risen to power again. People are not getting because of all the stuff that's on the surface of the froth about the politics now that behind this, underneath this, why we export war, why we live by war economically is that the military industrial complex still dominates the decision making. And I think it was Eisenhower perhaps who warned against that. He did. And so he was not, he was aware of what was going on. He was not a fan. But he was also perhaps sincere in his concern for communism, whatever that thought pattern was in those days. And so it wasn't a totally about money for him. It was also about a philosophy or a way of life that he also objected to or felt was not a proper. And it's interesting because in the U.S. doing that and taking the monolithic red scare, red threat philosophy that McCarthy had made so much out of in his time, they actually provoked a serious escalation in the Cold War. The Berlin Wall actually came to be because of that U.S. stance on the big red scare and the anti-communism political stance as the core of the U.S. foreign policy. So instead of mediating and arbitrating, we decided to fight at some point along the line. And how did that come? How did that happen? How did we decide to go from, we paid some money to the French, I guess, to help them fight. How did it go that we started to put American lives into the battle? That's a great question because we had reportedly only dozens of military advisors in their fifties even into the early sixties and it went up really quickly. One of the things that was used as an excuse was that there was an intelligence operation which sent an American intelligence destroyer into the territorial waters of North Vietnam without clearing it first. And some warning shots were fired. Just say, hey, this is our territorial waters. Get out of here. And so that was used as an excuse with Johnson to escalate the number of troops from the hundreds up into the hundreds of thousands. Kennedy took it to about 100,000. Johnson took it up over 250,000. We eventually got up during Johnson's time over 500,000 American troops. 60,000 of which were killed, 250,000, 350,000 were seriously injured. The number of PTSD cases which were fought up until maybe five years ago and are now being acknowledged were in the hundreds of thousands. And how many... Had a horrible consequence on the life, the mind, the spirit of the American people including those that did service in Vietnam who deserve our respect, our understanding and our support. And how many Vietnamese were killed? Is there any number? A port of 2 million. I think that's probably conservative. I lost students. I lost family members. I lost fellow volunteers. Just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What I hear from you also is that we as a country, maybe we've relied on war a little too much and this is a lesson that we should pay attention to today. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that after our break, okay? That's a really good place to leave it and to go from. Thank you for watching Think Tech. I'm Grace Chang, the new host for Global Connections. You can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m. where we'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs. So please tune in and aloha and thanks for watching. Good afternoon, Howard Wiig, Code Green, ThinkTechHawaii.com. I appear on Mondays at 3 o'clock and my gig is energy efficiency doing more with less. It's the most cost effective way that we in Hawaii are going to achieve 100% clean energy by the year 2045. I look forward to being with you. Aloha. Looking to energize your Friday afternoon? Tune in to Stand the Energyman at 12 noon. Aloha Friday here on ThinkTechHawaii. We are back and we are talking about Vietnam. We are talking about what happened, well let's say 50 years ago plus and coming forward and where America and Vietnam, well where there was a war in Vietnam with Americans and about 60,000 died. And the question is what have we learned from that? What have we learned? Before we talk about now or the present, what do people think about the Vietnam War now? What are your impressions? Obviously you can't tell me what everybody thinks, but what is your impression as someone that is involved with Vietnam and knows its people and its history? What are your impressions about what Americans and Vietnamese think about what happened at that time in the 60s? That's a great question because where it goes to is it became really, really clear to me and increasingly clear as I learned the Vietnamese language, which is wonderful, it's rich and it's full and it's precise, that the people in Vietnam, a huge majority, I mean we're talking 90 plus percent probably, did not want the war, did not believe in it, did not believe that it was going to be effective. All they wanted to do was to find ways to survive it and to minimize its impact on them and their families and their communities and that became increasingly hard to do as we escalated from a few troops up to 100,000 to 250,000 to 500,000 plus that we essentially took over the military part of the war and in doing that should have realized because there was no will, there was no support in the Vietnamese people for that war. It was an American war, we export it, it's what we do and we do it because the military industrial complex and a political leadership that's responsive to it and funded by it, believes that that competitive adversarial combative strategy is the one that's going to achieve the most success because some of them personally have achieved their positions and their power by very combative adversarial approaches to people and life. So it's giving a business philosophy to politics is what I hear you saying, is that this is how you win, is that right? That's, that was the philosophy, Kennedy bought it, Eisenhower had kind of grudgingly conceded to supporting it financially and a little bit militarily. Johnson who had initially resisted it was probably the shrewdest and sagest and most experienced of the politicians in Sawyer that was a really bad strategy. Later got convinced that if we don't we're going to lose or look really bad in the eyes of the world and that face factor became dominant in U.S. policy and that tells you that decisions are coming out of ego, power and competitiveness rather than out of bridge building and relationship building. And that would have been the way to to resolve the problem instead of war is what I hear you're saying. And the irony is it's what Ho Chi Minh always offered. He lived in the States. He lived in France. He incorporated the U.S. declaration of independence into Vietnam's. He was a true believer and his strategy was ideally to play Russia off against China to work with the U.S. once they could bring it into the military conflict and to build the country in collaboration with the U.S. and France and the West. He never wanted long-term alliance with either Russia or China. It was forced upon them because at the end of the military conflict in 1975 Kissinger with Nixon's blessings sent McNamara to every major financial international institution in every embassy and country in the world to boycott Vietnam. No humanitarian aid, no military, no nothing. They were left with either Russia or China so they picked Russia because they knew China and they were not going to go there. Russia tried for years to exert political control through military aid. Vietnam basically said, we don't want that stuff. The people in my family that were teachers quit because they were not going to teach Russian propaganda in the light of their history and culture in which not only men but women heroes had overcome by resistance and resistance is the theme for Vietnam and that we should learn from now. And I remember things like carpet bombing and Agent Orange and that type of thing that the United States used I guess as a strategic tool to win, to win the war which apparently didn't do that job but what was that about? Two things. Number one, it's the perfect example of sheer dominance of power by the military industrial complex and I hate to use that buzzword again but Monsanto and Dow had a dump pile of chemical warfare which was Agent Orange composed of three dioxins which nobody wanted because the long-term effects are so toxic and so long-lasting. It has a multi-hundred-year carbon life. It bonds with soil particles. It gets in the soil, it gets in the air, it gets in the water. You can't get it out. There are ways to biodegrade it and I'm now working with a project in Vietnam and Cambodia to do that over the course of decades with a microbial solution made from microorganisms and plants and other things that will break down that dioxin combination but it was called a defolian in order to defoliate the areas where the troop movement was. Number one, it's not a defolian. It was chemical warfare. More of that was used on Vietnam than all other countries in all other wars combined and there was no excuse or reason for it other than Monsanto and Dow needed to dump it. They got the military to go on with it. They gave it as a rationalization if we can defoliate the troop trails, the Ho Chi Minh trails, we can see where they're going and we can stop them. What a crock, they were in tunnels. Has nobody heard of the Khu Chi tunnels? This was a strategic move and we've talked about the number of deaths. We've talked about 60,000 Americans, young men mostly I would think and about 2 million Vietnamese folks and we've seen the pictures of the Milai massacre and that type of thing on TV. But I think now kind of sense and I want to talk about the last part of what we meant to talk about and that is forgiveness. I kind of sense that with my friends in Vietnam and my American friends who've been to Vietnam that there is a deep desire on their own side to forgive and maybe forget or not forget but to forgive. Well, what is, is my right? Is that a, what's going on there? Number one, it's part of the culture, character, spirit of Vietnam. It's who they are. They identify people, they connect with people, they bond with people as people. They can separate and distinguish those things that are products of government and military decision-making and actions and they do not hold the people responsible for that. They can still bond. They're the most hospitable people you'll ever meet. She'd go there, a friend who was stationed in Quynh Young for years in the military went back. He went up to Quynh Young. He was received by his former adversary, communist adversary, treated him like royalty, took him around. Does it Vietnamese? Yeah, Vietnamese ranking military officer gave him the best time anybody could ever wish to have in Vietnam. He came back, he literally cried because it was so moving and it helped him to understand what we missed and why we were so wrong. We were offered the opportunity, we were invited to have the opportunity to connect with these people and their leader Ho Chi Minh who is called Uncle Ho by almost all Vietnamese, even the ones who don't like him call him Uncle Ho. Now the other thing I saw is that John Kerry, interestingly enough, I mean his background, he served in Vietnam and then one of his last trips as Secretary of State, I mean to me it's very telling he goes to Vietnam. What was that about? Look at our leaders. The potential for learning is exemplified by people like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Kerry. At the end of their tenure, every one of those three went to Vietnam, almost last among their foreign visits. I know because a friend of mine who's with a foreign service in Vietnam organized Clinton's reception and spoke very highly of the way that he connected very personally, very openly, very warmly with the people as Obama has, as Kerry did. And it's kind of, so would I have the other model? And it's asking for forgiveness as well as forgiving both at the same time. It's actually asking to be forgiven for not appreciating the offered connection, the friendship, the equality, the understanding, the respect, the cultural exchange, the bonding, the educational exchanges that have been happening for decades. If you talk to students from Vietnam who've been here or students from here who've been to Vietnam, their experiences are rich and wonderful because they don't have those preconcepts. There's nothing adversarial, there's nothing competitive. They are connecting with people. With people, with people. And the stories of Vietnam will do that. Thank you, Chuck. I appreciate talking with you again about Vietnam, and I kind of think we're going to be back again sometime. We'd love to. There will be more.