3/17/24

 Sunday, March 17, 2024

In bed at 9 and on the LZB by 10:30 and on the BL at 11:13, shoulder pain. 39°, high of 37°.  A windy day ahead.  The wind is 15 mph WNW, 8-17/27.  The wind chill is 23°,  Sunrise at 6:59. sunset at 7:01, 12+2.  

Pain, etc.  The bedtime pain was not severe but it was enough to keep me from sleeping.  We lost internet service around 8 p.m. last night, but it had been restored when I moved to the BL and turned on a biaural sound site on YouTube to help me sleep.  I dozed off till some unknown time then moved to the bedroom for a PS, back in bed, and up again at 2:30 with shoulder pain.  I let Lilly out and filled her water bowl, then back to the TV room awake.  I had a piece of Irish soda bread and then I applied Diclofenac to the shoulder around 3:15.  I read the papers and at some point dozed off to awaken at 6:11

I'm grateful to the helpers at the Zablocki VA Medical Center.

We have our national cemeteries; the Vietnamese have theirs.

Do wars ever end?  There was a feature article in yesterday's NYTimes titled "An American Who Has Helped Clear 815,000 Bombs From Vietnam: Chuck Searcy has spent decades of his life redressing a deadly legacy of America’s war in Vietnam: unexploded ordnance."  Before I copy some excerpts, I note that the unexploded ordnance in Vietnam is only part of the legacy left by our invasion and occupation, there is also the teratogenic damage from Agent Orange and other chemicals used in the war and of course, the generation-spanning effects of PTSD among the combatants and the civilian population.

[Chuck Searcy] As a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, he had had access to a full range of raw information, from the enemy’s body counts to exaggerated claims of American progress.  “We got to see almost everything,” he said in a recent interview. “And I saw that our friends back home were being given information that was not just misleading but deliberate lies.”

By the time his one-year tour of duty ended, Mr. Searcy found himself doubting not only the war but his own character.  “I’ve really sometimes wondered if my timidity or refusal to step up and say this was wrong, whether this was a moral failure on my part,” he said.  . . . 

That sense of duty has propelled him to commit his life to redressing one of the most deadly legacies of the war: the millions of unexploded bombs and land mines that continue to kill and injure people every year. . . . .  The phrase he particularly embraces is a Marine Corps directive that involves clearing away spent metal shell casings on a firing range: Policing up your brass.  Mr. Searcy is, both figuratively and literally, policing up the deadly ordnance that the Americans left behind throughout Vietnam. . . .

Altogether, Mr. Searcy said, almost eight million tons of ordnance was dropped on Vietnam from 1965 to 1975. Bombs that failed to detonate became de facto land mines, which the Vietnamese government estimates have caused 100,000 deaths and injuries since the war’s end. 

In Project Renew’s two decades of operation, 815,000 bombs of all types have been detonated or taken out of action, Mr. Searcy said: aerial-dropped bombs, cluster bombs, artillery shells, booby traps, grenades and mortar rounds.  “Imagine that! 815,000, “ he said, “My god!” 

In despair for America: the truth hurts.  Notes from a speech by Chris Hedges "The Politics of Cultural Despair", 3 years ago.  (1) We squander our resources in military adventurism: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.  Millions of lives were destroyed or wrecked.  (2)  There are 8.1 billion Muslims in the world, 24% of the world's population.  We have turned almost all of them into our enemies. (3)   We pile up massive deficits, trillions of dollars, while we neglect our basic infrastructure to spend more on our military than all the other major powers combined. (4) We are the world's largest producer of arms and munitions.  (5)  The virtues we ca\laim to have the right to impose on others [democracy, human rights, the free market, the rule of law, and personal freedoms) are mocked at home where grotesque levels of social and economic inequality and austerity programs impoverish much of the public, destroy democratic institutions, including Congress, the courts, and the press, and create militarized forces of internal occupation that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public, run the largest prison systems in the world, and gun down unarmed citizens in the streets with impunity.

Watching, listening to, or reading Chris Hedges is experiencing a present-day Jeremiah or Cassandra.  You feel like telling someone, anyone, to 'take me out behind the barn and shoot me.'  He is incredibly dismal, hard to take in large doses.