"Indian Country Revisited"
             When I was younger, I asked my teacher, all the time in fact, why do we have to learn this. Her response was always, "you'll need it when you grow up." Math, science, and English, I understood, but history was different. She said that we must learn our history so as not to repeat the errors of the past. I still don't believe this. In Vietnam, Americans, foreigners to their land, came in and sought to take what wasn't ours to take. Did we not also do this when we, the British, came to the Americas to take the land. Sure we said that we were seeking religious freedom, but was that why we were really there? We were in Vietnam to fight for economic freedom (against communism), but was that really why? Vietnam was nothing more than the entire cowboys and Indians situation all over again, but with a different outcome. I propose then, why need history? If this situation was the same as taking the Indians' land, then we didn't learn from our history, and therefore it is worthless.
             In Robin Moore's, The Green Berets, he even refers to the entire conflict as Indians and Cowboys, but how accurate is this? For references I will be referring to Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, and Phillip Caputo's, Rumor of War.
             In The Green Beret's, O'Brien was a young intellectual who was drafted into the war years after it started. He was opposed to the war the entire time, and was very jaded that he had to go and fight. In this book, he presents the Vietnamese much in the same way that a family of cowboys would have described the Indians in the 1800's. He was forced into the war and hated it, and the only way that he could bring himself to fight it was to dehumanize and hate the Vietnamese. They are portrayed as a primitive race, living in grass huts and making it by on almost nothing. They have all of these tradition
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