Tuesday, November 3, 2026
Election Day
1964 Lyndon B. Johnson was elected President in a landslide, defeating Barry Goldwater
1970 Marxist Salvador Allende was inaugurated as President of Chile
1970 US President Richard Nixon promised a gradual troop withdrawal from Vietnam
1992 Bill Clinton was elected President, defeating incumbent President George H. W. Bush
2025 Two Palestinian teenagers are killed in separate attacks by Israeli settlers in Hebron and Beit Furik, respectively, in the occupied West Bank.
In bed at 8:15 CST, awake around 1, up at 2:30; 0245 203.0 200/75/67 xxx; 61/55/67/59, cloudy, windy, rainy afternoon & night
Morning meds at a.m. Entresto at 5:45 a.m. and 5:50 p.m.
Another rough night's sleep, less than 5 hours. I started the day watching a 6-episode documentary, Vietnam: The War That Changed America, on Apple TV. I watch films like this with some real survivor's guilt, seeing Marines and soldiers in combat, exchanging fire with the VC/NVA guys on the other side, slogging through rice paddies and jungle terrain, chopper and close air support pilots, with me sitting dry and well-fed in the TACC at Wing HQ at Danang. Episode 1 starts, appropriately, in July of 1965, when LBJ changed the mission of US forces from defensive (for Marines, guarding the big airbase at Danang) to offensive, by ordering in another 34 battalions of combat troops. That was when Vietnam became indisputably America's war, rather than a civil war between opposing Vietnamese camps, the Ho Chi Minh nationalists and the anti-communists in the South, including my future in-laws, my mishpokhe, then living in the city of Danang.
A line in the first episode: "Before the politicians or the American people, it's the soldiers on the ground who are the first to realize this war is not going to be what they thought." It reminded me of a night sitting in the O Club talking with a group of other Marines, at the end of December, 1965, after an Intelligence briefing, all opining that "This is not going to end well." In the Intelligence briefing, we learned that since the Marines landed in March of that year to defend the airbase, the number of enemy forces around us had doubled. I suppose it was information like that that caused Gen. Westmoreland in Saigon to request, and LBJ to order, a shitload of more combat forces into the country. All it did, of course, was lead to escalation after escalation and ultimately, to ignominious defeat, a far cry from the Marines raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi 20 years earlier.
It's a painful film to watch, including its treatment of the war's 1st major battle in the Ia Drang Valley, in November 1965, later chronicled in the book We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and war journalist Joseph L. Galloway. We suffered 237 killed and 258 wounded, while claiming an estimated 1,037–1,745 killed, while the People's Army reported 554 killed and 669 wounded. That precision about American casualties and imprecision about enemy casualties lasted throughout the war. The American "body counts" were real for the Americans, only rarely for the enemy. The count of American bodies fueled opposition to the war back home and made clear the human cost of the war, while the enemy body counts had no effect on public perception of the war. The more the claimed enemy body counts grew, the more they were discounted back home as meaningless because the number of enemy troops also kept increasing despite Saigon's and Washington's bragging about the lopsided body counts.
I have an attenuated but personal connection to the battle of Ia Drang Valley. My brother-in-law Jim Reck was a member of the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division. His unit shipped out to RVN early in the war, but he was too "short" in his enlistment to ship out with them. His fellow 7th Cav soldiers bore the brunt of the battle of Ia Drang Valley, suffering extraordinarily high casualties. Jim never forgot that he could have been one of those casualties and lived with some survivor's guilt of his own.
One of the saddest scenes of the narrative about Ia Drang showed a captured enemy soldier who had been cut off from his unit. He looked as if he was about the age of a high school sophomore, a school child. He was scared to death, of course. He reminded me that the full title of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five was Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. In Chapter 1, Vonnegut recounts visiting his wartime friend Bernard O'Hare. O'Hare's wife, Mary, becomes angry at the prospect of Vonnegut writing a book that might glorify the war. She tells him: "You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs!" Mary fears that Hollywood will transform the young, frightened soldiers into glamorous heroes played by actors such as Frank Sinatra and John Wayne, thereby making war seem attractive to another generation. Vonnegut recognized the validity of her objection and promised: "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.'" He dedicated the novel, in part, to Mary O'Hare.
In Chapter 5, an English officer reflects on the youth of the American soldiers arriving as prisoners of war. He remarks:
“You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock.
‘My God, my God —’ I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’”
Vonnegut himself was only 22 when he was a POW in Dresden. I was 23 when I arrived in Vietnam as a lieutenant. The average age of Marine and Army infantrymen killed in Vietnam was 22. For officers, it was 28. We don't know the ages of VC and NVA casualties, but we do know the ages of their POWS, and it is also about 22. 11,465 Americans killed in Vietnam were younger than 20, teenagers. That represents almost one-fifth of the American dead.
Another scene in the first episode that struck me showed an American officer telling his troops: "We are protecting our homeland. This is our job here, to protect our people at home before the situation reaches them." This, of course, is pure happy horseshit. The Vietnamese never posed a threat to the safety of those at home. The scene nonetheless reminded me of the beginning of Chapter V of my memoir:
More than the citizens of perhaps any other nation, Americans celebrate military service. Every night the CBS Evening News has a segment on “Fallen Heroes;” every Sunday morning, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos’ program closes with “In Memoriam.” This canonization of soldiers is due to the fact that the United States is an empire. The central idea of empire is the exertion of national power over others who are not part of the nation, the strong over the weak. A recent Paul Krugman column reported that next year the United States’ military expenditures will equal or exceed those of the entire rest of the world. If true, it is evidence of a level of economic, political, and military imperialism never before seen on earth. Since all empires are ultimately dependent on military power to ‘project’ their will on others by lethal force or the threat of it, empires must glorify their armed forces. This is so not only because the empire depends ultimately on the military being able and willing to kill subordinate peoples who resist American hegemony, but also because the military men and women must be willing to be killed to advance the economic and political goals of the empire. These goals are hard to accomplish with volunteer soldiers and even harder with conscripts who normally have no desire to kill or to be killed and who have little or nothing to gain personally from the fruits of empire.
To get imperial conscripts to “do their duty,” conditioning is necessary. First, they must be politically conditioned to believe that the subordinate people’s opposition or resistance to the empire’s will somehow threatens them or their families, “our way of life” or “our freedom.” This conditioning is seen in many guises, in the nightly “Fallen Heroes” blurbs, in the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ fiasco, back to rallying cries about making the world “safe for democracy” in a “war to end all wars” and changing the name of the “War Department” to the “Department of Defense” between 1947 and 1949. America must never be seen as waging a war of aggression, only of defending itself (hence the utility of the Pearl Harbor attack) or (when it serves a political or economic interest) defending the innocent victims of ‘tyranny’ or at least defending ‘freedom’ which as our current President reminds us, our enemies hate and we love. Do our military men believe this? Lance Corporal Hess, USMC, is quoted in The Proud: Inside the Marine Corps, published in 1992:
“I look at it this way. If I do have to kill, I will. And while I’m doing it I’ll be thinking about my family. My mother. And, lookit, do I want some raghead Ay-rab dictating the price of gas she buys or some commie-type hardass coming over here, ruling her, telling her what to do, and you know, exploiting her. It’s for her that you kill. It’s for us.”
He thinks about it again. “Hell yeah, I’ll kill them all. And not just the communists. It’s anybody who’s against the United States. Anybody who wants to say that one man can be a dictatorship and the people don’t have anything to say about it. And he wants to try that on the United States? Well, I’m gonna kill him with all the vigor I have in may body. That’s what it’s all about: preserving our way of life. That’s my job.
These are the words of one successfully conditioned American fighting man, ready to kill for Mom and her experience at the gas pump. And of course, there are politicians perfectly willing to send him off to kill for Mom and millions of folks back home who are perfectly willing to have him kill in their names. Right wing radio and evangelical Christianity regularly fan the flames of bellicosity. As Yeats wrote A Prayer for My Daughter:
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
There is another chilling scene in this documentary, involving a Marine who served in RVN, presumably in I Corps:
[Narrator]. There's no shortage of firpower. The problem is knowing where to use it. When a report come through of gunfire coming from an area thought to be a Viet Cong stronghold, the Marines are sent in. One of those Marines is Malik Edwards.
[Edwards]. I remember us whatever was happening that day, it came down to us. We were going into this village, but the tension was higher because they came out and used the words, "If you receive a round from the village, level the village." They said thosse words. This was the first time that we had an order like that. Immediately, we received fire. So now we're pumped. We're pumped. You know, 'cause now we really - - we're ready to do some damage. . . . I go up to a hut. And so I'm getting ready to fire. Before I could do any of that, this Vietnamese came out, and he said (Vietnamese word) "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" And then he goes over. to the house and pulls up the side of the house. And this is where I see, like, these women and children. They just huddled right there, crying and freaking out and stuff.
[Narrator]. These are the women and children of the village filmed later that day.
[Edwards]. I didn't shoot them, but it freaked me out. It just freaked me out. And I just dropped to my knees, I was like, "Oh, God." Even to this day, I'm stuck in that moment right there. Those children. And you're thinking, "God, what are we doing here?"
Edwards didn't shoot those civilians, but we know that literally millions of Vietnamese civilians were killed in our war, with our almost unlimited firepower, bullets, high explosives, and incendiaries. Others were slowly (or not so slowly) poisoned with our Agent Orange and other defoliants. We know that we dropped more bombs on the Vietnamese (and Laotians and Cambodians) than the total tonnage of bombs dropped by ALL THE BELLIGERENTS on enemy targets in World War II, indeed almost twice as much tonnage, 8 million tons compared to 4 million tons. This fact, among others, is why I now refer to our war ON Vietnam, rather than our war IN Vietnam. At my primary duty station as a senior air controller at the 1st MAW's Tactical Air Command Center in Danang, I was a very small cog in the very huge wheel of our air bombardment campaign against Southeast Asians. Like the Marine Malik Edwards, I'm stuck with that memory and that guilt decades later. That is why I thought of us in Vietnam as I sat in the Oriental Theater watching Naza, about Israel's massacre of civilians in Gaza. It's why I think of Vietnam when I watch or read about Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians. It's why I think of Fox News's Bill O'Reilly's infamous interview of Donald Trump in 2027:
O'Reilly: "He is a killer though. Putin is a killer."
Trump: "There are a lot of killers. Do you think our country is so innocent? Do you think our country is so innocent?"
Wedding photo, De and Bac Tuyet Hoang
Earlier, I wrote only about the thoughts I had while watching the first episode of this documentary. After I finished writing, I watched the remaining 5 episodes. It was a chastening experience - seeing so vividly the stories of war crimes (which we all heard about in Danang, but never saw), rising racial tensions at home and in the military, near-complete breakdown in morale and discipline, even in the Marine Corps, drug use, fragging of officers, hardhats vs. peaceniks, Nixon and Kissinger, Cambodia, Kent State, the plight of the POWS and their families, "peace with honor," the Geneva Peace Accord in 1973, and the fall of Saigon in 1975. It almost sickened me to relive those experiences over those terrible years, all brought on by that war that was ill-considered from the beginning.
On the other hand, my heart ached as I watched the beginning of the last episode with its footage of Vietnamese citizens rushing to the American Embassy in April of 1975, seeking to escape Saigon before the communist takeover. I thought of my mishpockhe, De and Bac Tuyet Hoang and their 6 children whose American-born last child, Anh, married my son Andy. De and Bac Tuyet were Catholics and had fled North Vietnam after the country was divided by the 1954 Geneva Accords. They fled south as the communists took over more and more of northern South Vietnam after 1973. And they fled by boat to a refugee camp in Thailand when Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. Later, they immigrated to the resettlement camp at Camp Pendleton, where for a time, my good Marine buddy, Pat Townsend, was OIC. Eventually, they were sponsored by a Catholic parish in Appleton, Wisconsin, where they moved and where my daughter-in-law Anh was born on August 24, 1981.
There were almost 2 million Catholics in South Vietnam when Saigon fell, about half a million in Saigon alone. After April 30. Catholic-operated schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other facilities were taken over by the government. Many religious communities lost buildings and property. The state regarded education, healthcare, and social services as responsibilities of the socialist government rather than autonomous religious organizations. Attending Mass did not become universally illegal, but religious practice became subject to extensive government regulation. Adverse conditions included conditions that included: (1) Requirements that Catholics register with local authorities, (2) Restrictions on parishioners attending religious services, (3) Police monitoring of sermons and clergy, (4) Government interference with religious education, and (5) Discrimination against Catholics in employment. The Communists were not "the good guys" in the war; there were no "good guys." The Hoang family left for good reasons and their family has thrived in America. The people who lost the war were the people of Vietnam, and the combatants on both sides.
