A nice tribute. If he was like most fathers, he would be plenty proud of your achievements, not seeking an apology for behavior of 35 years ago. Many of us were sure that we knew more than our fathers back then (“don’t trust anyone over thirty”), regardless of which side of the great debate we were on.
Likewise, I think it was difficult for young people not already aware of the dangers of Communism to know about the evil of the SE Asian communists, especially after the news media switched sides in 1968. There was a lot of bad information going around and some bad people pushing it. The containment concept was hard to sell, and when the government said we were there to maintain democracy, everyone knew that was nonsense ( although the government of the South was greatly preferred to the communists, a fact denied by that great SE Asian expert and General, John Kerry.
A better question is how you or others reacted to the massacres after Vietnam fell, but even there, rationalizations were available to true believers: the reports of killings and concentration camps were capitalist propaganda, Pol Pot was a result of the Cambodians driven mad by US bombing (I hope you didn’t buy that one), the boat people were the former ruling class of Vietnam leaving because they lost their privileges.
In that sense, I was lucky to have a cold warrior scientist as a father. He took us to East Berlin ( after waiting the mandatory 10 years on his security clearance). It was a shocking experience to go through Checkpoint Charlie in 1966 and suddenly be in 1946. It was stunning to go to a spot where you could look over the wall, and look up the barrels of VOPO machine guns mounted in the ruins of Nazi buildings. He also took me to a CIA run propaganda station in West Berlin (I was a radio broadcast engineer at the time(. When Cuba fell, I was home sick for months and watched with horror Castro’s firing squad. During the Cuban missile crisis, my father showed us where to “duck” if Albuquerque ( which had and may still have the biggest stockpile of nukes in the country ) was attacked.
But my father disapproved of my choice, too, which was to join the Army in 1966. There were plans – get an EE degree, get an MD, become a biomedical researcher. Instead, I was volunteering to get killed. Fortunately he found an alternative – Naval Air Reserve – and since it involved aircraft, I joined that – ending up with at least a more comfortable military job ( when I was a Boy Scout, I was always the last one up the hill – imagining participating in what I now know of the army, it would not have been pleasant ).
