The writer of a recent letter to the editor accused George Pyle of insulting the sacrifice of American service personnel who died in Vietnam because Pyle questioned the necessity of the war being fought in the first place.
It is a tragedy that we American citizens don’t direct more of our hostility to the politicians who are so ready to send troops off to die in unnecessary wars instead of those who oppose those wars. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon both continued the Vietnam War in large part because they didn’t want the political fallout of “losing.” President George W. Bush started the Iraq disaster by falsely claiming a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
Where is the outrage over their actions that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Iraqis?
Perhaps if our leaders were more judicious about sending our troops off to face death in the first place, we wouldn’t need to argue about who dishonors our war dead’s memories because they wouldn’t have been killed in the first place.
Jim Astin
Salt Lake City