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 Friday, November  11. 2022

Veterans Day

In bed at 9 after dozing off during the Michael Kitchen's movie Alibi, up at 5, many pss, no vino, no GERD.  Outside temperature of 45 degrees on the way down from 61 to 32, winter setting in.

Bait Bucket Thoughts on Vietnam

I was struck by the opening essay, the first paragraph so to speak, of the series.  It seemed accurate enough, encapsulating the horror, the confusion, the strife, and the loss of innocence experienced during what was really a 25-year-long losing war.  It started when the US financed and otherwise supported the French in their miserable and ultimately futile effort to maintain their overseas colony in SE Asia.  That effort failed spectacularly at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.  I was 12 years old then and remember hearing about Dien Bien Phu on the radio or television news as it was happening.  I remember reading about Dien Bien Phu in Bernard Fall's great book about it many years later, a book I must have donated to the Saukville library during our 'book purge.'

Notwithstanding its overall accuracy, the sentence in the introductory essay of the series was "It was begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and  Cold War miscalculations."  I struggle with that characterization.  To what other war would we apply that characterization - 'begun in good faith by decent people'?  It comes easy enough to us as Americans, recognizing that it was our government that started the war that killed millions of innocents.  Ho Chi Min and Gen. Giap did not attack Seattle and Tacoma.  Our government chose to deny his pleas for amity, chose to support the French, to support Diem and his Mandarin family, to bomb North Vietnam, to land the Marines at Chu Lai in March 1965, and ultimately to send almost 2.5 million troops to that country, to drop more bombs on it than we had dropped on Germany, Italy, and Japan in the entire World War II.  It was President Eisenhower who chose to airdrop support to the French at Dien Bien Phu and to keep it a secret from the American public.  It was Truman and Eisenhower to chose to support France's effort to recolonize Indochina.  It was Kennedy who steadily increased the number of military advisors in RVN, who supported the Catholic tyrant Diem (choice of New York's Cardinal Spellman) and it was Johnson of course who chose to bomb North Vietnam and invade South Vietnam.  And it was Johnson, McNamara, and many others who chose to lie to the American public about the war as revealed in 'The Pentagon Papers.'  Many choices over many years.  At what time, if ever, was the war not conducted 'in good faith by decent people'?  And fault, if any, lay not only with our government leaders.  I volunteered to go to Vietnam under 'choice of next assignment' on my Fitness Report in 1964.  I voted for Barry Goldwater for president in 1964.  I put a Goldwater sticker on the bumper of my precious 1964 Pontiac LeMans convertible.  I was politically naive, stupid, gullible.   I  was one of those 'decent people' operating 'in good faith' out of 'fateful misunderstandings,  American overconfidence and miscalculations.'  How culpable was my ignorance?  how vincible or invincible?  And I was a small cog in the massive lethal military machinery that brought death and destruction, napalm and white phosphorus, defoliation, and fetal deformations from Agent Orange and other chemicals,  from the air to the Vietnamese people.  After living in a strong-back tent for 6 months or so, I moved up to bunking in  a corrugated steel hutch where a sign over the door read "Better Dead Than Red."  That reflected a choice we Americans were making not for ourselves (as if there were any chance in Hell that the U.S. would become communist) but for the Vietnamese people, mostly peasants, mostly living in villages or hamlets near ubiquitous rice paddies.  They were better 'dead than Red.'  They had no say in the matter.  We Americans made that choice for them.  I don't fool myself that the VC and North Vietnamese actors were all innocent victims in all of this.  When Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Giap and Le Dan chose to fight to drive out the French and then the mandarin puppet government in Saigon and then the Americans, they were making choices too for other people, choices that inevitably would cost other people their lives.  But at least their goal was national liberation, freedom from occupation by a resource-sucking nation thousands of miles away on a different continent.  We Americans celebrate our forebearers who did the same thing in 1776.  

" For those Americans who fought in it, and for those who fought against it back homes well as for those who merely glimpsed it on the nightly news, the Vietnam War was a decade of agony, the most divisive period since the Civil War.  Vietnam seemed to call everything into question - the value of honor and gallantry, the qualities of cruelty and mercy; the candor of the American government; and what it means to be a patriot.  And those who lived through it have never been able to erase its memory, have never stopped arguing about what really happened, why everything went so badly wrong, who was to blame, and whether it was all worth it."  For some this is true; for others, it is like Death looking on with a casual eye, and picking at the dirt under his fingernails..

Minnows in the Bucket on Veterans Day

""Raw and mean, by which I mean that the sympathy-free approach to the writing was mean--there was no coddling: She and the reader were plunged into the words, the feeling, the lesson immediately.   A life shouldn't end in such a violent suicide, but the work that preceded her self-murder--that is how we should  live and how we share: Bold and pure and utterly true. But what is the price? There are prices on everything--the cheap and the easy; the glittery and the fun; the bold and the brilliant. But our budgets are different, and the withdrawal can sometimes be fatal."--Marlon Brando on Anne Sexton"

After Auschwitz by Anne Sexton

Anger / as black as a hook,  / overtakes me.

Each day, / each Nazi / took, at 8:00 A.M., a baby

and sauteed him for breakfast / in his frying pan.

And death looks on with a casual eye / and picks at the dirt under his fingernail.

Man is evil, / I say aloud.

Man is a flower / that should be burnt, / I say aloud.

Man /is a bird full of mud, / I say aloud.

And death looks on with a casual eye / and scratches his anus.

Man with his small pink toes, / with his miraculous fingers / 

is not a temple / but an outhouse, / I say aloud.

Let man never again raise his teacup. / Let man never again write a book.

Let man never again put on his shoe. / Let man never again raise his eyes, / on a soft July night.

Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. / I say those things aloud.

Detroit Archbishop: Catholics must fast, give alms and do penance after Proposal 3 passage

Niraj Warikoo, Detroit Free Press     Fri, November 11, 2022, 1:07 AM

Catholic leaders in Michigan are calling upon the faithful to fast, pray, give alms and do penance starting later this month following the passage of Proposal 3, the statewide ballot proposal that will enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.  "We awake today to the news that Proposal 3 has passed, altering our state constitution to allow for unregulated and unsafe abortion-on-demand in Michigan," Archbishop of Detroit Allen Vigneron said Wednesday in an email to local Catholics. "We are deeply saddened by this grave assault on the dignity and sanctity of unborn, innocent human life. We grieve for the many women who will continue to be harmed by abortion in our state. ... We grieve for the lives who will be lost because of this unjust and perverse law."   Vigneron called upon Catholics "to make reparations for the great sin of abortion in our midst."

The Irish Times, July 1, 2013: "The Catholic Church’s current position on abortion is 144 years old. In the 1869 document Apostolicae Sedis, Pope Pius IX declared the penalty of excommunication for abortions at any stage of pregnancy. Up to then Catholic teaching was that no homicide was involved if abortion took place before the foetus was infused with a soul, known as “ensoulment”.   This was believed to occur at "quickening", when the mother detected the child move for the first time in her womb. It indicated a separate consciousness.  In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV determined it took place at 166 days of pregnancy, almost 24 weeks. That is the current legal limit for abortion in the UK. It was Catholic Church teaching until 1869.

Notes while watching Episode 2 of Vietnam: Riding the Tiger

JFK Inaugural Speech:  " Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.  .   .  To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. . . . .To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required--not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. . . . .In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

Kennedy dispatched helicopters and APCs,  He also authorized the use of NAPALM and the spraying of defoliants rodent cover to the Viet Long and destroy the crops that fed them.  A whole array of chemicals was used, including those named for the color of the stripes on the 55-gallon drums in which it came - Agent Orange.  He quietly continued to increase the number of military advisors.  Within 2 years, the number he had inherited would grow to 11,300 Americans, empowered not only to teach the ARVN to fight a conventional war but to accompany them into battle, a violation of the 1954 Geneva Agreement that had divided Vietnam.  The administration did its best to hide from the American people the scale of the buildup that was taking place on the other side of the world, fearful that the public would not support the more active role advisors had begun to play in combat.

The Diem government started the program to gain control of the countryside by concentrating the rural population into thousands of fortified settlements ringed with barbed wire and moats and bamboo spikes meant to keep out the VC.

Lt. Col. John Paul Vann saw that tactics taught by Americans to ARVN were creating enemies, not friends.  Robert McNamara insisted that everything be quantified, a management technique he used as head of Ford Motors.  Hence, 'body counts'.  MACV gathered data daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly on more than 100 separate indicators, far more data than could ever be adequately analyzed.

Thomas Vallely, Marine veteran: "The more you think about the American strategy, the more you know that it wasn't going to work out particularly well."  My experience: By the end of 1965, the common feeling around the Marine O Club at Danang: This isn't going to end well.  Intelligence briefing shortly after I arrived in country: X number of enemy in our area; after 6 months or less, 2X.

North Vietnamese officer: "You see, for the Americans who come to Vietnam to fight the war, they look at everyone in the city as the friendly people.  But they look at the people in the village as a Viet Cong because the Viet Cong have no uniforms  How could they win?"  If they kill even one real enemy, they might get one replacement.  If they kill the wrong man, they get 10 enemies.  And mostly they killed the wrong man."

[The autocracy of Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu (and Madame Nhu, or 'Dragon Lady', ) reminds me of the family's strong connection with Roman Catholicism, Cardinal Spellman, )

October 1962: Cuban missile crisis  (fear of activation)

Musgrave, Marine Vietnam vet: "We were probably the last generation that really believed our government would never lie to us."

(ARVN unwillingness to fight reminds me of Russian troops in Ukraine)

2 Jan 63 battle of Ap Bac

We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam, but I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the communists and then get the people to reelect me." Kennedy to a friend, Spring, 1963.

A Catholic minority had for years dominated the government of an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.  70% Buddhist.  Diem's older brother was was ordained as the Catholic bishop of Hue.  Diem studied for the priesthood.   Buddhist protesters in Hue were fired on by government forces, on Buddha's birthday.  Despite US urging, Diem and Nhu refused to make any meaningful concession to Buddhists.  On June 11, 1963 Quang Doc, 73, set himself on fire in an intersection in Saigon.  Diem & Nhu cut phone lines to senior American officials, raided pagodas/ temples in Saigon, Hue another cities, rounded up 1,400 monks August 21, 1963.  Martial law declared..  Shut down universities, and high schools.  November 2, 1963, Diem and Nhu captured by ARVN military, assassinated.  November 22, Kennedy assassinated.