7/8/23

 Saturday, July 8, 2023

In bed at 10:15, up at 6:15, let Lilly out into a light rain.  62℉, high of 74℉, AQI=36-Good, wind N at 6 mph, 1 to 7 today, gusts up to 13.  The sun rose at 5:20 and will set at 8:33, 15+`3.   

What am I, nuts?  A common expression from my youth - what are you, nuts?  I wonder whether it applies to me and the guilt, anger, embarrassment, and shame  I feel for my participation in the American invasion of Vietnam.  It was a long time ago, and I didn't know any better, just doing my duty and all that, a flyspeck in the overall picture, what with the big decisions being made in Washington and more than 8,700,000 Americans having served in Vietnam.  Get over it, snap out of it!  But I do feel guilt, especially about how stupid I was eating up all the bullshit that was fed us out of Washington and Saigon.  I'm sure it's amplified by Andy having married into a large, wonderful Vietnamese family who left their country after the communist victory but I experienced embarrassment and shame and guilt over the war long before Andy had met Anh and before I got to know the members of her large and lovely family.  I guess those feelings were what I was experiencing in the years after I was back in the States and the war was still going on in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos though my emotions were fairly subdued in those years, defensively.  

In any event, yesterday I serendipitously came across an article by Jane Yett Kiely from the New York Review  of Books, in the December 14, 1972 issue called "If the Fighting Had Taken Place Here."  It included the following:

"The ratio of the South Vietnamese population to the US population is 1:11.3. Thus for every South Vietnamese killed or wounded or made a refugee, 11.3 Americans are projected into the corresponding categories, in order to reflect accurately the impact of the war on a smaller population. We have shown this on the map by referring to the population of distinct groups of American states. [The map she refered to is not reproduced in the archived article, just the text.]

The land ratio is 1:55. That is, for every acre of land defoliated in South Vietnam, 55 acres are projected onto the United States map.

Here are the statistics:

The total number of South Vietnamese killed during the war is conservatively estimated at 569,000 (US equivalent, 6.4 million); the total number wounded, 1,326,000 (US equivalent, 15 million). Forty thousand civilians were executed without trial under the Phoenix program (US equivalent, 452,000). Other Saigon executions are not included. At least eight million South Vietnamese have been made refugees (US equivalent, 90.4 million). These are all South Vietnamese government figures and may be low.

The Stanford Biology Group reports that over 5 million acres—12 percent—of South Vietnam have been sprayed with defoliating chemicals (US equivalent, 275 million acres).

A few qualifications should be added. The map does not represent a realistic picture of the war. In Vietnam itself the forms of destruction would overlap and many additional statistics would have to be added—the children orphaned, cities destroyed, diseases spread, soldiers captured and tortured, among other effects.

In addition, it must be remembered that the data do not include the war’s effect on the other peoples of Indochina, nor does it reflect the losses of the US and other countries involved in the war."

. . . . . . . 

The enormity of the crime, the sin, the suffering we inflicted on the people of Vietnam can't be overstated.  The comparative statistics in the NYRB article help, if only superficially.  What is painful to remember is how blasé we were, how indifferent, at least where and when I served.  While our fellow Marines were flying missions day and night that dropped high explosives, napalm, white phosphorous, cluster bombs, Agent Orange, and other toxins. we were keeping track of our departures dates, counting the days till we could return to the States, hoping for PCS orders to Hawaii or California, drinking premium booze at dirt-cheap prices at the Officers Club, and generally oblivious of our complicity in a massive war crime.  Insouciance, indifference, callousness, hard-heartedness, White superiority, racism, American exceptionalism.  All these thoughts were rekindled by the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 2/24/22.  "“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.

A photo I took in 1965, two little boys on the

"Dogpatch" side of the barbed wire we

surrounded ourselves with

I Remember Mama.  It was 50 years ago yesterday that an aneurysm in my wonderful mother's brain gave way while she was working in her garden behind their row house a few doors away from Kitty's and Jim's.  Kitty called me and I was on my way to the hospital in Blue Island.  A devastating event, for Mom and for the rest of us.  Neither Kitty, nor my Dad, nor I ever got over her death 8 days later.    I Remember Mama was a television series that ran from 1949 to 1957.  We watched every episode of it from the time we got our first television.  I can't remember when that was, but before that, we could and did watch tv with the Semrau family, our next-door neighbors.  Kitty and I didn't realize it at the time, but it is clear to me now that Carl and Ann Semrau were my family's best friends in the years after WW II when my Dad and Mom were both suffering from PTSD, he from combat on Iwo Jima, she from sexual assault and notoriety.  It was Carl and Ann who enabled us to move out of the roach-infested, one-bedroom, basement apartment to their second-floor apartment where my Mom and Dad, Kitty, and I all had a separate bedroom plus a porch from which we could look down on the world instead of looking up.  'Movin' on up, to the East Side, to a de-luxe apartment in the sky - eye - eye.'

The Guardian's Slavery Project.  This series moved me to finally donate $5 per month to the Guardian.  I don't read it all that often, but often enough and it's important to support good journalism from the Left. in our ear of growing conservatism and worse.  The NYT story that alerted me to the Guardian series reminds me that White Supremacy is not unique to America.  It is a Western European product of the great imperial, colonizing nations: England, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, even Italy.  It is also a pretty natural product of free market, laissez-faire Capitalism, under which labor costs are always sought to be at least minimized or, if possible eliminated, to increase Profit.  

Night terrors, day terrors.  I don't have bad dreams all that often, at least so far as I am conscious, but I do wake up in the middle of one occasionally.  My repeated bad dream, experienced many times over many years, was of knowing there was somebody in the room in the middle of the night.  It was a result of 'Jimmy' Hartman's crime against my mother, Kitty, and me on September 30, 1947.  Last night I had a dream that one dear to me fell down a rugged mountain slope.  It was pretty vivid; it shook me up and woke me up.  I was out of sorts all morning and part of the afternoon, not exactly depressed or anxious, but decidedly unwell.  The feeling wasn't helped by reading the morning papers which, as always, featured a lot of bad news of various sorts but, among the rest, stories of medical challenges of the elderly and of lack of staffing at elderly facilities.  The story reminded me of my (and probably nearly all old folks') day terror, of falling ill with a serious disease that requires institutionalization, loss of home, and loss of autonomy.  I'm approaching the end of my 82nd year of life and about to enter my mid-80s.  There is something terrifying about that, not the fear of inevitable death, but the fear of sudden or gradual diminishment, fear of the incapacitating stroke or of any of the several kinds of dementia.  In Vietnam, there was that stupid wood-burned sign some 'patriot' hung in our hootch, 'Better dead than Red,' but now both Geri and I can visualize physical and mental conditions where we believe 'better dead than [that.]"  What if anything should we be doing about it?  Not an easy question to grapple with.  Maybe I shouldn't have been so quick to bow out of the session with the nice Ph.D. candidate from Marquette a few months ago.