Truce should lead to end of war
Local editorials from 50 years ago are being reprinted every Monday and Tuesday in this column. This editorial appeared in the Valley Independent on Nov. 29, 1966.
The diplomatic wires are humming now with the annual discussions of a Christmas-New Year cease-fire in Viet Nam.
The Viet Cong say they want this again, and the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments apparently are agreeable although the U.S. wants it to be clear that this time the truce will not be followed by a pause in the bombing of North Viet Nam such as occurred last year.
Most of the world expects the truce to be arranged without much difficulty. Maybe it will not even be necessary this time for the pope to make a special plea. The Viet Cong are saying they favor four days of interruption — two days at Christmas and another two days for the New Year. And probably something close to this arrangement will be agreed upon.
The Christmas-New Year truce is justifiable for its own sake. Just to stop the butchery for a few days is worth something. But beyond this, the truce should serve to point up the grim futility of this agonizing conflict which is deciding nothing. For if it is possible and does no harm to each side to stop the killing for four days, why not make it four months or four years?
To turn the coin on the other side, if a long truce is not good, why is a short one any good? Surely not just out of respect for the teachings of Jesus Christ, whose birth date is to be celebrated. If we were following his teachings, there would be no killing — period.
As the agony of Viet Nam wears on and with it the confusion about what we are supposed to be doing there and what we plan to accomplish out of all the war’s suffering and devastation — as the agony wears on, we must keep asking ourselves and our government the same hard questions.
Some day the thing is going to be stopped and probably on terms which both sides now say they cannot accept. Maybe four days of non-killing could usefully be spent in trying to find such terms.