Vermont's Town Meeting and lessons from the Battle of Bến Tre
2025-03-08
Dear reader,
Don't get caught by the VC holding the short-timers stick, at least without a Spooky giving cover. There's still time to brush up on your Vietnam War slang, and time to plan ahead to recognize Vietnam Veterans Day on March 29, 2025.
For reasons I'll discuss below, the quote came to my mind this week: “We had to bomb the village to save it.”
I looked into it a bit more and found that I misremembered the quote, and had a lot to learn about the Battle of Bến Tre. See below.
***
Thanks to everyone who's written back with their mailing address. To participate, simply reply with your:
[Preferred mailing name]
Mailing address
City, State, Zip
[overseas info]
As I wrote yesterday, I want to ship all my friends and neighbors like you a complimentary bottle of maple syrup from our farm and a copy of my new print-only catalog, "Free Rapunzel!"
Two clarifications:
Some people who wrote back from places like California seemed apologetic that they live so far away. That's what mail is for -- and I can still remember when getting mail was fun. I'm excited to send you some. Please count yourself in.
Some people let me know that they live in Vermont already and don't my maple syrup. Tough. Give the syrup to a friend but keep the writing. You won't find this online, and you deserve good, topical hardcopy reading material.
No, Turner, I will not be emailing copies. Send me your mailing address.
Okay, that was three clarifications. But that third one is on you, Turner!
I am looking forward to creating more things from our farm "in real life" and sharing them via mail and delivery. I gave away three dozen of our eggs yesterday running errands and it felt great. What else do you need from a farm in Halifax, Vermont? We're growing this year.
I came away from Halifax's Town Meeting on Tuesday stunned about the Governor's education "plan" and how much we don't know about it. I drafted this "letter to the editor." The letter contains the digging into the quote that I did, and how I find it a compellingly horrific example of how bad choices can feel necessary based on bad framing. On the flipside, finding a more productive frame reveals better choices.
I haven't sent it into the paper yet. A quick back-story about what it's like to be an elected leader who publishes op-eds at times that challenge the most popular Governor in the country. It doesn't seem like the Scott Administration hears positive engagement and yet holds criticism against me. The last time I went was critical of Governor Scott (but constructive) in the media, one of his senior staff angrily accused me of "Throwing grenades." Too bad they received it that way, but to clarify I followed up with this love note to Governor Scott in the Reformer, which I forwarded to this same senior staff person.
No response.
Anyway -- do you have any feedback on the following? Disagreements? Should I send it into the paper, or not bother?
Here it is:
To the editor:
Reading Governor Scott’s “Transformation Plan” for public education, I was reminded of a quote from the Vietnam War: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
I don’t know why this quote popped into my mind, and I didn’t even think much of it at first. It’s a horrible quote, but isn’t it emblematic of how off-course we got in Vietname that our military strategy included “pacifying” the very villages we were there to protect with rockets, bombs, and napalm? The quote is too on-the-nose to shed further light.
But with Vietnam Veterans Day coming up this March 29, I thought it might be learning more about where the quote came from. I’m glad I did, because what happened at Battle of Bến Tre on 31 January 1968 illustrates how bad choices can seem like the right choices, and inevitable, when you start off with bad framing.
The town of Bến Tre was a provincial capital where the U.S. ground and air attack killed 328 enemy VC fighters, along with 528 civilians killed and 1,219 wounded. Over 5,000 homes were destroyed, creating over 30,000 refugees. This carnage was not only necessary and inevitable by the metrics we were tracking—it was progress!
Uttered by an unnamed American officer and quoted by a reporter, the quote illustrates how the strategy at Bến Tre was a logical consequence of Secretary McNamara’s assembly-line, body-count-metrics strategy of attrition. With success framed by the body count on the nightly news and a hope of wearing down the enemy through attrition, military strategy involved killing, and taking massive casualties, and yet not bothering to hold the territory, or working to build trust with locals.
Any issues were the enemy’s fault for choosing that village to hide in, said U.S. Air Force Major James K. Gibson, a Forward Air Controller pilot who fought at Bến Tre: "The way we selected these targets was determined by the VC. They chose the battleground and we really had no choice where we put the target.”
As citizens who should hope to live up to the independent Vermonters of 1777, we must be on guard for making policy in a way that assumes a certain framing.
Here’s how Gov. Scott frames the key issue of the day in a recent “Stronger Schools, Stronger Students” plan. The Governor says that Vermonters—that’s you and me—“demand changes” to ensure:
Students anywhere can access the same high-quality education
Funding system is fair, predictable, and transparent
Spending gets under control to avoid skyrocketing property tax hikes
These are nice enough as catchphrases, and I give the Governor credit for focusing on “affordability” as the winning issue of the 2024 election. But we have additional priorities as well.
Where do I see local control? Oh, I see it here, under what Gov. Scott calls a “problem”—“Highly complex school board governance structure.”
I would like to rebutterate—as a fellow Halifax resident put it at Town Meeting on Tuesday. I stand with all the Halifax residents who spoke up in support for our local school board, and local support of Halifax Elementary School. The school is a pillar of our community. We want lower taxes, but we don’t want a policy that targets local voices running local schools as an “administrative cost.”
The Governor’s plan doesn’t require Halifax to close our school—yet. But the Governor makes his priorities clear: he’s willing to close your town’s school to save the statewide system.
Who would decide that? A board seated who-knows-where—Springfield? Rutland? Brattleboro? I appreciate that legislators must made hard choices to balance the budget without overburdening our backs. However, I must object to this plan as lacking transparency in what residents in small towns like Halifax can expect in terms of our school’s future, and our own voice in that.
There’s a depression in the grassy ground where Halifax’s last general store stood. To any elected leader considering the future of public education in Vermont stop on by and I’ll show it to you, down the street from the school. There are “green shoots” in Halifax of new civic institutions, like the Halifax Cafe. But there’s no general store on our horizon.
A focus on one word—affordability—is scarcity thinking. I’m afraid that policy framed around metrics of cutting costs without acknowledging the costs of not having schools like ours could be shortsighted, and “transformative” to our community in a way we don’t want. In honor of the wisdom passed down to us from Major Gibson, let’s help the local schools in towns like Halifax, Whitingham, and Wilmington, succeed. Don’t save money by closing them.
Sincerely,
Tristan Roberts
Halifax, Vermont
Thanks for reading. What's your feedback? I'd love to hear. And for free sugar, send me your mailing address.
Cheers,
Tristan Roberts
Quill Nook Farm
Halifax, Vermont
P.S. In baby news, Loie started crawling yesterday afternoon!