"Like US soldiers in Afghanistan, soldiers imagined Vietnamese people as subhumans, enabling merciless bloodshed without the interference of conscience. One Vietnam veteran wrote a poem about this decidedly politically incorrect practice: “We were taught to call them gook / slope, slant, and worse / because it’s easier to kill / that way, easier to sleep at night / if you’ve merely crushed a roach / under your boot heel.”
The official Vietnamese estimate for the number of deaths in the war, counting both civilians and military, is over three million. Even if that’s an overestimate and the real number is, say, half of that, then “only” a million and a half people died in a country of thirty-six million. That’s a staggering number. It’s a death toll that defies Donald Trump’s characterization of the military as overly restrained.
Trump seems to think that Nixon and Kissinger were hamstrung by “politically correct” hesitations about using whatever level of force would lead to an easy victory. So what does he think that level of force would have been? How many more hundreds of thousands of tons of napalm should have been poured on Southeast Asian peasants? Should we have nuked Hanoi? And what exactly should George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump himself (who was president for four years of the Afghanistan War) have done to that long-suffering country that they weren’t already doing?"
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/trump-vietnam-afghanistan-war-woke
#USA #Trump #Woke #Vietnam #Afghanistan #Militarism #Warmonger