I feel sorry
for my brothers in arms who wear a ball cap proclaiming their Vietnam service,
as if that was the high point of their lives.
No one chose
to be there. No one was killed or wounded
by choice. 58,000 died, and most of those were between the ages of 18 and 25.
And that
58,000 number was probably a low-ball number manipulated by the government; not
an actual count; not accounting for people who later died from war wounds,
injuries, toxic poisoning, and suicide…
I am sure the number would be well over 100,000.
Ask a Vietnam
vet why he was there, and he can’t tell you.
It was politicians moving around pieces on a checker board, and vets
were the expendable pieces.
We weren’t
there to support a democratic government in the south. We were there to establish and support the Tan
Son Nhut Air Base, giving us a nuclear threat presence on the southern border
of China. It was all about China. It was geopolitical politics.
China did
not want an American nuclear presence on its southern border any more than we
wanted a Russian nuclear presence in Cuba, on our southern border.
We could
have, at any time, moved into the north and taken Hanoi, but that would have
brought China into the war.
China did
not want open war with the US any more than we wanted war with China, so we
armed the south, they armed the north, and we fought to a stalemate that, for
fifteen years, maintained a status quo, allowing us to maintain the geographic
nuclear threat on the Chinese southern border.
Finally, the
death toll of American forces became too much to hide, and anti-war activism
threatened the politicians in office; so we retreated with our tails between
our legs – we surrendered the war – we accepted our death toll as having
accomplished nothing, cut our losses, and came home ignobly.
A Vietnam vet
wearing a hat proclaiming his service is equivalent to a rape victim wearing a
hat with a picture of her rapist.
WE were both
violently fucked.
the Ol’Buzzard
