Vietnam truce unlikely to last
Local editorials from 50 years ago are being reprinted every Monday and Tuesday in this column. This editorial appeared in the Morning Herald, a predecessor of the Herald-Standard on Dec. 19, 1966.
The history of truces extends centuries back in history, but the idea that soldiers should arbitrarily stop killing each other for a stated period of time and then immediately resume the fighting has always seemed slightly lunatic.
A truce is something like a temporary agreement among thieves not to steal or lie or cheat. As the National Liberation Front — the political organization behind the Communist guerrillas in Vietnam — nears its sixth anniversary, it is promising to observe pauses in the killing over the Christmas and New Year holidays.
The Viet Cong was organized militarily well before, but the NLF was created out of the politico-paramilitary grouping only six years ago. North Vietnam on Nov. 26 ordered its troops to observe 48-hour truces on Christmas and the New Year, and the NLF was understood to be willing to go along. Four days later the South Vietnamese and the Americans agreed to observe these truces. They added an additional four-day truce from Feb. 8-12 for the lunar new year, known as Tet. This period is a time when Vietnamese families traditionally get together for the biggest holiday of the year.
Last year the Viet Cong more or less honored the 12-hour cease-fire they declared between 7 p.m. Christmas Eve and 7 a.m. Christmas Day, as well as a similar truce for the New Year. But they ignored — did not even acknowledge — the longer cease-fire offer of the South Vietnamese and United States governments.
Hopes that the Christmas truce could be extended proved entirely illusory. The 37-day pause in the bombing of North Vietnam that followed the 1965 Christmas truce produced nothing.
So despite the appeal, Dec. 8, of Pope Paul VI that both sides extend the Christmas and New Year’s cease-fires into one continuous truce, no lengthening is expected, much as most of the world would like to see combatants leave the peasant and his plow alone.