The Vietnam War was a ten-year rainstorm, one I experienced for one tenth of it (and got a decoration for). It carried us, as if to the moon, as if the moon had dropped on us. It infected the community, everyday life; it also gave some of us, excitement (as it had for me), but many funerals, 56,000-American funerals, over 5,000 a month. It gave us new and daily sounds over the radio, and television, and the full actual sounds of war, I would get to hear, in 1971.
The political power of the day embodied us all; it killed JFK, and brought the war even closer to our living rooms. As the world turned at the United Nations, behind closed doors, in our Congress, right up to the Oval Office, politicians and industry discussed its merits (its intrinsic worth)for ten-years. We had many dragons in our flag. Thus, the storm continued unabated.
We all looked at each other-back then (us soldiers), as if we were young blind owls in the night, once confident Americans, now feeling abandonment and estrangement because of the nature of the war. And the people of the nation, my nation the ones that commanded us to fight it, behind our backs, cussed us, called us baby killers, told us to go to Canada, spit at us: damned if we ran, damned if we stayed and fought.
My story is not quite like most of the other soldiers' stories in Vietnam. I didn't question if the war was right or wrong, I just went, matter of fact, I had taken some jungle training in Washington State, when the doctors discovered my toes on my right foot had been smashed from a bomb falling on it in Augsburg, West Germany a few months prior-as a result, I became unfit for war. I did not have to go to Vietnam, -because I would not be able to run well enough. However, I wanted to go so I kept my old orders as they were cutting new ones, and jumped on the plane to Vietnam: I wanted the experience of being in a war, I had filled my veins with patriotic fever, and the travel seemed exciting. I was a silly boy back then.
There was a hostile spirit in the core of America, so I discovered during this time-being from the Midwest, I never noticed it until I started traveling, for the Army; this spirit, I do believe created a defeated attitude among us in Vietnam. Again, I suppose I was different, single, no one back home-for the most part, but many a soldier cried in the night, wanting to go home, be with his wife, children, even some cried for their mothers, this created a storm of drug related soldiers. I saw them come in healthy, and three months later, they were on every drug available. Soldiers not wanting to be soldiers do not make for good soldiers.
President Johnson had taken the 34,000-troops that President Kennedy had sent to Vietnam, American soldiers of war-sent them home, and replaced them with 500,000-soldiers, new ones (much like Obama has done, shifting soldiers like toys in the Middle East; and all remains quiet in the White House.) What can you say to a man like that, like Johnson? Only the devil knows.
Pickled and indecisive Americans, we were all of that and more back in the early late sixties and early seventies. Actually, Nixon was the only one who wanted to stop the fighting, and started bombing Hanoi, and had we continued, we would have won the war (without shame, or dishonor),but again, America screamed and howled at our barbarism, which it was, but we were fighting barbarians. Nixon sent home 300,000-Americans by end of 1971. Those 300,000 were part of Johnson's scheme for the American Iron Horse, American Industry, and the real barbarians who kept the war going. It was a commercial war, costing the American Government-not one dime, we made up the paper money as if it was wallpaper; oiled the money machines night and day: it cost over nine-billion dollars-devaluing the dollar worldwide, as we have done today, are doing right now, with the two wars going on in the Middle East. Equal perhaps, at today's inflated rate, Vietnam would have cost 105-billion. In comparison, Iraq has cost us 700-billion, a war like Vietnam, of no crisis for America.
I went to fight communism. I believed in America, only to find out the cold hearts and thin shadows of the emperors of America's industrialization had designed the war to last, or last longer. By proxy, that is to say, to fight a war in another country-a playground war sort of-instead of fighting one another (the Russians and Chinese), in our own backyards, and profit by it. In addition, in the process we destroyed the ecosystem of Vietnam, which was nearly equal to that of the Amazon, along with killing three-million Vietnamese inhabitants.
Let me add, Agent Orange killed a good friend of mine, among others of course, and genetically altered and lowered the life span of a million other American soldiers (out of the ten million sent to Vietnam),perhaps even my system was infected, who's to say. In any case, during its usage and years later, a grasshopper was not safe to live in the environment, and for ten years after the war, defected children were born because of the massive usage of chemicals by America. Therefore, Vietnam was also a testing ground for new biological warfare (not much different from Saddam Hussein, who used it on the Kurds, and we scorned him for it).
The industrial machines of America was at full capacity in the mid to late '60s and early '70s: cranes, jeeps, wings for planes, bullets for rifles, and helicopters: trains filled up with rations: beef and butter, vegetables and fruits, all to feed those ten-million soldiers rotating yearly. It was an industrial heyday for America's Kings of Industry (they ruled the political system).
The executives of industry knew nothing of leaping over bodies, digging holes in the dirt to hide one's face from incoming rockets, the scrap metal, metal fragments displaced, and flying everywhichway (they quickly sent their children to college so they'd not have face the torrents of war). During one attack, a piece of metal the size of my fist, and bulky like a round smooth rock, red hot, passed flying by my cheek during a rocket attack, I moved an inch,
The political power of the day embodied us all; it killed JFK, and brought the war even closer to our living rooms. As the world turned at the United Nations, behind closed doors, in our Congress, right up to the Oval Office, politicians and industry discussed its merits (its intrinsic worth)for ten-years. We had many dragons in our flag. Thus, the storm continued unabated.
We all looked at each other-back then (us soldiers), as if we were young blind owls in the night, once confident Americans, now feeling abandonment and estrangement because of the nature of the war. And the people of the nation, my nation the ones that commanded us to fight it, behind our backs, cussed us, called us baby killers, told us to go to Canada, spit at us: damned if we ran, damned if we stayed and fought.
My story is not quite like most of the other soldiers' stories in Vietnam. I didn't question if the war was right or wrong, I just went, matter of fact, I had taken some jungle training in Washington State, when the doctors discovered my toes on my right foot had been smashed from a bomb falling on it in Augsburg, West Germany a few months prior-as a result, I became unfit for war. I did not have to go to Vietnam, -because I would not be able to run well enough. However, I wanted to go so I kept my old orders as they were cutting new ones, and jumped on the plane to Vietnam: I wanted the experience of being in a war, I had filled my veins with patriotic fever, and the travel seemed exciting. I was a silly boy back then.
There was a hostile spirit in the core of America, so I discovered during this time-being from the Midwest, I never noticed it until I started traveling, for the Army; this spirit, I do believe created a defeated attitude among us in Vietnam. Again, I suppose I was different, single, no one back home-for the most part, but many a soldier cried in the night, wanting to go home, be with his wife, children, even some cried for their mothers, this created a storm of drug related soldiers. I saw them come in healthy, and three months later, they were on every drug available. Soldiers not wanting to be soldiers do not make for good soldiers.
President Johnson had taken the 34,000-troops that President Kennedy had sent to Vietnam, American soldiers of war-sent them home, and replaced them with 500,000-soldiers, new ones (much like Obama has done, shifting soldiers like toys in the Middle East; and all remains quiet in the White House.) What can you say to a man like that, like Johnson? Only the devil knows.
Pickled and indecisive Americans, we were all of that and more back in the early late sixties and early seventies. Actually, Nixon was the only one who wanted to stop the fighting, and started bombing Hanoi, and had we continued, we would have won the war (without shame, or dishonor),but again, America screamed and howled at our barbarism, which it was, but we were fighting barbarians. Nixon sent home 300,000-Americans by end of 1971. Those 300,000 were part of Johnson's scheme for the American Iron Horse, American Industry, and the real barbarians who kept the war going. It was a commercial war, costing the American Government-not one dime, we made up the paper money as if it was wallpaper; oiled the money machines night and day: it cost over nine-billion dollars-devaluing the dollar worldwide, as we have done today, are doing right now, with the two wars going on in the Middle East. Equal perhaps, at today's inflated rate, Vietnam would have cost 105-billion. In comparison, Iraq has cost us 700-billion, a war like Vietnam, of no crisis for America.
I went to fight communism. I believed in America, only to find out the cold hearts and thin shadows of the emperors of America's industrialization had designed the war to last, or last longer. By proxy, that is to say, to fight a war in another country-a playground war sort of-instead of fighting one another (the Russians and Chinese), in our own backyards, and profit by it. In addition, in the process we destroyed the ecosystem of Vietnam, which was nearly equal to that of the Amazon, along with killing three-million Vietnamese inhabitants.
Let me add, Agent Orange killed a good friend of mine, among others of course, and genetically altered and lowered the life span of a million other American soldiers (out of the ten million sent to Vietnam),perhaps even my system was infected, who's to say. In any case, during its usage and years later, a grasshopper was not safe to live in the environment, and for ten years after the war, defected children were born because of the massive usage of chemicals by America. Therefore, Vietnam was also a testing ground for new biological warfare (not much different from Saddam Hussein, who used it on the Kurds, and we scorned him for it).
The industrial machines of America was at full capacity in the mid to late '60s and early '70s: cranes, jeeps, wings for planes, bullets for rifles, and helicopters: trains filled up with rations: beef and butter, vegetables and fruits, all to feed those ten-million soldiers rotating yearly. It was an industrial heyday for America's Kings of Industry (they ruled the political system).
The executives of industry knew nothing of leaping over bodies, digging holes in the dirt to hide one's face from incoming rockets, the scrap metal, metal fragments displaced, and flying everywhichway (they quickly sent their children to college so they'd not have face the torrents of war). During one attack, a piece of metal the size of my fist, and bulky like a round smooth rock, red hot, passed flying by my cheek during a rocket attack, I moved an inch,
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