Don't call me a hero!

By the time I got to Vietnam I had, over many years, been lied to and subjected to many layers of "education" by my government, my "news" providers, my religious leaders and my teachers. And I was never told that those wonderful war comics I had read as a child were actually preparing me to want to become a patriot too. I was stupid enough to believe all that stuff. I was ignorant. I did not know. "I was only nineteen." I had trusted them. And so I had no trouble at all in inventing my own grubby little "reasons" for wanting to go and kill people who dared to subscribe to an ideology which I did not then understand. And when I saw them dead I thought them no different from dead feral dogs.  Don't call me a hero!

Gerry Binder
Vietnam veteran