For some people the event was about 30 years too late. Bill Clinton, finally going to Vietnam. The man who preferred dodging the draft to eluding Vietcong bullets will visit Hanoi, where many of us suspect his loyalties have resided all along.

Much has been made of his continuing effort to find and restore the human remains of 50,000 brave American fighting men who took the place of William Jefferson Clinton and were not able to dodge that fatal bullet. There are those who believe that all it takes to heal the wounds of war are the discovery of a rusty dogtag or an unidentified jawbone.

They are wrong.

There are also those convinced that a history of animosity between former enemies can be papered over with a flow of American greenbacks and promises of economic cooperation between two systems that are seemingly, diametrically opposed at their heart. Of course, after eight years of Bill Clinton’s rule, that may no longer be the case. Sadly, today, America resembles the totalitarian regime of Vietnam in far too many ways.

But those who encourage the final solution of a financial settlement coupled with an attitude that says, "let bygones be bygones" are also wrong.

Let’s take a little history lesson. Bill Clinton protested American policy in Southeast Asia as an Oxford College student and took foreign study classes in Moscow while the Soviet Union was supplying North Vietnam with the men and materiel it needed to fight the U.S. to a standstill. In a war-era letter to an ROTC commander, Clinton wrote that he "loathed" our military. Since 1992, he has done everything within his power to dismantle U.S. bases, reduce military manpower, cut development programs and force a US commitment to internationalist military misadventures like the NATO Kosovo fiasco.

Morale and pay raises are virtually non-existent in the military. The all-volunteer army has now been forced to lower its standards and accept candidates with high-school equivalency certificates. Soldiers are forced to receive dangerous, unproven inoculations like the oft-maligned Anthrax vaccine. Meanwhile, the brightest and best, including half our National Guard pilots in one state, have been leaving the US military in droves.

And this is the man who will bridge the gap and bring a sense of closure to the most divisive era of American history? I don’t think so. Not while there are remains of the slightest possibility that any American prisoners of war may still be alive and forgotten in Vietnamese, Cambodian or Laotian custody. As long as Americans continue to suffer for their commitment to our nation, the history of the Vietnam War continues to be written.

The loss of the Vietnam War was a tragedy. But Bill Clinton’s apparent willingness to write off our POW’s and MIA’s is an obscenity. With the memory of Veterans Day fresh in our minds, we can’t help but note that every American who suffered and died in that senseless war deserves a more fitting epitaph than that.

4.9¢ long distance from WebToday: Online sign-up takes 30 seconds