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Parting Shots

By Wm. R. Lowry
Editor & Publisher, MiBiz
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note-able quote

“Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”
— Richard M. Nixon, 1969

“This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart.”
— Sen. Frank Church, 1970

“Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.”
— President Gerald R. Ford, April 1975

“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America--not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”
— Marshall McLuhan, 1975

“Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.”
— Henry Kissinger, 1979
“Within the soul of each Vietnam veteran there is probably something that says ‘Bad war, good soldier.’ Only now are Americans beginning to separate the war from the warrior.”
— Sen. Max Cleland, Vietnam Vet

“We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we’re in a time when there are no heroes, they just don’t know where to look.”
— Ronald Reagan

“Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.”
— Myra MacPherson, 1984

home at last

While not a betting man, I am confident that 99.9 percent of MiBiz readers carry mentally to this day the pictures — in astonishingly vivid detail — that flashed across the world’s TV screens on April 30, 1975.
Our collective mind’s-eye has never been able to erase the unfolding scene as Operation Frequent Wind tumbled into chaos and widespread panic. This national shame was witnessed to the world as super power America evacuated its embassy  and watched helplessly as Saigon, South Vietnam fell to the invading Viet Cong forces.

Much less memorable was the televised April 23 speech by President Gerald R. Ford announcing the end of the Vietnam War, a 20-year Cold War conflict conducted by four U.S. presidents and carried out by some 3 million American military personnel.

The war’s toll on the country’s mental, spiritual, political and fiscal health — while immense — cannot be accurately calculated. The same cannot be said about those who waged it: 58,159 U.S. soldiers were killed, more than 150,000 were wounded and at least 21,000 were permanently disabled. Some 830,000 vets suffered symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder.

The saddest chapter, from the American perspective, was the scorn of a nation heaped upon her own sons — both those who returned and those who sadly did not.

Now, thanks to a full compliment of notable West Michigan businesses and organizations, led by public broadcaster WGVU, a proper homecoming will honor the region’s Vietnam era vets on July 3 at Fifth Third Ball Park in Grand Rapids.

Dubbed LZ Michigan (Landing Zone Michigan), the event is but one aspect of a grand salute to America’s forgotten heroes. I urge you to visit www.wgvu.org/lzmichigan and get involved.
It’s long past time to update those painful mental pictures ... and give our boys the overdue honor too long withheld.

battle royale

Closer to home, the war of words between the Michigan Economic Development Corp. and its critics took a new twist recently with the release of a right-to-exist manifesto by the MEDC executive committee. (see OPED above)

State Sen. Nancy Cassis, R-Novi, chairwoman of the Senate Finance Committee, took umbrage with the MEDC’s claims of “unwarranted criticism” by the Legislature and media. Cassis called it the “rightful duty” of lawmakers to question if incentives to lure businesses to Michigan are working, and at what cost to taxpayers.

Mackinac Center’s Michael LaFaive salvoed back, “Since its creation, the MEDC has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in appropriations and tax expenditures while Michigan has lost 708,500 jobs and led the nation in unemployment. Yet they have the temerity to describe public discussion of these failings as ‘unwarranted.’”

The battle remains joined.

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