Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

looked about eighteen or nineteen years old. Fifty years earlier, young men their age had stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.

Although I had read Stephen Ambrose’s book D-Day, I was not prepared for the height of the cliffs that had to be scaled by Allied forces after they fought their way across the beaches on June 6, 1944. Pointedu-Hoc looked impenetrable, and I listened with reverence to the veterans who had made that climb.

Bill’s relationship with the military had gotten off to a rocky start, so a lot was riding on his speech about D-Day. Like me, he had opposed the Vietnam War, believing that it was misconceived and unwinnable. Because of his work during college for Senator Fulbright with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the late 1960s, he knew then what we all know now: The United States government had misled the public about the depth of our involvement, the strength of our Vietnamese allies, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the success of our military strategy, casualty figures and other data that prolonged the conflict and cost more lives. Bill had tried to explain his deep misgivings about the war in a letter to the head of the University of Arkansas ROTC program in 1969. In deciding to withdraw from the program and submit to the draft lottery, he articulated the inner struggle so many young men felt about a country they loved and a war they couldn’t support.

When I first met Bill, we talked incessantly about the Vietnam War, the draft and the contradictory obligations we felt as young Americans who loved our country but opposed that particular war. Both of us knew the anguish of those times―and each of us had friends who had enlisted, were drafted, resisted or became conscientious objectors. Four of Bill’s classmates from high school in Hot Springs were killed in Vietnam. I knew that Bill respected military service, that he would have served if he had been called and that he would also have gladly enlisted in World War II, a war whose purpose was crystal clear. But Vietnam tested the intellect and conscience of many in my generation because it seemed contrary to America’s national interests and values, not in furtherance of them.

As the first modern President to have come of age during Vietnam, Bill carried with him into the White House the unresolved feelings of our country about that war. And he believed it was time to reconcile our differences as Americans and begin a new chapter of cooperation with our former enemy.

With the support of many Vietnam veterans serving in Congress, Bill lifted a U.S.

trade embargo on Vietnam in 1994 and a year later normalized diplomatic relations between our countries. The Vietnamese government continued to make good faith efforts to help locate American servicemen missing in action or held as prisoners of war, and, in 2000, Bill would become the first American president to set foot on Vietnamese soil since U.S. troops left in 1975. His courageous diplomatic actions paid tribute to more than 58,000 Americans who sacrificed their lives in the jungles of southeast Asia and enabled our country to heal an old wound and find common ground among ourselves and with the Vietnamese people.

One of his first challenges as commander in chief became the promise he made during the campaign to let gays and lesbians serve in the military as long as their sexual orientation did not in any way com promise their performance or unit cohesion. I agreed with the commonsense position that the code of military conduct should be enforced strictly against behavior, not sexual orientation. The issue surfaced in early 1993 and became a battleground between strongly held opposing convictions. Those who maintained that homosexuals had served with distinction in every war in our history and should be permitted to continue serving were in a clear minority in the military and the Congress. Public opinion was more closely divided, but as is often the case, those who opposed change were more adamant and vocal than those in favor. What I found disturbing was the hypocrisy.

Just three years earlier during the Gulf War, soldiers known to be homosexual―

both men and women―were sent into harm’s way because their country needed them to fulfill its mission. After the war ended, when they were no longer needed, they were discharged on the basis of their sexual orientation. That seemed indefensible to me.

Bill knew the issue was a political loser, but it galled him that he couldn’t persuade the joint Chiefs of Staff to align the reality―that gays and lesbians have served, are serving and will always serve―with an appropriate change in policy that enforced common behavior standards for all. After both the House and Senate expressed their opposition by veto-proof margins, Bill agreed to a compromise: the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Under the policy, a superior is forbidden to ask a service member if he or she is homosexual.

If a question is asked, there is no obligation to answer. But the policy has not worked well. There are still instances of beatings and harassment of suspected homosexuals, and the number of homosexual discharges has actually increased. In 2000, our closest ally, Great Britain, changed its policy to permit homosexuals to serve, and there has been no reported difficulty; Canada ended its ban on gays in 1992. We have a long way to go as a society before this issue is resolved. I just wish the opposition would listen to Barry Goldwater, an icon of the American Right and an outspoken supporter of gay rights, which he considered consistent with his conservative principles. On the issue of homosexuals in the military, he said, “You don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.”

Bill addressed the American veterans of our parents’ generation in the speech he delivered at the World War II Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Collevillesur-Mer: “We are the children of your sacrifice,” he said. These