1114

 Monday, November 14, 202

In bed at 9, awake at 2 and up at 2:30, unable to sleep, feeling guilty about the difficulty of the moving job I asked Andy and Peter to perform.  21 degrees now with a high of 39 expected.

Arlington Heights

Geri left with Lilly at about 10:45.  As usual, having Geri out and about is not unusual whereas not having Lilly in the house, even if she sleeps most of the time and in different rooms in the house, is discombobulating. Having both of them gone for 24 hours or more is too vivid a reminder of what life is like without them.  

Notes on episode 3 of The Vietnam War: The River Styx

With God on Our Side   Bob Dylan

Oh my name it ain't nothin',               my age it means less                                                                         The country I come from                   Is called the Midwest                                                                                I’s taught and brought up there          The laws to abide                                                                                And that the land that I live in            Has God on its side

Oh the history books tell it                 They tell it so well                                                                                The cavalries charged                        The Indians fell                                                                                        The cavalries charged                        The Indians died                                                                                    Ah the country was young                 With God on its side

The Spanish-American                       War had its day                                                                                    And the Civil War                               Was soon laid away                                                                                And the names of the heroes               I’s made to memorize                                                                     With guns in their hands                      nd God on their side

The First World War, boys                    It came and it went                                                                               The reason for fightin'                          I never did get                                                                                        But I learned to accept it                      Accept it with pride                                                                            For you don’t count the dead               When God’s on your side

The Second World War                        Came to an end                                                                                    We forgave the Germans                      And then we were friends                                                        Though they murdered six million       In the ovens they fried                                                                    The Germans now too                          Have God on their side

I’ve learned to hate the Russians         All through my whole life                                                                   If another war comes                           It’s them we must fight                                                                        To hate them and fear them                 To run and to hide                                                                                And accept it all bravely                     With God on my side

But now we got weapons                    Of chemical dust                                                                                  If fire them we’re forced to                 Then fire them we must                                                                    One push of the button                        And a shot the world wide                                                               And ya' never ask questions                When God’s on your side

Through many dark hour                   I been thinking about this                                                                      That Jesus Christ                                Was betrayed by a kiss                                                                       But I can’t think for ya                       You’ll have to decide                                                                 Whether Judas Iscariot                       Had God on his side

So now as I’m leavin'                          I’m weary as Hell                                                                            The confusion I’m feelin'                    Ain't no tongue can tell                                                                       The words fill my head                        And they fall to the floor                                                                    If God’s on our side                             He’ll stop the next war

Between January 1964 and June 1965, there would be 8 different governments in Saigon.  All of the leaders were so close to the Americans that they were seen as puppets.   In the North, Le Duan achieved controlling power over the government over Ho Chi Minh.  A hawk on the South compared to Ho In 1964, LBJ increased American personnel in the country from 16,000 to more than 23,000 by the end of the year, he authorized the US to bomb NV,  had US forces oversee RVN Naval forces attacking northern islands and coastal enclaves. "All of it was to be conducted in secret.  The American people were not to be told.  It was an election year."  August 7, 1964, Tonkin Gulf Resolution passed 88-2 in the Senate.  In the House, not a single rep opposed it.  NVA starts sending NVA regular troops into RVN over Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.

March 2, 1965, Operation Rolling Thunder began, systematic bombing on NV. LBJ insisted on secrecy, American public not to be told policy had changed from retaliatory bombing to systematic bombing, i.e., that war had widened  Westmoreland asked for 2 battalions of Marines to protect Danang Airbase from which fighter-bombers were hitting the North.  Asst SecDef: "US Aims: 70% - to avoid humiliation, 20% - to thwart Chinese expansion, and 10% - to permit the people of RVN to enjoy a better, freer life.  Marines landed on March 8th and the long downward spiral began, as did the anti-war movement on campuses and in Washington.  Part of my job was keeping track of all those A4 Skyhawks, F8 Crusaders, and F4 Phantoms flying bombing missions over North Vietnam.  I don't believe I ever had a moral qualm about what we were doing.  I don't recall questioning it in terms of morality only in terms of effectiveness.  Would it work in stopping the spread of "Godless Communism," holding the Chinese Communists in check (and Russia, which also supported NVA), would the U.S. and the Marines and other services be victorious over the 'little men in pajamas"?  I did my job well, I think, except for one occasion when we were changing duty crews.  A bombing mission was scrubbed but somehow a C130 Hercules refueling mission that was to support it over the North never got the word.  It was shot down waiting to refuel the scrubbed flights.  All hands lost, bodies unrecoverable.  It was never suggested that either my crew or I was negligent in any way, but I know I felt culpable, guilty, and somehow responsible.  I still wonder about it to this day.  And now I wonder, as I don't think I did then, why I was so oblivious to the morality of we were doing there  I thought about it once I left Vietnam.  At Camp Schwab and back in the States and now, especially after Russia's invasion of Ukraine brought it all back.

August 5, 1965, Cam Ne, Morley Safer, and then Dan Rather.  Marines burned down 150 houses, wounded 3 women, killed one baby, wounded one Marine, and netter four prisoners.  BABY KILLERS

November 1965, BATTLE OF IA DRANG  LZ x-ray and LZ Albany  Intelligence reassessments: instead of 5 VC regiments in RVN, 12; instead of 3 NVA regiments, 9.  Danang # of hostiles doubled after we got there.  Despite months of bombing, three times as many NVA regulars were now slipping south of the DMZ as originally believed.  Westmoreland sends an urgent cable to Washington seeking 200,000 more troops

Karl Markantes, Marine: "My bitterness about the political powers at the time was, first of all, the lying.  I can understand a policy error that is incredibly painful and kills a lot of people out of a mistake, if they made that with noble hearts . . . and to read that by the fall of 65 McNamara knew that the war was unwindable.  That's what makes me mad.  Making mistakes, people can do that, but covering up mistakes, then you're killing people for your own ego.  And that makes me mad."  I wonder whether there are any veterans of the Vietnam War who are not deeply, deeply cynical especially about the government but more generally about life.

Christmas in Vietnam, Merry Christmas wishes.  As Christmas time approached, I think we were cynics, disbelievers in all the 'happy horseshit' about the war.  I remember walking into the officers' mess hall one day and the Wing Chaplain, a full colonel Episcopal priest was hanging ornaments on an artificial Christmas tree and singing, out loud, "Christmas is a-coming and the goose is getting fat, please to put a penny in the old man's hat, if you haven't got a penny then a ha'penny will do, if you haven't got a ha-penny then God bless you."   I remember being disgusted by him.  I guess by that time I was a full-fledged infidel since I never attended a single mass or religious service in Vietnam.  For that matter, I don't recall attending mass during our time in Yuma either.  The only mass I recall attending after our wedding mass at St. Gregory's in South Euclid was a Spanish language mass in Roswell, New Mexico on our way from Brunswick, Georgia to Yuma.  Bless me, Father, it's been half a century since my last confession.  Since that time, I have . . .

This morning's WaPo: Biden, turning 80, faces renewed age questions as he weighs reelection   Broad statistics shed little light on particular individuals, but in general, health risks increase sharply after 80. Aging individuals are less resilient to accidents, falls and other unexpected events. Recovering from an episode that requires hospitalization takes longer for a person in their 80s than someone in their 60s, doctors say.  The odds of acquiring three diseases simultaneously rise tenfold between 70 and 80, then tenfold again during the following decade, said Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The risk of Alzheimer’s disease doubles every five years after 65, said Steven Austad, senior scientific director at the American Federation for Aging Research (and 32 percent of those 85 or older have Alzheimer’s dementia).  “Aging makes us more vulnerable to pretty much everything,” said Austad, ..“And when they go wrong, they can go wrong very rapidly.”

POLARIZATION  Linda Greenhouse's oped in this morning's WaPo: "A Gallup poll from July showed a startling polarization following Dobbs. Although Republicans and Democrats had been roughly aligned in their views of the Court as recently as August 2020, with at least two-thirds of both groups indicating approval, Republican confidence in the Court soared 29 percentage points, to 74 percent, while Democratic approval plunged 23 points, to 13 percent—the lowest rating Gallup has ever measured. The partisan gap is the biggest on record. . . . . A political scientist would have been farsighted indeed to anticipate what happened to the Court from 2017 to 2020: that a president who lost the popular vote would manage to lock in a conservative supermajority with three appointments, all of them confirmed by the narrowest of margins—following the Republicans’ abolition of the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations—by senators from states that collectively contain less than half the country’s population. No wonder, then, that theory no longer fits reality.

Biological life doesn't survive well at the poles, neither does democratic political life