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A WILLFUL AMNESIA  
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E. Ethelbert Miller
April 29, 2025
Washington Spectator
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_ This refusal to learn is the shadow of the Vietnam War that hangs
over us now as our nation appears to be losing its soul and the Trump
regime demonstrates not only how to ignore history but how to erase
it, as if it’s an easily edited website. _

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Green leaves of summer turn red in the fall
To brown and to yellow they fade
And then they have to die
Trapped within the circle time parade
Of changes.

_—Phil Ochs_

The war in Vietnam came to me in songs. It came to me in the night
like a bat changing into Dracula. The early years of the Vietnam War
did not replace my ideas of war shaped by watching World War II
movies. I was afraid of Nazis and Germany. My parents being West
Indians provided cocoon protection. I knew as much about Vietnam as I
did about Mississippi and the Southern Civil Rights Movement. I lived
among immigrants. We went to sleep dreaming about making money and
becoming Americans.

If America went to war, it had to do so without us. I went off to
Christopher Columbus High School in 1965. I knew nothing about Watts
exploding and very little about the Harlem riot of 1964. But I did
know about the draft and how it wanted to go steady with me when I
reached 18. At Columbus High School, the students were mostly Italian
or Jewish. I was part of a small number of African American kids who
took the train up to that part of the Bronx, where there were parks
and clean streets. There was one Black teacher at the school, and he
taught physics, and so we had nothing in common except our Blackness.

It was while attending Columbus that I seriously started listening to
the music touched by the war. I started with Simon and Garfunkel, Bob
Dylan, and Joan Baez. It soon became Phil Ochs and Arlo Guthrie. The
war in Vietnam had entered my ears. I wasn’t just listening to
ballgames on the radio; I had moved up to FM and WBAI. I graduated
from Columbus early and took a job working at Bookazine, a wholesale
book distributor. I was looking forward to attending Howard University
in the fall of 1968. I knew nothing about the Tet Offensive, but the
deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in April and June
of 1968 changed my thinking and my life. I attended a peace
demonstration in Manhattan near the United Nations. I didn’t want to
go to Vietnam. I didn’t want to be drafted. I didn’t want my
number to be called.

As the war counted its candles, year after year, it was the Army and
the Marines that carried the weight of the fighting, with more Black
Americans visible in those services than in the Navy and Air Force,
and more Black bodies among the dead being shipped home in caskets. I
had a cousin who enlisted in the Air Force, and I picked up a few
recruitment brochures from the Coast Guard, trying to play it safe.
But my number was never called.

Many years later, I would stand in front of the Vietnam Memorial. I
would stare at the black shining wall filled with the names of the
departed. I would watch people looking for the names of loved ones,
tracing their names, leaving flowers by their names, as they wept into
stone. I knew no one on the wall.

After songs came movies, and so for me the Vietnam War was something I
watched with actors playing corpses and actors playing heroes. I
noticed how, in many of the films, the Viet Cong were never seen. The
enemy was invisible. So, largely, were the Vietnamese. Only the
American dead mattered.

But history is not invisible; it’s a living, breathing thing. It
teaches us about our mistakes and reminds us of our collective
ignorance. I remember singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
as if it was a Motown hit. I was unaware of the sadness in the lyrics.
It is a sadness now that keeps me awake as I read about Gaza and
Ukraine. What do we learn from war? And is our nation still divided as
much today as it was before?

On my bookshelf is a copy of Myra MacPherson’s _Long Time Passing:
Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. _I like Myra. I interviewed her
back in 2018. Stuck inside her book are the questions I asked her:

“What might a reader today take away from your book that was written
in 1984?”

“What have been the lessons of the Vietnam War?”

We should have learned it is impossible to kill or eradicate an idea
or to win a war against people fighting for self-determination. But in
my notes about the opening remarks I made before asking Myra my first
question, I wrote, “Since Vietnam, Americans have been fighting in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia.” And now we have a
president who dreams of empire and real estate, of owning Panama,
Greenland, and Canada, of ethnic cleansing and beach hotels in Gaza, a
flood of jingoism less than one hundred days into the new
administration, and during the fiftieth anniversary of the ending of
the war in Vietnam. The Trump regime’s desire to retake the Panama
Canal evokes for me an image of someone coming out of the men’s room
and drying his hands with the Monroe Doctrine. And wanting to make
Canada the fifty-first state is an insult to me and everyone living in
the District of Columbia. We are the fifty-first state, as we have
been demanding for years. Take away our Black Lives Matter mural and
plaza, but give us liberty and home rule.

What have we learned?

How do we teach the lessons of the Vietnam War when America suffers
from amnesia?

I’m afraid the chapters about the Vietnam War in the history books
that will be given to a new generation of students will be even
shorter than the chapters that describe slavery. The Vietnam War will
only be described as a time when anti-war protests weakened our
nation, and we lost because of domestic politics and because, in a war
where civilian casualties outnumbered military casualties at least
three to one and atrocities such as My Lai took place, we fought with
too many restrictions on the military—something Pete Hegseth, the
former National Guardsman and Fox host who runs the Defense
Department, intends to reverse by advocating for leniency toward
soldiers accused of crimes against civilians and a loosening of the
restrictions in place to prevent civilian casualties
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This refusal to learn is the shadow of the Vietnam War that hangs over
us now as our nation appears to be losing its soul and the Trump
regime demonstrates not only how to ignore history but how to erase
it, as if it’s an easily edited website.

How do we avoid the despair that fills the air? How can we hope and
pray there will be no more wars.? Have we become a nation that can no
longer breathe? One cannot speak of Vietnam without remembering how
divided we became as a nation. Did we ever heal?

When viewed from above, Maya Lin’s _V_-shaped black granite wall
honoring those who died in Vietnam looks like a wound in the earth. A
wound doesn’t disappear. The scars of war will always remain as a
reminder that what makes us sadly human is our failures. Yet it’s
our ability to love that gives meaning to our lives. It’s the
heart’s desire to change and forgive that brings joy in the morning.

_E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs
and several poetry collections. He was given a 2020 congressional
award from Congressman Jamie Raskin in recognition of his literary
activism, awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by
the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and named a 2023 Grammy
Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. In 2024, Miller
was awarded the Furious Flower Lifetime Achievement Award._

_The Washington Spectator is an independent, progressive and
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in print, and updated daily online at washingtonspectator.org. The
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* Vietnam War
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* History
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* Maya Lin
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