During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, Jr. decided to publicly oppose the war despite the fact that it cost him the support of many former allies in the government and the general public. In his now famous speech “Beyond Vietnam” given on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York, he provided a detailed analysis of the flawed policies that led to the war. Click here for a text of the entire speech. Over fifty years later, most historians recognize that his analysis was correct. The video posted below that summarizes Dr. King’s opposition to the Vietnam War is from The National Park Service, a government agency.
Yet beyond critiquing the reasons for the war, Dr. King went on the articulate why opposing the war was an essential way to support the troops. Here are some of his words from April 4, 1967:
I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
In light of our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dr. King’s words still ring true. Much of the rationale for those wars has proven to be flawed and even deceptive. Many who served in combat had multiple deployments resulting in thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of men and women suffering from PTSD. Holding our government to account for sending people to war does not dishonor the service of our veterans. In fact, it is perhaps the highest form of supporting our troops.