I went to the bathroom and took off my uniform, and put on the civilian clothes I had worn to San Antonio when I came to Lackland Air Force Base to start basic training. It was the first time I was the object of hate by anyone. вЂњYouвЂ™re a baby killer,вЂќ she proclaimed, and spit on me. The woman looked at the young man standing before her in his dress blues with such scorn and hate in her eyes. Walking through the airport in San Antonio, Texas one Spring morning, catching a flight home before my next assignment, a young woman and man walked up to me. I joined the Air Force so I would not be a trigger-puller on the front lines.

I did not like the War, but when I got in the sights of my local Draft Board, I enlisted. I stayed because of the way the left treated our soldiers during, and after the war. Even though I worked for Republican Presidents, and alongside GOP Members of Congress, I was what statisticians call an outlier, something so far from the norm of the GOP that I stuck out all alone. Ideologically, I have not been a Republican for all my adult life. Vietnam is why I stayed in the Republican Party. It took a while longer for me to leave the Party. The GOP made the decision I could go when I did not support the war. I speak about my decision to leave the GOP in 2016. I opposed the war, which made me a traitor in the eyes of the Party. I was a Republican when President Bush asked Congress for the authority to invade Afghanistan. Last year, Afghanistan passed VietnamвЂ™s record. Until recently, the war in Indochina was AmericaвЂ™s most protracted sustained military engagement. America wants to forget the nightmare in Indochina that started on November 1, 1955, and raged for seventeen and a half years. There was a sense of grief about Vietnam which faded to numbness. If there was any relief in the unilateral declaration from Ford, we did not see it expressed in America. It is the war America tries to forget, even to this day. None of those things happened in the wake of the PresidentвЂ™s words. Usually, when wars end, there are celebrations in the street, big parades, and veterans who fought bravely are bestowed honors before admiring crowds.

вЂњThe War in Vietnam is finished as far as America is concerned,вЂќ the President told the audience. On this date in 1975, President Gerald Ford gave a speech at Tulane University and declared the Vietnam War was over for America.

The vietnam war