Uncle Pat and band members board a C-47. They also served who stood and fiddled. © 2005 UrbisMedia
Every Veteran’s Day we are supposed to honor the men and women who fought and died for this country in past wars. It is natural to think of people you know or knew. I always think of my uncles; they were my heroes when I was a kid and I saw them in their uniforms from WWII I was proud indeed. One fought in North Africa and Italy, another who fought in Burma, one who test-flew B-25s, and another who played violin in the Army-Air Force Orchestra. They served in what some have come to call “the good war.” Those that survived are now dying by the thousands every day, casualties of aging. They are venerated by Americans and peoples of other nations almost universally and almost without equivocation.
I know some who served in Vietnam as well, all non-combat veterans, guys I went to college and grad school with. Veterans Day isn’t as pleasant a day for many vets from this conflict; they didn’t get parades and many were unfairly mistreated because they served in a foolish conflict with ill-defined objectives and fueled with ideological myopia and were the nearest ones to ventilate frustration upon. Some were, and remain, like the Swift Boat Veterans and their ilk, gung ho and unequivocal about that conflict; others have made some sort of accommodation with their experience. The Johnson administration couldn’t stop it and the Nixon administration stubbornly protracted it until we sent a nasty little nebbish with a comical German accent to Paris with a white flag. We left with our Huey tail-rotors between our legs and consigned the South Vietnamese Army to slaughter. Half the world and half of us despised or disrespected us for that one.
Now we are at war again, a putative preemptive war to save us from WMDs that were never there and our leaders knew were not there. A dirty little war cooked up in the scheming cabal of the neo-cons who operate a dim-witted president and with the lethal undertone of reciprocal jihadism. This one isn’t just about political hegemony, but about religious hegemony as well. This one isn’t against an ideology already dying of its own rigidities, but against a faith and its extremist elements that are nurtured by the very misdirected blunt instrument way in which we have addressed its crimes against us. This one just won’t stay nicely, and remotely, confined to a sliver of Indochina.
You just have to wonder how far down this loony president and the theopathic American Taliban that shores him up will take us. We were the laughing stick of the world when we impeached an internationally very popular president for committing adultery with a consenting intern. Now most all of the world dislikes us for a preemptive invasion of Iraq, and the people we were supposed to be liberating despise us for grabbing some of its citizens who we think might be terrorists and torturing them. Then they have watched as insurgents in gallabyasand flip-flops and toting outmoded weapons have held their own against American soldiers who look like robots from outer space and have tanks, planes, hummers, and high-tech weaponry. The Bush administration then botched the government response to Hurricane Katrina and said they couldn’t get to go where news crews with cameras had been days ahead of them. So the world got to watch as Americans looked like Somali refugees than like citizens from the richest, strongest nation on earth. Now the world will watch as we start teaching a form of pseudo-science worthy of the 14 th Century that has no scientific evidence or experimentation to support it as equal to Darwinian theory. The sum of it is the work of a plurality of bellicose, mean-spirited idiots, supporting an idiot, who now want to make the nation’s children as stupid as they are. That’s how far down he has taken us. Is this the sort of America that so many have died for? Is this the sort of America that honors its veterans with deeds rather than parades?
If you have to travel out into the world with your American passport, be embarrassed, be reallyembarrassed. And be scared, be more scared than you were before. And, oh, you might want to leave those pseudo-patriotic flags and “support our troops” sticker-ribbons home.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.12.2005)