Friday, June 16, 2023
In bed at 10:10, up at 4:30. Let Lilly out. A robin singing before dawn. 53℉, high of 66, wind NNE at 12 mph, with gusts up to 19 mh, beach hazard warning with waves 2 to 5 feet until 7 a.m. Sunrise at 5:11, sunset at 8:33, 15+22.
Bloomsday. This morning's Pearls Before Swine cartoon strip:
Rat to Goat: HAPPY BLOOMSDAY!
Goat to Rat: What's that?
Rat to Goat: It's a day we celebrate the life of the writer James Joyce whose novel "Ulysses" took place on June 16th. Because if there's one thing we should celebrate, it's a novel that's 265,000 words long that not one person on earth understands.
Goat to Rat: I sense sarcasm.
Rat to Goat: And tomorrow is my "Right Foot Day" which I celebrate by kicking all book snobs right in their arrogant . . .
Still trying.
Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 U.S. ___(2023), I heard news reports yesterday of this U.S. Supreme Court case upholding by a 7-2 vote the constitutionality of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, passed in 1978. I wasn't familiar with the case and wondered about it after hearing fellow Lefties praise the decision so I read much though not all of the decisions this morning. I expected it to be a 'good guys' vs. 'bad guys' decision with inveterate bad guys Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito the only two dissenters. After reading the 2 dissenting opinions and much of Neil Gorsuch's long concurring opinion (joined in parts by Sotomayor and Jackson, but not by Kagan), I wasn't very sure of who were the 'good guys' and who were the 'bad guys.' There were 3 young children whose lives and well-being were involved in the legal issues in the case. They seemed to be pawns in a political game. I need to read more of the opinions. Gorsuch's opinion is a great description of White Supremacy in operation against a feared minority group, almost a form of cultural genocide. I learned from listening to a podcast some months ago about the role of the Jesuits in the Red Cloud Indian boarding school on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. (American Genocide: The Crimes of Native American Boarding Schools)
Daniel Ellsberg has died, an American hero, the Great Unmasker who in "The Pentagon Papers" revealed the lies told by American government officials to the American people, including the Americans who served, were wounded, and/or died in Vietnam. Or who came back with psychic, emotional, or spiritual wounds which plagued them for life. From my memoir:
Throughout the time I was in Vietnam, and for the years of occupation and fighting thereafter, our government promulgated what we, even in late 1965, called ‘happy horseshit.’ One of the memorable lines in Apocalypse Now is “The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to rise above it.” The Pentagon Papers, that the Nixon Administration tried to keep secret, collected much of the ‘happy horseshit.’ On August 9, 1965, three CBS correspondents interviewed Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk about Vietnam. Harry Reasoner asked why American national interests were linked to South Vietnam. McNamara said:
First, let me make it clear, Mr. Reasoner, that this is not primarily a military problem. Above all else, I want to emphasize that. It is a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of South Vietnam . . .
Secretary Rusk’s reference to President Johnson’s invocation of ‘national honor’ drew this question:
But, sir, don’t you have to reckon honor at its cost? I mean, it is not an abstract thing. It has to be valued and weighed according to what it costs you. And what about dishonor? What about the world image that we now present? We are burning villages, we are killing civilians. Now, don’t you weigh one against the other?
Rusk answered:
Well, let me say that you also weigh the costs of dishonor, that is, the failure of an American commitment. And I would hope that our own American news media would go to some effort to present a balanced picture of what is going on in South Vietnam: the thousands of local officials who have been kidnapped, the tens of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians who have been killed or wounded by North Vietnamese mortars and by the constant depredations of these acts of violence against the civilian population.
It is a sad experience to think back on those days in Vietnam and to re-read the ‘happy horseshit’ of the politicos. I remember quite clearly talking with other Marines about the futility of the war, sharing the judgment or intuition that no ultimate good was going to come from all the death and destruction. I talked about it in the middle of the night with my friend Bob Hilleary during those endless night watches in ‘the bubble.’ My tentmates and I groused about it while holed up under canvas during the endless monsoon rains. We talked about it over alcohol and blackjack hands at the officers’ club. Regarding the “happy horseshit” in the news reports on Armed Forces Radio and in Stars and Stripes and in hometown newspapers that were mailed to DaNang, I remember with surprising vividness my good friend, from Yuma and Iwakuni and DaNang, Warrant Officer Ron Kendall frequently quoting his high school football coach in Iowa who used to tell his team: “You can fool the spectators but you can’t fool the players.” The players, at least in my unit, didn’t believe the happy horseshit from Saigon and Washington, just as I haven’t believed the happy horseshit from Baghdad and Washington 40 years later. A nation does not ‘win the hearts and minds’ of another people by dispatching an invading army of highly trained killers to its shores, airfields, or landing zones. A nation cannot successfully use as ambassadors of good will Marines and soldiers who are always at least a lethal threat to kill locals and often a homicidal force. We do not ‘save villages’ by ‘destroying them,’ whether the village is a hamlet in the Mekong Delta or the city of Fallujah on the Euphrates. We do not preserve national honor by becoming an international pariah. My heart aches when I think of the price the Clausen family and millions of other families paid in foreign wars only to lead to policies of invasion, occupation, torture, kidnappings, detentions without legal process, and claims of almost boundless executive authority by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Gonzales. Did we learn nothing from Vietnam? Is there no limit to the amount of happy horseshit gullible Americans will willingly eat?
When I arrived in Vietnam on July 12, 1965, the conflict there was not yet a full-fledged American war. The mission of American combat forces was limited and essentially defensive. It all changed two weeks later when President Johnson made the decision to grant General Westmoreland’s request for a massive infusion of American forces in 1965 and more in 1966. He granted the request for the very reasons that should have caused him to deny it - because he knew that the South Vietnamese government was incapable of effectively governing the country and the South Vietnamese military was incapable of defending it. That decision on that date for those reasons turned the war into an American war. The whole world knew of the fecklessness and corruption of the Vietnamese government in Saigon and of the powerlessness of the South Vietnamese military and of the determination of the VC/NVA forces and we Marines knew it too. In Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect, he acknowledges the mistake of not pulling out of Vietnam early. He wrote:
By [the early or mid 1960s] it should have become apparent that the two condition underlying President Kennedy’s decision to send military advisors to South Vietnam were not being met and, indeed, could not be met: political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved; and the South Vietnamese, even with our training assistance and logistical support, were incapable of defending themselves.
Given these facts – and they are facts – I believe we could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam either in late 1963 amid the turmoil following Điem’s assassination or in late 1964 or early 1965 in the face of increasing political and military weakness in South Vietnam. And, as the table opposite suggests, there were at least three other occasions when withdrawal could have been justified.
Date of Withdrawal US Forces US Killed Basis for Withdrawal
Nov. 1963 16,300 advisors 78 Collapse of Điem regime and political instability
Late 1964 or Early 1965 23,300 advisors 225 Clear indications of SVN’s inability to defend itself, even with US training and logistical support
July 1965 81,400 troops 509 Further evidence of the above
December 1965 184,300 troops 1,594 Evidence the US military tactics and training were inappropriate for guerrilla war being waged.
December, 1967 485,600 troops 15,979 CIA reports indicating bombing in the North would not force North Vietnam to desist is the face of our inability to turn back enemy forces in South Vietnam.
January 1973 543,400 troops (April 1969) 58,191 Signing of Paris Accords, marking the end of US military involvement
All of my college roommates, except Joe Daley, would end up serving in Vietnam. Tom Devitt served as Executive Officer, one step below the commanding officer, of a Marine artillery battery. The man he replaced had been ‘fragged’, killed by his own men with a fragmentation grenade thrown into his tent. Gerry Nugent served as a Marine infantry officer. Ed Felsenthal and Bill Hendricks served aboard ships on the South China Sea, pulling into the port of Da Nang frequently. None of us was in contact with any of the others during our time ‘in country.’ One of our friends from the NROTC unit at Marquette, Jay Tremblay, was shot down and lost piloting his aircraft over North Vietnam. Another good friend, John Boyan, flew H34 helicopters for 13 months in Marine operations. Pat Townsend, Dick Coffman, Brian Fagin, all good friends from Marquette, all served as Marines in Vietnam and made it home in one piece.
Daniel Ellsberg more than any other single human being revealed the lies and hypocrisy behind the Vietnam War. To many, especially Republicans, he was a traitor. To me, he will always be a hero. RIP
My workplace
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