History for the day

Rico says it's hard to believe, but it's been fifty years since the start of the war in Vietnam (and who, of those of us old enough to remember, can forget LBJ's pronunciation of 'Veetnam'?).
Peter Baker has an article in The New York Times about it all:

Barack Obama was still in his crib, just five months old, when American helicopters swooped out of Saigon into the jungle in January of 1962 carrying South Vietnamese troops on a raid. It was the first time American forces participated in major combat in Vietnam, opening a chapter in history that reverberates to this day.
Fifty years later, the babe in the crib is the president of the United States and the commander in chief during another long, vexing war without victory in sight. As he made a pilgrimage to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to kick off a thirteen-year project marking the anniversary of Vietnam, he is trying to find a better outcome to the decade-long war in Afghanistan.
“You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor,” Obama told the veterans gathered in the broiling sun before the iconic black granite wall, many of them graying and wrinkled with the passage of time. “You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. It was a national shame,” he added, “a disgrace that should have never happened. And that’s why here today we resolve that it will not happen again.” Offering a measure of closure a half-century later, the president asked the Vietnam veterans present to stand. “Welcome home,” he said. “Welcome home. Welcome home. Welcome home. Thank you. We appreciate you. Welcome home.”
The unusually ambitious project that started on Monday was authorized by Congress and will be carried out by the Defense Department through 2025, tracking the progress of a war that began with a relative handful of advisers before escalating to more than half a million American troops. By the time the last troops left in a negotiated withdrawal followed by the famous helicopter evacuation from the roof of the embassy in Saigon in 1975, more than 58,000 were dead.
The first phase of the commemoration, through 2014, will be devoted to recruiting partners and support. Organizers envision tens of thousands of commemoration events across the country from 2014 to 2017. Then until 2025, they plan to work to sustain the effort through oral histories, forums, seminars, and the like.
That Obama would be the president to kick it off says much about how the country has moved on since Vietnam. He is the first president from the post-Vietnam generation. After beating Senator John McCain, a Vietnam prisoner of war, to win the presidency in 2008, he now heads into a campaign this fall that will be the first presidential election since 1944 without a veteran leading either major party ticket.
Obama arrived at the White House without the scar tissue of Vietnam. But he was not completely untouched by the ghosts of that era. His early community service mentor, Jerry Kellman, had been an antiwar activist. His later acquaintance with Williams Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground that waged a campaign of bombings to protest the war, would become deeply controversial on the campaign trail in 2008.
More significant are the lessons he has taken from Vietnam as he has presided over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his early months in office, he mused over a private dinner with historians about the cost of the war on Lyndon B. Johnson’s domestic agenda and the possible parallels for his own presidency. He read Gordon M. Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster about Vietnam as he contemplated his own troop buildup in Afghanistan.
During long deliberations about the Afghanistan surge in late 2009, his special representative to the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, brought up Vietnam, sometimes to the annoyance of a president who did not want to be trapped in old fights. (Holbrooke has since died.) But even as the president agreed with NATO leaders last week to turn over next year the lead of the Afghan war that has claimed nearly two thousand American troops, Vietnam hung over the decision.
Major General Paul D. Eaton, a retired officer whose father’s name is on the Vietnam wall, said the lesson Obama should take was to “stay ahead of the generals” and not go in “if your gut tells you that there is no vital national interest”. He said he was “in some ways” disappointed that Obama escalated the effort in Afghanistan at first, but he praised him for pulling troops out of Iraq and setting a path to withdrawing from Afghanistan. “President Obama has successfully buried the notion that Democrats can’t be powerful actors in the arena of national security affairs,” he said.
Others worry that Obama took the wrong lessons from Vietnam. William C. Inboden, a professor at the University of Texas who served on George W. Bush’s national security staff, said Obama’s sometimes tense relationship with the military stemmed from a misreading of Vietnam and a perceived need to assert authority. Inboden said one lesson was that war should not be fought without adequate resources or a genuine commitment by the president. “The lesson for Afghanistan,” he said, “would be not to order the military to fight a war that the commander in chief does not seem to believe in and is not willing to generate public support for.”
Obama offered no thoughts on Afghanistan as he spoke at the Vietnam wall on Monday. During an earlier appearance at Arlington National Cemetery, he paid tribute to the veterans of Iraq in particular, on this first Memorial Day after the withdrawal of the last troops from there.
He singled out four Marines who died in a helicopter crash in the March 2003 invasion, becoming the first American casualties of the Iraq war: Major Jay Thomas Aubin, Captain Ryan Anthony Beaupre, Corporal Brian Matthew Kennedy, and Staff Sergeant Kendall Damon Waters-Bey. And he cited Specialist David E. Hickman of the Army, who died from a roadside bomb in Baghdad last year, becoming the last of the nearly 4,500 Americans killed in Iraq.
The one lesson of Vietnam that Obama has shared aloud lately is the conclusion that the politics of war should not detract from support for those who wage it. Last week, when he met a Vietnam veteran at a campaign stop in Iowa, he ad-libbed a line in his speech about making sure the country did not “make that mistake again”. He picked up the theme on Monday. “Let’s resolve that in our democracy we can debate and disagree, even in a time of war,” he said. “But let us never use patriotism as a political sword. Patriots can support a war. Patriots can oppose a war. And whatever our view, let us always stand united in support of our troops, who we placed in harm’s way. That is our solemn obligation.”

Rico says he was ten when the War started (as with those of earlier generations, there is only one War in Rico's life, no matter what has happened since then), and was over before he had to serve; having come from a long line of shirkers, he didn't miss it... (But why does The New York Times insist, in this electronic age, on dropping characters when listing military ranks? Saving a few keystrokes seems ridiculous, and forces poor Rico to put them back in...)