Good day gamers,

I have posted before that I’m currently attending Empire State College to complete a history degree. I have also posted some of my past writing for this class. I am posting my most recent essay here again.

This past week, our writing assignment was very unique. It was to take an article from our text book and write an essay from the perspective of the original author and how they felt about how the world had changed 50+ years later.

One of our articles was about how Undersecretary of State George Ball responded, when asked by President Johnson to comment on advice on whether or not to increase the military presence in Vietnam. Ball said to cut our losses and get out before getting more involved and wasting time, treasure, and most importantly, more American lives.

I wrote the following paper last week. It is fiction and doesn’t necessarily reflect my views on the subject. However, the timeliness of this is amazing as I watch the news and the horror of the complete collapse of the Afghan government that we supported for many years with time, treasure, and most importantly, American lives.

• Game Master Dave

(This is a fictitious story set into a historical context for this assignment.  Any relation or similarity of the main character to any real person is completely coincidental. This story does not necessarily represent the views of the student author, the professor, or the university.)

Dear Sirs:

My name is Clark Kimbell.  I live in Ridgewood, NJ.  I’m a retired lawyer and professor.  I’m a widower and I have one son who is married and lives in California.  He is a Navy veteran and served in the First Gulf War as a young seaman.  I am 83 years old.  And I am angry. 

I’m writing to you in case you want to do an article on my life for your local newspaper.  You see, I was a clerk for Undersecretary of State George Ball, and I was present for all the meetings that George had with President Johnson about the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam.  I have been watching the news tonight and seeing the complete incompetence of our present administration in withdrawing from Afghanistan.  What choices led up to this?  What were the choices to go into Afghanistan?  I would have liked to have been in those meetings as a ‘fly on the wall’.

George Ball was a good man.  He hired me since I was 4^th in my class at Yale Law School and he gave my first full time job in Washington.  George asked me to research how the French handled Vietnam.  I wrote a fifteen-page report and presented it to him.  Included within, in brief, were three major point: 1) the French set up a puppet government with a weak leader, 2) they did not invest effectively in the infrastructure of the country to support long term stability, 3) the French government could not decide on a long-term plan.  George brought these same points to the meetings with President Johnson’s cabinet.  However, we were discussing American involvement and not French involvement.  It seems that the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations could have learned a lot from my report as well.

George not only opposed an escalation of the Vietnam War but proposed an exit from the war as soon as possible.  The other advisors supported sending more troops to Vietnam. They had two worries:  1) that the United States would lose credibility by being defeated by guerrilla warriors, and 2) that Communism would spread.  George promised the President that he would support him no matter the final decision.  In private, George thought that too many other cabinet members were influenced by powerful industry leaders that could profit off the war based on sales of materials.

Of course, as we all know, we lost Vietnam while losing more than 58,000 soldiers in a war that lasted 18 years for us if you include when we first sent over advisors.  This was from 1955 to 1973.  Now we have been embroiled in a war in Afghanistan for 20 years, from 2001 to 2021 and we are just leaving again, with no advanced planning.  Just leaving!  And just like in Vietnam, we are leaving behind friends, co-workers, and those that supported us through our two decades of involvement in trying to make Afghanistan a free and independent democracy.  What is even more infuriating is that it seems we didn’t learn from the Russian experience in Afghanistan.  They withdrew in defeat after ten years. Just like we didn’t learn from the French in Vietnam, we didn’t learn from the Russians.

George seriously doubted that nation building was possible with hostile forces in the Vietnam jungle.  It seems that the same is true in South Asia as it is in Southeast Asia.  When will we learn to not become the ‘police force’ of the world and try and ‘Americanize’ the planet?  

Johnson should have paid attention to the French experience and listened to George and cut our losses in Vietnam.  More recent Presidents should have learned from the Russian experience in Afghanistan before putting our troops in harm’s way again.

George Ball was a good man.  He learned from history, and so should we.

I am very distressed. 

Thank you for reading. Please contact me if you decide to do an article on this topic.

Sincerely,

Clark Kimbell

I, David VanderWerf, current student, have seen through this assignment and our other readings that all current events are built on past ones.  No decision is ‘made in a vacuum’. I believe that people in positions of power are not doing enough proper research and study. A common saying is that ‘history repeats itself’.  I personally don’t think that history repeats itself, but I do think that leaders make decisions based on ill-informed and selfish advice.  We need to learn, as a society and a world, that history can hold the clues to our success if we would only listen and learn.

Elizabeth Cobbs, et al. Major Problems in American History, Volume II. 4th ed., (Cengage Learning, 2016).