“Our objective is the independence of South Vietnam and its freedom from attack. We want nothing for ourselves—only that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.” President Lyndon Johnson, 1965
During the Vietnam era, over three million Americans fought to defend the government and people of South Vietnam from a Communist invasion. Fifty-eight thousand of them lost their lives. About three quarters of the men who fought and died were volunteers.
Instead of honoring the memory of the American heroes who fought and died in Vietnam, left-leaning historians tend to portray the GI’s as villains, and their mission as a waste and a fraud. A future Other Half of History column will describe the way college faculties slander Vietnam era soldiers. Today’s column is about the textbook misrepresentations of their mission.
