Having personally witnessed the era of American history, which spanned more than a decade and was called; The Vietnam War, I’ve often pondered the reasons, Why?
The answer to the “why” is a very complex pursuit of many influencing factors. Some involve politicians, bureaucrats and government officials that were never held accountable for their crimes in the death of millions!
Although for my purpose here, I’ve settled in on one specific question; why we as a nation of supposedly peace loving people had we allowed our leadership to be exempt of prosecution while at the same time ignoring our very own complicity?
Many of the soldiers who carried the burden of fighting this war (by the end of it’s conflict), were chastised and dishonored for their individual participation upon returning home.
They were often met with an unthankful contentiousness that could spontaneously erupt from their fellow American, when dressed in military uniforms in public.
This left many of our service men and women insulted and bewildered as to why the American public had abandon them for supposedly defending their freedoms? After all, wasn’t it a war that the American public had funded by paying taxes?
Could it have been that the images coming back from the war zone had began to burdened them with guilt for their culpability in representing their 1/250,000,000 part in such a war?
The truth be known, the war in Vietnam wasn’t about America’s defense, it was an offensive war of attrition that took it to the enemy one fully loaded B-52 at a time, compliments of the American tax payer!
Unfortunately, most folks in America at the time would never hear the bullets that were killing them. They’d only see the muzzle flash from the distant erupting ground fire of an enemy deeply embedded within our very own government bureaucracies.
The Wholesale Salesman of Patriotism …
NOTE; If the YouTube video clip above is “No Longer Available” it’s because of woke censorship!
Untruthfully, in those days we had guys like Robert McNamara and today in the Biden Administration era we have guys like, Lloyd Austin being confirmed as Defense Secretary, becoming the 1st Black Pentagon Chief.
Does anyone else see the duplicity in selecting a Supreme Court Justice or a Pentagon Chief or any other government official on the basis of race or gender?
Especially when they can’t even provide a definition for what a woman is?
NOTE; If the YouTube video clip above is “No Longer Available” it’s because of woke censorship!
I mean truthfully, isn’t that in essence and by definition discriminator and racist?
Never mind that he was a former Board Member of Raytheon and never mind that she can’t provide a definition for a woman when asked. Oh and please don’t get distracted with him awarding over $2.36 Billion in Military Industrial Complex (MIC) Contracts to Raytheon, since his confirmation.
In days gone by, such conflicts of interest regarding our nation’s top leadership roles weren’t so microscopically examined and definitively exposed.
Now our appointed (not elected) officials with the help of a collaborative and culpable dishonest press have become embolden enough to overcome any timidity or misgivings from the public.
This technique disables critiques and bolsters unaccountability by turning what appears to be their adversity into a shield. Using the “race card” have you, removes any further opportunity for investigating the “content of their character” because of “the color of their skin”…hum?
Our leadership has not only killed the integrity of the electoral process, they are working at conducting the embalming process through a comprehensive network of bureaucracies so that a living and breathing economically strong democratic republic can never be brought back to life!
The promotions for their Vietnam era decisions came in the form of an unrelenting campaign of shock and awe that were broadcasted into the living rooms of the naive American family of the mid-1960’s.
So…you tell me what has changed except the duration of such these types of engagements that have now doubled in bilking the wealth and prosperity of America, one bullet at a time?
This was a slow and methodical exposure to what many barley understood and would increasingly become more and more uncomfortable with watching on the nightly news.
It was the live fire action and accounts of the atrocities for what happens in fighting a war that America began to start seeing first hand. Although it would take a decade for the American people to stand up and demand an end to that war, the exposure began to plant the seeds for demanding more accountability.
Furthermore, the disparity between the distribution of men in our fighting forces in Vietnam shows that African Americans comprised 11% of all troops.
However, a disproportionate number were ever made officers, with only 5% of Army officers African American and 2% across all branches.
Black troops were more likely to be assigned to combat units: 23% of such troops in Vietnam were Black.
When you combine these facts together with the fact that 70% of all abortions conducted in the U.S. are on single Black woman well, one should be able to see very clearly that a hidden agenda for genocidal population control did in fact exist!
If you really want to see how racism looks you’ll need to take a much harder look into the Democrats leadership decisions and peel back the obscurity of a hidden agenda that screams utter hypocrisy from the rooftops!
Anti-War Protest…
At first, anti-war protest erupted and the power base (corrupt politicians) of the Military Industrial Complex’s hidden agenda became exposed for how they were playing the game.
This was a power base that had been greatly influencing American politics since before the Civil War. As an example, the patriarchs of the DuPont family started selling gun power to the U.S. government back when Jefferson was our President 1801-1809.
From there the vast and all encompassing war machine testicles of influence reached much further than anyone could have imagined, and today it spans the entire globe, requiring our tax paying dollars to fund new outbreaks of war like in the Ukraine.
In those days, some of the troops that were sent by our Defense Department were Draftees, not volunteers. About 25% of the fighting force were drafted, where as during War-II it was about 75%.
As the war continued on, more and more protest erupted and some young men refused to be drafted. The news moguls would cover these protests and show clips of some guys actually burning their Selective Service Cards (Draft Cards), which was at the time considered a crime.
The media’s front-page exposure of this kind of rebelliousness together with other escalating events also helped to create an atmosphere in the younger American populous that began pushing back on the promotion of wars.
In 1965 the median age of the American population was about 27.5 years old. As compared with today’s median age being 36.4 years old.
When a nation’s median age drops below that 27.5 year old marker, it is much more prone to a revolution, which begins with rebelling against what can appear (when promoted as such) to be the long standing dictates by an “Old Crony” power base.
The most recent uprisings across the Arab world should be an eye opener, as to how youthful baby booming demographics and revolutionary propensities parallel. The Arab Spring…
Of course the Old Cronies are not going to just sit idly by and let it happen so, we would get events like the riots at the 1968 Democratic Party’s Convention in Chicago and the student’s shooting at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970.
Needless to say, these events and others began to focus upon the 500,000 plus willing participants (the soldiers) that were deployed in a war that had went on far to long (twice as long as War-II, 1941 to 1945 and three times longer than the Korean War, 1950 to 1953) without a unconditional surrender as a decisive victory!
The American populous had grown weary of the unquestioned troop build up that had risen from 16,400 during the Kennedy’s Administration in 1963 to 538,000 at the end of the Johnson’s Administration in 1968.
From Soldiers to Social-Workers…
This civil war in Vietnam had by then not just crept into the living-room of every American family but the Defense Department was now sending home our boys in body bags in increasing numbers.
According to the collection of data in the U.S. National Archives, it shows that 58,220 U.S. soldiers perished during the Vietnam War. The percentage of US deaths was 1.53% of the total number of Vietnamese. Let that sink in for a moment.
To put things in binational perspective, there are at least 300,000 Vietnamese MIAs compared to 776 US MIAs, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), formerly the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC). The total number is 1246 of whom 470 are classified as “non-recoverable,” meaning they died but that the DPAA does not “believe it possible to recover” their remains.
The old famous military quotes were no longer providing much comfort to the many families who’d lost their sons and daughters in this engagement.
“…It is a proud privilege to be a soldier – a good soldier … [with] discipline, self-respect, pride in his unit and his country, a high sense of duty and obligation to comrades and to his superiors, and a self confidence born of demonstrated ability.” ― George S. Patton Jr.
Since then, we’ve seen a one-hundred and eighty degree turnaround that now bestows an acknowledgment of thankfulness and gratitude for those who have served our great nation.
Yet in more recent times of our history our leadership had chosen to double down in a similar civil war conflict called; The Afghanistan War, for more than two decades. Thus, in retrospect what has been lost and what was gained in following orders?
Furthermore, the cost of the war was quoted to have a cost to the American taxpayer of two billion dollars a week. You do the math, 2 x 52-weeks in a year = 104-Billion yearly, times twenty years!
Does it really take ten or twenty years to win or in these examples, loose a war in a third world nation?
How does this honor our fighting men and women who have sacrificed so much in the name of defending American Freedom?
Equally so, how does patriotic duty inadvertently become conscripted to such a ruse by paralleling a belief that their is a need to fight in such conflicts in order to keep our freedom?
It should be very clear by now to all that what Major General Smeadly Butler had called out, is more relevant today than ever! When he said; War is a Racket, he hit the nail on the head!
And if it is a racket, is it a good idea to just blindly march into such wars thinking that one is exempt of their first responsibility as the motto goes, to God!
Or have Americans had their Judo-Christian foundation for morality duped into affixing their allegiance to another Master?
And so…I penned the poem below in an effort to contemplate my retrospective observations for how Vietnam appeared “States Side”. While all along our fighting men were hunkered down in that distant land of rice fields and jungles that lay half way across the globe.
Only those who had actually served “In Country” can truly express the depth and gravity in meaning for what that war actually meant to them.
But, I too was taken up with the obligation to do what was assumed to be my patriotic duty, when I received my Selective Service Number when turning the eligible age of eighteen.
Rather than getting drafted, I thought I’d enlist! So…I went down to the Army Recruitment Depot to sign up!
Of course, I needed to take a version of whats called today; The ASVAB Test, or Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.
I scheduled this and took the battery of tests. During that week when returning home, I’d sit down to watched the Huey’s (Helicopters) being pushed off the Flattops (Aircraft Carriers).
These emergency actions were being required in order to make room for the incoming rapid evacuation of Saigon. We were dumping millions of dollars of perfectly functioning Aircraft right off of the decks of ships simply because they were out of fuel.
Well I guess its needless to say, after watching that fiasco unfold and seeing military leadership just unravel, I lost interest in investing the next four years or more of my life in what appeared to me to be a complete chaotic circus.
Who’ll Be God Damned?…