|
... but all who serve in Shrub's little dick-whipping exercise were and are betrayed. :mad:
{WARNING: the following tirade ain't gonna be pretty! If brutal truth offends you, skip the following post. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!}
Let me make myself clear. First, I'm a vet. Marines, 1967 through 1969.
Right.
soundtrack: "VietNam Fixin' To Die Rag" :hippie: :smoke:
by Country Joe and The Fish
We weren't all draftees, believe it. I enlisted, and it was NOT one of those "sign up before I get drafted" deals, either. The cold, hard, sick truth is, many of us, perhaps the majority of us, signed up out of a sincere belief that we were standing between our beloved homes and families, and the horror of war. We believed that there were people in the world whose only intent was the destruction of those whom we loved and cherished. We believed that there were people in the world who would not, could not, be dissuaded from that destruction by any means short of physical annihilation.
Most important, we believed that there were people in the world who understood the truth of this brutality far better than we did, people who knew far more of the truth than we did OR COULD, and we trusted that, when they told us of the brutality, of the intentions, of the Viet Cong, that they were giving us the unvarnished truth.
We believed that someone had to physically get between these brutes, and the objects of their brutality.
Believing these things, we could not but fight in the defense of our loved ones back home.
If we were lied to (and we were), if we were fighting an immoral war for spurious reasons (and we were), the fact of OUR intent could not, and should not have been, denigrated as it eventually was.
We who fought, thought AND BELIEVED that we were there for the only truly right reason; the only truly just cause: the proper defense of others. We did our job to the best of our ability.
Those who stayed behind, who discovered the lies of the politicians who sent us into harm's way, did THEIR jobs by exposing those lies and mobilizing the civilian population to remove the faithless leaders and end that unjust war. Sadly, far too many of those brave civilians were reviled for their courage in exposing the betrayals by our leaders.
Equally sadly, too many of those who did expose the leaders, took out their rage on us, whose only wrong was to fight what we believed to be a just war, against a brutal foe. We were told that there is no such thing as "Just War", by the same people who told us that there was no such thing as "Justified Violence'. "Violence never solves anything" we were told. Much like condemning the person who, catching a child molester in the act, acts swiftly (and violently) to stop the assault, maiming, perhaps killing, the assailant but saving the life (and perhaps, the sanity) of the poor innocent victim.
I wonder how many of those mothers whose children were brutalized and butchered in Auschwitz, in Buchenvald, in Atlanta, would have hesitated to kill, if the alternative was to witness the slaughter, the brutalization, of their own baby.
Were there brutes in our ranks? Of course there were. My Lai was only one example of far too many heinous deeds committed "in the name of our loved ones back home", with only underlings like Lieutenant Cally and Captain Medina taking the rap for their superiors who actually GAVE those orders.
Guess what? This little exercise in Oval Office masturbation is very much like Nam. Again, we were consistently lied to by leaders whom we mistakenly trusted to know what the reality was in the Middle East. We were lied to and told that going to war was necessary to prevent "the Terrorists" from commiting atrocities in the town square. We were lied to and led to believe that those horrific images from downtown Manhattan, playing in our living rooms, would soon be playing live, and in living, bleeding stench-o-rama, in our own town streets.
We had the mantra "Support Our Troops" rammed down our collective throats, along with the lie that, by questioning the justification by which our kids were sent to die, we were undermining them and their brave efforts.
Sadly, shamefully, when people tried to tell the truth about the alleged WMDs, or about the alleged links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, they were shouted down and condemned as traitors by the very people whose experiences 40 years ago SHOULD have taught us better. When people tried to reveal the truth about the real connections between Saudi petroSheiks and American petrobarons (ArAmCo!), between war profiteers at (among too many others) Halliburton, and those at the very highest levels of government, they, too, were shouted down and condemned as traitors by the very people whose experiences 40 years ago SHOULD have taught them better.
I expected no better from the Right Wing. I expected little better from the Conservative Mainstream. I DID expect FAR more for the so-called Progressives, especially those who lived through Nam as I did. Since when (I asked many of my own "fellow travelers") did we start trusting the government not to lie? When did it become acceptible to trust Big Busine$$ to act against its own $elf intere$t$? Was it the same time it became acceptible to trust the Police to protect us? Funny, I never got either memorandum.
So now we have kids -- our children, our grandkids -- who were never told those truths which we so painfully, so bloodily, learned more than 4 decades ago. They trusted, as we trusted. They volunteered, as we volunteered. Our best and brightest believed, as we believed, that there could be no higher calling, no nobler service, than to place their frail young flesh between THEIR beloved homes and families and the horror of war.
Their insufficiently-armored frail young flesh.
Meanwhile, we have the sheer naked effrontery to stand righteously by and point accusing fingers at execs and pols who acted absolutely and predictably according to their natures (no betrayal there!), while we failed to implement, to pass on and pass down those blood-soaked lessons from from our best and brightest years. It was those of us who KNEW BETTER and did NOT act on our knowledge who really failed those poor suffering bastards in uniform; who have betrayed our children.
Pissed off yet? I am. :mad:
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
