This letter is in reaction to several moving letters in a local publication last week about people's moving experiences with the Vietnam War "Moving Wall" monument:

Yes, Lisa, the war in Vietnam, like many in our recent history, was a senseless war. And the great tragedy that none of us wants to face is that our sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, and cousins of all orders were led like sheep to the slaughters. They were sent by shepherds who drove them there for their own personal political ambitions and paranoia. That was despite JFK's and RFK's warnings against getting mired down in an unjust land war in Southeast Asia.

Our people did die for what they thought would be our freedom. But they did not die for our freedom. They died for the pride and prejudice of officers and politicians who could not admit their predecessors' and their own mistakes. They died under the orders of men who would not heed their predecessors' warnings, or the lessons they should have learned a decade earlier in Korea.

By stating that we considered our defense perimeter in Asia to be a line between Japan and the coast, Dean Acheson had led the North Koreans to think we would not oppose them if they attacked South Korea. McArthur had achieved the goals of the UN police action when he had driven the North Koreans north across the Yaloo River into China within the first four months or so. We could and should have stopped there.

But McArther could not abide the shackles of civilian authority and international law which, like the Chinese, told him to stop at their Yaloo River border. So when he should have been calling our people home after having achieved the UN's stated purposes, Truman had to call McArthur home instead and send more men and women to be sacrificed.

Why? Because by not respecting the Chinese border, McArthur had provoked the Chinese to invade in waves. That led to hundreds of thousands of needlessly futile deaths over the next two years in a war that was not necessary and could not be won without an atomic World War III-which many right wing politicians and military leaders and their backers wanted.

Our right wing politicians' and military men's frustrated paranoia next provided the arrogance to oppose and alienate the leaders of the Cuban revolution. We forced them into the arms of the Big Bear. Leading and leaving Cuban traitors to wallow in their blood at the Bay of Pigs further fanned those people's frustrations. That defeat further exacerbated the right wing's disgrace while that battle further threw Castro into the arms, to be protected by the arms, of the Big Bear.

Those frustrated hawks then sought to use Castro's natural reaction to our attacks as an excuse to use nuclear warfare to win a "victory." Once again they were frustrated by JFK's measured response to merely force Russia to remove their missiles from Cuba. That achieved no more than the "police action" in Korea was supposed to, and had, achieved: a just and lasting peace--until McArthur had forced China to attack-which got tens of thousands more of our people, and millions of theirs, sacrificed. Here too U. S. reactionaries had to leave the Cuban's chosen form of government intact.

Our people in Vietnam were sacrificed to the passions of many of the officers and leaders whose frustration in Korea and in Cold War incidents had led them to want a war, even nuclear war, where they "felt" they could win a victory, not for our freedom but for their careers and political posturing-even at the cost of risking the destruction of civilization and millions of their fellow citizens, and hundreds of millions of people around the world. The extent of their evil was unimaginable. It dwarfed all that Hitler envisioned.

Those politicians' and military men's insatiable need for military victory would not be assuaged until Reagan let them play bully in Grenada. Then they practiced beating up on Panama. Finally President Bush's administration "invited" Madman Insane to invade Kuwait, much as Dean Acheson had done in Korea by drawing our line of defense outside Korea (which had enticed North Korea to attack). That had led the revolutionaries in the North to believe that we would look the other way while they took the South. Likewise, the failure of our Ambassador to Iraq to forcefully serve notice that we would protect Kuwait if Iraq attacked, tempted Sadam to attack.

We may never know the motives for such "mistakes." But the effects were clear. Our people died and were wounded. Other people suffered incredibly and needlessly at our bloody hands. None of that was necessary or required to protect our freedom since the second World War.

In many cases, such as once Korea had mistakenly attacked, or China was forced to attack after Mc Arthur's violation of their borders, or Castro was willing to let Russia put ballistic missiles in Cuba in exchange for their protection after our committment to interfere in their revolution was clear, or Iraq had invaded Kuwait by mistaken temptation or worst, or Milosevich had unleashed his fascists in Kosova, thinking no one would oppose his ethnic cleansing, our people did need to fight for the freedom of others.

It is the glory of our people that they so willingly sacrificed their lives and our freedom for what they thought were others' lives and freedom-although it was unconstitutional to require it in the way that our government always did-without declarations of war. It is a testament to our folly that we should have learned so little from our repeated mistakes. It is a testament to our self-destructiveness that we should so resent being reminded of the errors of our government's ways.

In such cases, such as in Vietnam, the conflicted motives of our frustrated leaders and officers lusting for victory led them not to value the lives that would be snuffed out even enough to think through what they were doing for many corrupted purposes. McNamara and his band of calculators have since admitted some of their mistakes. Let us not glorify our people's needless sacrifices, nor their leaders' foolishness and corruption. Our people wanted to be patriots in the worst way. They were. But our leaders were criminally insane sociopaths-or worse.

Let us be thankful for our people's willingness to sacrifice for what they mistakenly thought (as they had been taught) was their duty: to fight for the sake of what they thought was our freedom, as men's words and their conceptions of their God gave them to see the situation.

But let us not white wash the facts that our and other people were slaughtered to mark at least our leaders' arrogance and ignorance of a culture and a history which our leaders should have understood before committing us to oppose a revolution whose time had come.

Our people were slaughtered on many battlefields to assuage our leaders' frustrations and political needs. Listen to LBJ's tapes of a spineless and tormented man who knew we shouldn't be in Vietnam but who was unwilling to pay the political price to withdraw-as if one man's political career is worth even one other man's life!

Our people were slaughtered in a war ordained to use and destroy enough munitions and military equipment to provide enormous profits for our military-industrial complex. Ike had warned us about them but a few years before. We would not remember his wisdom but in hindsight.

Our people were slaughtered in Vietnam because our government maintains secret organizations in which we put blind trust. Those institutions, such as the CIA, NSA, NSC, etc. are not responsible. They have mislead us repeatedly for the sake of global corporations and their new fascist world order.

Our people repeatedly have been sacrificed to the arrogant foolishness of leaders who think that all they have to do is strut around like they know something, and all the honest folk who know the limits of their own understanding will follow after. We always make the needless sacrifices and then are expected to clean up our leaders' messes. We get at most an "Opps!" out of our leaders for posterity as they fade away like McArthur, LBJ, Rusk, McNamara and George Bush.

We needed clear headed and kind hearted leaders to keep us out, or lead us out, of Vietnam. But our enemies shot JFK and RFK while we let LBJ and Nixon toy with our people's lives as they covered up their crimes. We say the bucks stop with our leaders. Our problem is that we have not been adequately insistent that our leaders be held really responsible for their, at best, criminally negligent manslaughter-such as for the crimes of our government against the people of Vietnam.

Why do we support the World Court's justice for Milosevich, but not even posthumously for LBJ or Nixon, or currently for Rusk and McNamara? Put them before a jury for crimes against humanity-for knowingly causing over two million needless deaths that occurred because of our attempts to impose a government to our liking on the people of Vietnam regardless of what their people wanted!

Let us never believe "My Country, Right or Wrong!" That is not patriotism. That is provincialism. It is foolish, fascist arrogance. Rather, let us dedicate ourselves to insist that, "MY Country, Right the Wrong!" when we find it in ourselves.