ON May 21, a group of Vietnam veterans is sending a convoy of 50 trucks down to Nicaragua to give "real humanitarian aid to the people of Nicaragua." The efforts by these Vietnam veterans to aid the Nicaraguan people strike at the heart of Reagan administration policy in that region by questioning whether it seeks to bring about freedom or has some other, less benevolent purpose. The answer may be that U.S. policy objectives in Central America are no different from what some contend they were in Vietnam.

The popular conception is that we lost the war in Vietnam. However, as Noam Chomsky points out, maybe we didn't. It all depends on the objectives, and how we define won and lost. Of course, if the objective in Vietnam was to prevent the country from going red, we lost the war. But was this the true goal? Or was it rather, in Henry Kissinger's phrase, to "bomb them back to the Stone Age?"

If complete and irreparable destruction was the objective in Vietnam, we definitely won the war. Today, 15 years after the United States pulled out, Vietnam is one of the poorest countries in the entire world. Communist or not, Vietnam will never present a "threat" to the United States, economic or military.

The debate over Central America has centered on how to bring democracy to the region. The Reagan administration claims to be trying to do just that; its critics say that the means subvert the ends. But if we remember Vietnam, it may just be that Reagan administration opponents have been too generous. The chaos and destruction which have enveloped Central America may not be the sad costs of a misguided effort on behalf of freedom. Instead, they may be the result of a cold and calculating policy that holds that weak neighbors make good neighbors.

President Reagan says that his Central America policy is designed to promote democracy and freedom in the region. But given that Central America is still dominated by strong-arm dictators and torn by revolution, one must ask: were these Reagan's real goals in Central America? Or was he trying to reduce the economies of Central America to a complete shambles and to cripple the region forever, like we did to Vietnam? If this was the strategy in Central America, the Reagan administration has been highly successful.

IN eight years, the Reagan administration has funneled $3.2 billion in economic and military aid into Central America. Is it a phenomenal disaster that this money has not produced freedom and democracy, or even economic growth in Central America? Is it a mistake that all we have to show for our remarkable investment is protracted war, oppressive governments, increased drug traffic and economic and political decay? Or was this the point all along?

When President Reagan took office in 1981, his main foreign policy concern was to prevent El Salvador from going Red. While he took care to maintain a charade of democracy in that country, our policy seems designed to create chaos. First the CIA began to support the right-wing death squad violence that, between 1981 and 1985, left 60,000 suspected insurgents and union members dead. When the Reagan administration came under fire for its support of the death squads, it sponsored the elections which brought Jose Napolean Duarte to power in 1983. Duarte was supposed to have found a middle, "democratic" ground between the rightwing army death squads and the revolutionary FMLN/FDR.

Duarte's "democracy" has presided over the slide of El Salvador into economic turmoil and all-out civil war. Duarte received hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. economic and military aid, supposedly to shore up the government economically and politically. This money successfully funded Duarte's bombing of the FMLN/FDR-held countryside, but failed miserably to bring any sort of economic stability to his country.

Now the right, the left, and the center in El Salvador are all tired of Duarte's leadership, and his days as president are numbered. In the last election, Duarte's party lost its majority in the parliament to the rightist ARENA party, whose leader Roberto D'Aubuisson is personally connected to the death squads. It looks as if D'Aubuisson may carry the presidential elections later this year. This would certainly destroy any talk of "democracy" in El Salvador.

EL SALVADOR is further than ever from a stable democracy. The economy is now entirely dependent on United States aid. One-third of El Salvador's citizens are refugees. Government planes continue to bomb the countryside. The nation is politically unstable and enmeshed in civil war.

In Nicaragua, the Reagan administration has financed a war which has raged for six years with the express purpose of crushing Nicaragua's economy and making it politically unstable. The contras never had a chance of winning the war on their own. They admitted as much when they decided to negotiate with the Sandinistas as soon as the Congress cut off aid earlier this year. The negotiations have been warmly welcomed by most everybody in Central America except for the Reagan administration, which has spent years trying to prevent such a disaster. Reagan doesn't want the war to stop until Nicaragua is crippled or submits.

The current fiasco in Panama demonstrates the Reagan administration's lack of concern with democracy, and its promotion of instability and ruin. As early as 1972, the U.S. government knew that General Noriega was linked to the drug trade. In 1985, the U.S. Army Southern Command in Panama wrote a report citing the involvement of Panama Defense Forces in the drug trade. The evidence was so strong that several senior United States officials tried--and failed--to turn American policy against General Noriega.

Now, Reagan has turned on Noriega, but can't manage to dislodge him from Panama. While the Reagan administration has refused to move decisively to oust Noriega, it has imposed economic sanctions supposedly aimed at punishing him which have in reality punished the Panamanian citizenry. Chaos reigns in Panama.

HONDURAS provides a fine counterpoint to this picture of chaos and decay. Honduras has long been our faithful pawn in Central America and thrives on our support. But last month, 2000 rioters took over the streets of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and burnt two U.S. embassy buildings to protest the United States' illegal extradition of noted drug trafficker, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros. The riots were not in support of Matta, but in protest of the extradition of this Honduran citizen for crimes committed abroad, a direct violation of the Honduran Constitution.

The United States has forced Honduras to harbor the contra army, several new U.S. airstrips and occasional groups of paratroopers. The natives are getting restless, and if they don't quiet down, Honduras too may soon be added to the list of unstable and crumbling Central American countries.