Wednesday, August 21, 2024
1968 Democratic Convention opened in Chicago, went on to nominate Hubert Humphrey
2014 Israeli airstrike in Rafah killed Mohammed Abu Shammala, Raed al Atar and Mohammed Barhoum - 3 of Hamas's top commanders
In bed at 9:20 p.m., after falling asleep reading Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy at about 8:30(?), awake at 2:20, and up and about at 2:55 a.m Lilly is sound asleep next to her mattress on the TV room floor, sleeping so soundly I kept looking at her belly to see if she had died overnight, till I saw her shoulder twitch and realized she is still with us. I dozed off at some point and half-slept till 6:30 when I let Lilly out.
Prednisone, day 101, 10 mg., day 8/28. I took the 10 mg. at 6:30 a.m. with some banana bread. I took the morning meds plus 650 mg. Tylenol at 7:10.
Volvo annual servicing at Fields Volvo in Waukesha. New battery, new front outer tie rods, wheels alignment, replace rear brakes, replace license plate light bulb. $3,148.49. Arrggh!
On the way back from Waukesha in my loaner car, I got to admiring the highway infrastructure, especially the I-94 I-45 interchange with its impressive three-dimensional, intersecting bridges and ramps. Then I got to thinking of how much that infrastructure, indeed all infrastructure, means to us and how fortunate we are that we don't worry about it all being blown to smithereens by high explosives, unlike, for example, our fellow humans in Gaza and in Ukraine. We call ourselves homo sapiens and homo faber, man the wise and man the maker, but as a species, we could more accurately be called homo vastator or homo extinctor, man the destroyer or annihilator. I have in mind the words I read last night in Max Hastings' Vietnam book:
On June 16 [1965], McNamara announced reinforcements that would raise the troop level to seventy thousand [including me.] Two days later, giant USAF B-52s began to attack alleged communist troop concentrations in South Vietnam. In the eight years that followed, the bombers carried out 126,615 so-called Arc Light sorties, dropping four million tons of bombs. Aircrew considered them milk runs. Pilot Doug Cooper shrugged. "The job had all the excitement of being a long-haul truck driver without being able to stop for coffee." A navigator said he felt that he and his crew just bombed an endless succession of map coordinates "that seemed to do nothing except put holes in the jungle floort." From mid-1968 onward, ordnance was released not on the judgment of bombadiers but instead that of Skyspot radar operators on the ground. The B-52s operating over South Vietnam and later Cambodia and Laos faced no threat from enemy action, merely a slight risk of accidents. Most of these elderly monsters suffered from corrosion: one had its bombs fall off the wing racks onto the runway during takeoff, because of wiring corroded by rain and sea salt. In eight years, just twelve Arc Light planes were lost to such mishaps. The B-52s sufferd very little to destroy very much.
These words reminded me of course of myself and my fellow Marines in the TACC in Danang, how casual we were as we went about our usual business of keeping track of all the thousands of sorties we marked up on our status board, day and night, day in and day out, outbound and inbound, each carrying death and destruction somewhere: F-4 Phantoms, F-8 Crusaders, A-4 Skyhawks, A-6 Intruders, 250 pound, 500 pound, 2,000-pound bombs, 20 mm. cannons, napalm, white phosphorus, Agent Orange. All of us were cogs in the huge machine delivering Death and Destruction to the millions of Southeast Asian humans who had no more control over the decisions of their governments than we had over the decisions of our government, yet there we were, killing one another on orders from above. They did what Uncle Ho and General Giap required of them; we did what LBJ, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and General Westmoreland required of us. I don't recall myself or any of my fellow Marines giving a thought to the human beings our aircraft were killing, dismembering, maiming, burning, or poisoning. It was all in a day's work, as it was for the B-52 bomber crews dropping 4,000,000 tons of bombs over 8 years. I wrote in my memoir:
Most of the work was routine and unexciting: keeping track of aircraft, listening to the radios. . . .
When a military person works in a technical support role such as I had in Vietnam, he or she doesn’t experience directly the lethality of the enterprise he or she is supporting, at least not on a regular basis. We didn’t see the dead people. We didn’t hear screaming or crying. Life can easily become a matter of routine, of regularly rotating watches, of greasy Spam sandwiches every third night, and Black Label and Blackjack on the other nights. Being such a small cog on such a large and lethal killing machine, it becomes easy to avoid thinking in terms of any personal responsibility for the suffering and loss that are the inevitable consequences if not the very purposes of modern warfare. Front line troops don’t share this immunity.
We drank a lot of liquor, smoked a lot of cigarettes and did a lot of gambling in Danang. The drinking and gambling occurred at the officers’ club at night. . . We knew we were involved in a lethal enterprise, some of us directly, others of us indirectly. We knew that Americans and Vietnamese were dying and being injured every day. But we didn’t normally see the results of our efforts. Quiet drunkenness was commonplace . . .
Many thoughts bounce around in my head as I write these words and remember those 234 days in Vietnam and 4 years in the Marines. I', not sure what to make of any of them, but they don't make me proud of myself or of my country and its government.
Our good neighbor John McGregor has been diagnosed with leukemia. Very sad news. He's a great neighbor and a very good man.
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