Protests
have brought women the vote; protests have brought an end to segregation;
protests have brought an end to wars…
When my tour
ended in Vietnam one hundred and fifty of us were flown back to California on a
civilian airline in an attempt to disguise our return and avoid protest.
When we landed the airport there were young people protesting. We were in our jungle fatigues and we were harassed. There were dead military bodies aboard our flight.
I was
furious but we had been ordered not to react.
For years I was resentful.
But now I
realize these protests, as distasteful as they were to me at the time, brought
an end to an unjust war. The government
knew the war was not winnable but continued to send our military into the jaws
of the war shredder. After 58,479
deaths, hundreds of thousands of wounded, and hundreds captured, held prisoner,
and tortured, we surrendered Saigon to
the North Vietnamese and retreated.
Nothing had been accomplished!
Those
military deaths and wounded vets were for nothing but political chess.
This war
would have gone on longer except for the outrage, mostly by college students.
High schools
teach you information. Colleges encourage
you to think. College classes encourage
a diversity of thought and professors like to be challenged.
College students
are most often young and naive - they haven’t been jaded by the adult world. They see things in black and white and do not
yet realize that the human world operates in shades of grey.
The Middle East
is a complex place of religious fundamentalism, and the human race is a violent
organism.
The students
want an end to war – a peaceful solution to what they feel is genocide. I can’t fault them for that.
the Ol’Buzzard
