VIETNAM: LET'S GIVE THE DOVES THEIR LIMB
McKinley, Stephen
V i e t N a m : L e t ' s G i v e t h e D o v e s T h e i r L i m b by Stephen Originating north of the Burma-Laos border in Red China, the Mekong River wanders in a southeasterly direction...
...To hell with the carping over the quality of the prose, the depth of the thought...
...And in between, he sat down and wrote a best-seller in 21 days...
...D Jack K e r o u a c , RIP by John Coyne Published with special permission from National Review...
...For their hatreds were not his, and his love for America will forever lie far outside their experience...
...H o Chi Minh was quick to recognize that the Mekong is the most important river in Indochina, and he must have noticed that Vietnam is not the only nation contiguous with this avenue for revolution...
...With American troop deaths tolling nearly 40,000 and all weather vanes indicating Sam is ready to go home, I question the justice of waiting until December 1970 to withdraw as Goodell & Co...
...To the contrary, he stated, all he really wanted was that land which joined his...
...Such disregard for philosophical either/or niceties, not to mention common sense, has attracted today's greatest names on the left-of-center honor roll...
...And the great irony of all this is that those persons who refer to the domino theory as "discredited" will ultimately prove it tragically correct...
...And so what if it didn't read quite like we expected...
...This childishly simplistic view of foreign policy, totally disregarding cause and effect, is partly responsible for our dismal failure in prosecuting the war, and while it m a y allow us to elegantly "bug out" of Vietnam, the transience of such a "peaceful" solution would be reminiscent of a similar "peace in our time" gained at Munich in 1938...
...And the stories, apocryphal perhaps, but the stuff of the Fifties' legend...
...If South Vietnam and the Mekong Delta came under Communist rule, not all Indochina would necessarily fall, but as our military m e n admit, our defensive position would be seriously weakened...
...This McGovern, Goodell, Hartke, Hatfield, et...
...The result of this Zeitgeist is that an ever dwindling number of consequential voices dares challenge our Vietnam pullback by identifying it for what it is . . . a sellout...
...He referred to a long whining diatribe printed by N e w Left tax-refusers...
...approach is exactly the sort that would McKinley trigger what Che Guevara called "one, two, three, many Vietnams...
...But, if Hanoi follows a imification policy Page 3 dedicated to the memory of Ho, could we not still come out ahead in Vietnam...
...If the reds do not move in almost everyone will benefit...
...So if we plan to capitulate to Giap's reds, why not to our own of a somewhat lighter hue and at least let the liberal birds come home to roost by implementing their ideas, not just in a diluted form palatable to Nixon, but in toto...
...And this the neo-Beats will never imderstand...
...They were punks who had made their minds up about the world before they knew anything, and they had expropriated the legend...
...H o knew as do American hawks that the M-^kong is the trip wire for all the dominoes of South East Asia...
...So perhaps it would be best to let the doves have their way in Vietnam and bug out...
...Jack's dead," they'll murmur, and have another one for that road they'll never travel again...
...A deep, profound love affair with America...
...Then he broke his leg after a long splendid punt return, and that finished football at Columbia...
...With this article we eagerly welcome Mr...
...Some of them have settled down in the suburbs now, some of them have gone back to the little towns they came from...
...The only problem here would be where to file it with so much other evidence: Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, East Germany, Berlin Wall, Czechslovakia, Hungary, etc...
...If we were to win this war by following a hawkish strategy, the doves could still say that they had a better way...
...It would be a showcase of documented Communist aggression for all the world to see...
...The problem is to make the electorate see such irresponsibility for the folly it is...
...To those of us who did some of our growing up around Columbia in the Fifties, he was the standard, the legend...
...M e n in their forties, gray and used up, and it takes a little more booze each month to work up to anything like a moment or two of that old wild exuberance...
...W e may even decide to guard South East Asia and the other areas of our commitment in the world by all means necessary — military, economic and diplomatic...
...This lack of leadership has marooned the majority of Americans who followed Nixon's election with the reasonable expectation that his "secret solution" would be something other than a wrinkled page from Eugene McCarthy's poetry book...
...Extricating the U. S. from Vietnam regardless of all hazards has become accepted in the media as America's only policy, and Nixon is but a few steps behind the Fulbrights in this sellout...
...Betting that the reds will perform on cue we may finally be shaken to our senses and develop the resolve that there will not be any more Vietnams...
...He'd been a high school football hero back in Lowell, and on a good boozy night Scott Fitzgerald just might have traded The Great Gatsby for Jack's varsity letter...
...Strangely it is those in Washington most concerned with insuring there are "no more Vietnams" who accept the lines that: 1) the Communists are our friends, 2) Vietnam is a civil war, 3) therefore it is time we were out...
...Hopefully this time we would be able to monitor from neighboring countries the trials and executions of war criminals and other enemies of the state...
...As Fred Halstead (Socialist Worker's Party presidential candidate) campaigned, "let's bring the G. I.'s home now...
...And every now and then, against our wills, we'll still make an occasional trip up to the West End Bar, the place that Jack once ruled...
...Ask Japan, Korea, Thailand and Australia...
...There is much to commend such a course to our government, but the greatest gain would be our lesson from such a folly...
...On the other hand those who ascribe to the theory as a premise for more vigorous execution of the war will, if their suggestions are ever accepted, have done nothing to discredit the domino theory's discreditors...
...The nation's press, listing ever more to port, has been a major force in popularizing the idea that the sole alternative to our current imbroglio is to cop out...
...We'll drink a glass or two of good cheap rotgut wine, and for a little while it will be 1950 and we'll think again of magic names like Denver and Tucson and Santa Fe...
...The wild jags, the fistfight with a professor, the trips with Cassady...
...Abraham Lincoln used to enjoy telling the story of the Illinois land speculator who, when accused of being land hungry replied that he was not...
...At times perhaps even degenerate...
...But in a peculiarly American way, the way of Walt Whitman or Hart Crane or maybe even Fitzgerald...
...some, like Allen Ginsberg, have freaked out way beyond return...
...Of course this is exactly what they are saying about the Cold W a r in Europe, and about Korea...
...And what about once we are comfortably out of Vietnam...
...And we'll all devoutly hope that Jack's road ended where it should...
...propose...
...And some of them sit in small dark bars in places like Denver and Santa Fe, stranded like bits of driftwood on a beach after flood tide...
...D Page 4...
...The A R V N forces — contrary to Washington's public relations m e n — are incapable of containing the North Vietnamese aggressors...
...Dear Coyne," he wrote, "This brochure reads like a complaint by Al Capone...
...For have we not seen Congress challenge a military commitment to Thailand, where we currently have 48,000 troops stationed, under the rubric "no more Vietnams...
...In short, given the current military-technological capabilities of the United States, and pitting it against that of the other powers in the world, the domino theory is not an ironclad rule but a measurement of wills...
...The word victory has become as much an omission in Nixon's rhetoric as it was during Johnson's administration...
...Disreputable, sure...
...W e didn't give a sweet damn, for he was saying something we all ached to find our own way to say: we loved this country and we wanted to tell it so...
...It is tragic that the current Vietnam debate centers on the present and past with hardly a thought given to the future...
...Jack believed, and they never would...
...But their claim was not legitimate...
...Coyne as an associate of The Alternative...
...For if, as Frank Meyer states and Khrushchev and Brezhnev have substantiated, we are in a struggle with world Communists who over fifty years ago declared war on the western world and its strongest member the United States, it is not only futile but criminal to battle one arm of the Communist machine while oiling the rest of it by seeking trade and detente...
...Just how valuable is Vietnam to the non-Communist world...
...On the day of his death I had a note from him...
...They hadn't earned it...
...And it is precisely this that comes through On the Road...
...H e loathed them...
...At least our domestic doves will be shown for the irresponsible mountebanks that they are, and America can — in its next battle with world communism — present a united front...
...V i e t N a m : L e t ' s G i v e t h e D o v e s T h e i r L i m b by Stephen Originating north of the Burma-Laos border in Red China, the Mekong River wanders in a southeasterly direction delineating the Laos-Thailand border, flows through Cambodia, and estuates into the South China Sea in South Vietnam...
...This should indicate that Vietnam has become a stumbling block tripping all rational thinking, for it assumes that any military commitment in South East Asia will inevitable evolve into our current situation in Vietnam...
...If this leads to defeat in South East Asia (as I a m sure it will), at best America will gain a victory at home...
...The end result will be the same...
Vol. 3 • February 1970 • No. 4
