Anyone remember reading how much everyone loved Vietnam?

 The unity of the American people, the strength of the political response to North Vietnam, the ease with which our unrestricted military struck down our cowering foe?

 No, nobody remembers these things happening, because they didn’t. We were divided, our leaders didn’t have a clue and our military was so restricted that they almost may as well have not been there.

What on earth, Nick, does this have to do with us, college students in 2015?

You did promise to only write about political stuff that mattered, so what are you writing about?

 Good question: the answer is terrorism.

What does that have to do with Vietnam?

Bear with me; I’ll explain.

In the past week (just this week!) ISIS hacked the Twitter and Youtube accounts of CENT.COM (the U.S. military group in charge of the Middle East), gunmen armed with AK-47’s  murdered 12 employees at a satirical newspaper in the heart of Paris, and the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram gunned down 2000 people in Nigeria.

In response to this spate of heinous and bloodthirsty attacks by Islamic extremists, over 50 world leaders and a million people gathered in France to protest the violence, according to CNN.

 The president manfully responded by showing up at the rally, pledging to work with the government of Nigeria to stop the violence of Boko Haram, and declaring he would form a task force to make our cyber networks stronger.

Except, none of those things happened.

The president did not go to the rally, he did not pledge to stop the violence in Nigeria and he has not formed a cybersecurity task force.

 For that matter, Vice President Biden wasn’t even there.

Nor was Secretary of State John Kerry.

Curiously enough, nobody senior was representing the United States.

The president scheduled a meeting with the San Antonio Spurs instead.

Now for the Vietnam connection: as you all know, the U.S. has been fighting a war on terrorism for the past decade and a half.

We made some progress in Iraq in the early 2000’s, only to see it slip away when we pulled our troops out.

Now we’ve had years of half-hearted strikes and weak “sanctions”. This past week just highlights the problem.

If we care about terrorism – and my guess is that we college students do care – since we want to live in a safe country, then we will demand that our leaders stamp this threat out.

We lost the war in Vietnam, not because our country was weak, but because we weren’t willing to fight an all-out war.

We must not lose this war on terror.

If gunmen can strike in the heart of one of the most populous cities in crowded Europe and get away, who’s to say that New York City, Chicago or Detroit aren’t next?