AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, as we continue our 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War special with Ben Chitty, a Navy volunteer in the Vietnam War from ’66 to ’67 and also in 1968. Ben Chitty, the Clarence Fitch coordinator of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in New York, speaking yesterday at a commemoration ceremony at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan.

BEN CHITTY: The moment when the war came to an end 25 years ago was a bittersweet moment for me, as I recall, which is not very clearly. I got drunk as a skunk somewhere in North Carolina. The war had finally come to an end.

But, you know, I had wanted more. I wanted peace with honor. Now, honor is not so mysterious. It means being honest, accepting responsibility, making amends for injuries. I didn’t want much. I wanted official apologies, reparations, technical assistance for Vietnam and a change in the government, a whole new government here at home.

What did I get? We got new fronts in a never-ending war. We got counterinsurgency operations, low-intensity conflict, police actions abroad in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, with Colombia being the next stop. We got censorship and repression at home, orchestrated by the military-industrial complex and the national security state, their allies and agents. Look at what happened to the Sanctuary Movement, the South African solidarity movement, militant environmentalists and the new anti-terrorist measures. And somewhere along the line, the Soviet Union disintegrated, but not the subversion of democracy. There was no repudiation of the policies which created such destruction. There was no resolution of the prolonged crisis of legitimacy. The system still isn’t working for most people. It’s still killing people at home and abroad. So some kind of peace came to Vietnam 25 years ago, but not to me.

For one thing, we were changed. That war was unwinnable long before most of us got to it, but no one told us, or we didn’t listen. We had to find it out for ourselves. It was an experience which could raise your consciousness. We learned a new American history. The U.S. is not a democracy, but an empire, not a benign empire, founded on genocide and slavery, expanded on commercial interest and chauvinism wrapped in a missionary spirit.

We learned a new military history. Most U.S. wars have been wars first of conquest, then of intervention, sending soldiers somewhere to fight with the people who live there over how they can live or which government they can have, or if they can live at all. Even the details look a little different to us. The U.S. military learned to practice total war, wars on entire populations, modern wars. We fought the Native Americans for centuries, killed or relocated them and took their land. We took Indian fighting to the Philippines in 1898, and then we found gooks to fight in Mexico, Haiti and Nicaragua. We refined our technology of death, machine-gunning Moros on Mount Dajo in 1906, firebombing Caco bands in the Haitian boondocks in 1919, strafing Sandinista villages in 1929, finally incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. We still refine it in the Gulf. We proved the futility of opposing U.S. interests with fuel air bombs on the Highway of Death. And according to one report, that videotape persuaded Slobodan Milošević to withdraw from Kosovo. Makes No Gun Ri in Korea, My Lai in Vietnam, the firefight in Mogadishu look like trivial excesses, lapses of discipline. After all, most of the people we killed in Vietnam were noncombatants, and we killed them at a distance with explosive and incendiary devices.

We even found a new veterans’ history. Our government has only rarely kept faith with its veterans, from the Revolutionary War veteran cheated out of his bonds to the Civil War veterans defrauded by lawyers in cahoots with a corrupt Veterans Administration, to the World War I Bonus March vets dispersed by bayonet from their nation’s capital, the Korean War POWs accused of disloyalty, the atomic vets of the Cold War dying of cancer by friendly fire.

For another thing, we had some problems of our own. We had to help heal ourselves. We formed rap groups to deal with alienation, which was the original Vietnam syndrome, and post-traumatic stress. We started going back to Vietnam to help rebuild what we had helped destroy. We even built our own memorial, the wall in Washington, which is now so popular with tourists that we forget how bitter was the opposition to its design. We had to deal with the POW/MIA legend, a story started by the Nixon administration to rally support for his secret plan to end the war, and then fostered by anti-communist fanatics and more than a few crooks and charlatans inside the government and out. We tried to force recognition of dioxin poisoning from Agent Orange exposure. The government began to give us that finally, just as it began sending half a million men and women into the Persian Gulf, where the Pentagon did them with depleted uranium, nerve toxins and experimental vaccines the same way it had done us with defoliants.

We watched as the major legislative reforms of the Vietnam era, the War Powers Act and the independent counsel statute, were ignored or flouted or perverted in an orgy of partisan bickering, then abandoned. We saw another reform, the all-volunteer army, racked by the everyday and deadly oppressions of our society — race and class, which loaded up the military with minorities, poor people and immigrants; gender, which left women subject to sexual harassment at every level; sexual identity, where “don’t ask” gave a green light to witch hunts and, finally, to murder.

We learned of the environmental costs, the toxic waste abandoned in the Philippines and Panama and also Kaho’olawe in Hawaii, Eglin Air Force Base, Cape Cod, Fort Drum, Fort Dix. Diamond Shamrock’s production of Agent Orange in the Ironbound community in Newark left a Superfund site so toxic that today it’s capped and fenced and under guard 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can go to see it.

We saw how the lessons of our experience became military control of the media and minimum American casualties, which turned into unreported deaths and hidden injuries. How many Panamanians died in Operation Just Cause? No one counted. How many allied soldiers were injured in the Persian Gulf? That count is still coming in.

Now, these events have some things in common. The real lessons of our experience have been ignored or corrupted by the same folks who sent us to Vietnam and their political heirs. The machinery of death is more efficient, certainly more expensive and profitable. In fact, while it’s politically dangerous to risk a soldier’s life in responding to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, it’s OK to send marines to their deaths in a flawed and unnecessary but very expensive and very profitable airplane like the Osprey.

Well, you know, it’s enough to make you crazy. So how crazy are we? People say that the U.S. could have won the war. We know they could not. People say the antiwar movement harassed and betrayed the soldiers. We remember that the government drafted and enlisted us, lied to us and let us die. By giving me something constructive to do, the antiwar movement saved my sanity and maybe saved my own life. People say that the antiwar movement lost the war. Wait a minute. Let me get that straight. I get sent to a war I can’t win and I should not be fighting. I come back and say, “This has to stop,” so now it’s my fault.

Of course, this revisionist obsession with alternative fictions is not really about strategy or tactics or about geopolitical constraints or even the various and notorious betrayals, the liberal media, Walter Cronkite, Robert McNamara, even Jane Fonda. It’s about you and me, the folks who told the truth about the war. If we were right, then the people who supported the war, the folks who favored intervention, the people who sent us crusading against communism, they betrayed us, their own sons and daughters. Antiwar veterans are the witnesses against them. We have been through the meat grinder. We saw the system was not working. We knew the war had to stop.

And we’re still here. We know Operation Just Cause was little more than a badly bungled arrest. We know we went to war in the Persian Gulf to put the emir of Kuwait back on his golden throne. We know that the Sudan missile strike was a clear case of homicide by depraved indifference. We know the Balkan bombing campaign, a perfect war with no American casualties, or so they say, failed to bring peace to the Kosovars, whether Albanian, Roma or Serbian. How many of these Panamanian, Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Sudanese, Kosovar people are better off for American intervention?

We know more. We know the question is one of democracy, of political power and accountability. We know the problem is not bad people, though I’ve met some very bad people, but a bad system. We know the answer will be based on mass mobilization and militant resistance. Here’s an example. On the island of Vieques off Puerto Rico, several dozen people practicing nonviolent civil disobedience have stopped the U.S. Navy from bombing their island for more than a year, the largest and longest civil disobedience campaign in recent U.S. history. We know Puerto Rico is a colony in the U.S. empire. We know the Pentagon has told lies, broken promises. And we know the Navy’s claims of national security are bogus. We understand what’s going on in Vieques, and that’s why it’s — and why it’s important. If or when — when — the people of Vieques chase the Navy off their island, it will be our victory, too.

Now, even in VVAW’s glory days, when we defied the attorney general and the Supreme Court, Dewey Canyon III in Washington, disrupted the Miami convention, seized the Statue of Liberty, walked out of the Gainesville courthouse acquitted on every count, VVAW was as much a state of mind as a formal organization. Vietnam veterans who opposed the war turn up in many places, in Black Veterans for Social Justice, Veterans for Peace, Project Hearts and Minds, the Veterans Vietnam Reconstruction Project. What we bring to the movement, besides passion and perhaps credibility, is this. We have learned something about just and unjust wars. We know that for us, this never-ending war of ours, the real war, the civil war in the heart of the empire, in the belly of the beast, is a war of self-defense. We know the system can waste you in a heartbeat. Walk around the protest camps in the live-fire zone on Vieques, you’ll meet veterans.

Just one more example. I’m a Vietnam veteran. I’m alienated. Sometimes I’m a little grumpy. I don’t like the way things are. I don’t trust the government. Barry McCaffrey also served in Vietnam. He thinks we can cure the pestilence of drugs in our communities by locking up a lot of people here at home and by arming a brutal and corrupt military and its paramilitary allies, who use terror to keep the rich rich and the poor poor in Colombia, a country already fully integrated into the freest of global markets, the international drug trade. Which one of us is nuts?

So, 25 years after the fall of Saigon, I’m still a Vietnam veteran, I’m still against that war, and I’m still looking for peace with honor. But I will settle for peace with justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Ben Chitty, coordinator of the Clarence Fitch Chapter of the Vietnam Veterans Against War. As the symposium on the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War was taking place yesterday, two ships with more than 1,000 U.S. marines headed to the island of Vieques in anticipation of an FBI-led operation to arrest protesters, at the same time U.S. and British warplanes bombed northern Iraq. And finally, we end with the ambassador to the United Nations from Vietnam, Nguyen Thanh Chau.

NGUYEN THANH CHAU: You in the West, you start your April with the Fool’s Day. And we, the Vietnamese, we ended our April 25 years ago with the day which has gone into the history of our people as the landmark of the war for independence and freedom. Twenty-five years have passed, and the rumblings of the shells and the warplanes have been silenced, but the rumbling in the mind of the people on both sides still going on, and we perfectly understand the agony of those who got involved in the war on both sides. Yes, your boys came to Vietnam to fight without knowing what’s going on and what for. We did it because we know what we were for at the time, and we have arrived at it.

I belong to a generation which has gone through different wars, you know, that savaged our country. And I think that’s enough to know war is no good. Nowadays you can have, you know, some kind of crazy doctrine about, you know, let war have a chance. But I don’t think it’s proper to say so. You know, we suffer in the war. We understand the suffer — sufferings of the people in the war. And we also know that we have the Nobel Peace Prize. We don’t have the Nobel Prize for War.

Vietnam is the land of the heroes. Yes, we have 5,000 — 8,500 mother heroes who lost their relatives, who lost the member of their families in the war. Some of them lost entire the family, from the husband to the sons and daughters to the grandchildren. Yes, they were hero, but they suffer so much. We also have 300,000 people still listed as missing in action. And you understand what the agony would be on these people.

We also have thousands of deformed babies and children born to the families with parents affected by Agent Orange sprayed on the people of Vietnam by the United States. The responsibility is clear, and I believe that it’s now time that serious thought should be focused on these issues on both sides. The government of Vietnam has set aside $79 billion for the victims of Agent Orange, but that’s a pinch of salt in the sea. It’s not enough. It’s not enough, let alone the mental scars on those people who got involved in the war and came back to give birth to these children.

Yes, we have it all in Vietnam. It’s a lesson that we on both sides had to learn. We learned, you know, how a people would do to save their land, and you should learn how to stay outside something which is not yours.

AMY GOODMAN: Vietnamese Ambassador to the United Nations Nguyen Thanh Chau, speaking yesterday at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan at a 25th anniversary ending of the war in Vietnam.

And that does it for today’s program. If you’d like to order a cassette copy, call 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. Democracy Now! is produced by María Carrión and David Love. Special thanks to Grayson Challenger and Anthony Sloan. Our engineer today is Matthew Finch; our technical director, Errol Maitland. From the studios of WBAI in New York, I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening to another edition of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!