Sometime around 1972, a tiny group of Vietnam war protesters held a short hunger strike on the steps leading up to Nelson Cathedral.

They were just a minuscule part of the international revulsion over a superpower’s total destruction of a Third World country that had fought for independence for more than half a century against Japanese occupiers, French colonialists and then American military power that backed a bunch of corrupt South-east Asian gangsters.

The Nelson protesters were, naturally, subjected to abuse from local rednecks. The police were stretched and the local newspaper was nonplussed. One of the protesters’ partners, who happened to be a journalist working on the local paper, was also accosted by an ignorant right-winger early one morning, accused of being a Communist, threatened with assault and strongly urged to leave New Zealand.

That’s how life was, way back then.

When the Kiwi troops returned, they got more stick than the politicians who had sent them on a fool’s errand. What few people realised at the time was that wise old Keith Holyoake, leader of the National Party, had opposed any involvement and was dragged into it by his more feral conservative colleagues.

Our troops also got a lot more sick from the poisons that the United States dumped willy-nilly on Vietnam and by what was called shell-shock but is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

This week, the survivors finally received an apology from our politicians – some of whom were once pink-faced protesters and had themselves contributed to the disgraceful treatment of returning soldiers by helping to turn public opinion against them personally. Australian veterans are still waiting for their apology – although saying sorry cannot help those who have succumbed through alcoholism or suicide as a result of their experience. US Vietnam veterans have no chance. Many say they would have been better off dead.

Talk is cheap, as all politicians appreciate, and it cost nothing for party leaders to say sorry to the remnants of our Vietnam War force. No doubt the apology left a sour taste in the mouths of many, and the national gesture of regret will have gone unnoticed at CIA headquarters and the Pentagon.

However, the surviving troops should feel some sense of satisfaction because of the way our foreign policy was forever changed by Vietnam – probably the least justifiable war of the late 20th Century.

Helen Clark and her fellow travellers must have learned something from recent history, littered as it is with myths and propaganda about the Domino Effect of communism and the mirage of weapons of mass destruction. They might share grumpies’ opinion that much of what we see as terrorism today was taught to the less fortunate by the “civilised” people who turned Dresden into a fireball, laid waste to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and murdered at least 36 million Russians and Jews in the name of ethnic cleansing and racial purity. After all, it was us westerners who changed the rules of war and said that civilians were a legitimate target…

They have at least kept young Kiwis away from the mire of disastrous US-sponsored wars on imaginary threats.

Our remote country is probably the world’s best place to stand back and observe the utter futility of armed conflict, all the way from Gallipoli, through Korea and Vietnam and on to Iraq. We know that powerful nations have been all too happy to accept our cannon fodder, but all too quick to forget our sacrifices.

The day after the Vietnam apology, 180 nations signed a treaty banning cluster bombs.

Notably absent from the cluster bomb conference were the United States, Israel, India, Pakistan, China and Russia, the world’s major culprits in this obscene piece of Western-inspired hi-tech terrorism. Britain’s useless and doomed Premier, Gordon Brown, stood up and declared that the UK would join the ban – while excluding American-owned cluster bombs stored on British soil as well as any needed for NATO operations (meaning that he’s not banning them at all).

New Zealand can offer nothing but token gestures in matters such as global warming. Any contribution we try to make will always harm more Kiwis than it helps the Earth, and will go unnoticed by the true polluting nations.

But we can still make a real difference by steadfastly refusing to become involved in matters that involve killing the innocent. And by kicking seven sorts of crap out of anyone with enough guts to fight us on a Rugby pitch. That is where intelligent 21st Century conflict really belongs.