Sunday, March 29, 2026
1971 1st Lt William L Calley Jr was found guilty in My Lai massacre
1973 The last US troops left Vietnam, 9 yrs after the Gu;f of Tonkin Resolution
2020 Anthony Fauci warned America may see between 100,000 - 200,000 deaths from COVID-19
In bed at 9:45, awake at 2:25, up and onto LZB at 2:40 0300 154/71/32 0310 135/68/32 11 206.6. 37/27/55/37
Morning meds at 5 a.m. Ranolazine at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.
I wrote this on this date in 2023:
Withdrawal from Vietnam. 50 years ago today, 'peace with honor', what a sick joke. Nixon, Kissinger, Vietnam, Chile. The democratically elected government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup on September 11, 1973, spurred on and supported by the Nixon-Kissinger CIA. Allende literally blew his brains out with an AK-47 as the Chilean army, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, established a neo-fascist military dictatorship that ruthlessly ruled the country until 1990. When was it I first learned never to believe what the government tells us, always to suspect the worst in what the government doesn't tell us?
My office, 1965-1966
Watashi-wa in 1965-66
I should have added to that note I wrote 3 years ago some comment on Nixon's and Kissinger's roles in what was happening in Indonesia, not so far south of where we were meddling in Vietnam's affairs. After the upheaval of 1965–66, Indonesia was ruled by General Suharto, whose government was strongly anti-communist. Nixon and Kissinger saw Indonesia as a key Cold War ally in Southeast Asia. By 1973, their administration was committed to strengthening Suharto’s regime politically, economically, and militarily. This included restoring and expanding military aid and arms sales, which had been restricted earlier. Portugal began withdrawing from its colony of East Timor in 1974–75, but planning and positioning were already underway earlier. By 1973, Indonesian leaders were already concerned about instability in East Timor and the possibility of a left-leaning government emerging there. U.S. policy under Nixon and Kissinger signaled that: Washington would prioritize Indonesia’s stability over self-determination in Timor, and the U.S. was unlikely to oppose Indonesian intervention stronglWhile no explicit 1973 “order” existed, the policy climate they created made later actions (like the 1975 invasion) more likely. During this period, the U.S. resumed and expanded weapons transfers to Indonesia includiing aircraft, small arms, and logistical support later used in operations in East Timor. Kissinger, in particular, was influential in downplaying concerns about human rights abuses. After Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, the occupation that followed (1975–1999) involved widespread and well-documented human rights abuses against the Timorese population. These were carried out primarily by the Indonesian military under the regime of Suharto. The Indonesian occupation of East Timor involved systematic and widespread human rights abuses, including: mass killings, starvation policies, forced displacement, and torture and sexual violence.
These actions are widely regarded by scholars and human rights organizations as constituting crimes against humanity, and in some interpretations, genocide, and they were "green-lighted" by Nixon and Kissinger, i.e., the American government, our "peace with honor" guys
Three days ago, Lydia Polgreen wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled "It's Not Trump. It's America," an essay well worth reading, but the gist of it was found in this paragraph:
Is Trump a freak of history or its fulfillment, an aberration or a culmination? The answer, surely, is both. But in the course of his presidency, Trump has revealed a much older malady: America’s unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking, indifferent to what others might want and supremely confident that its plan is the right one. Beyond Trump, it’s this disfiguring mentality we Americans must face.
Vietnam proves her point, as does Chili, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and where else??? We never learn. And we wonder why so much of the world distrusts us, or hates us.
Symptoms: LOW HEART RATE NOTIFICATION from my Apple Watch at 9:25 a.m. "Your heart rate fell below 40 beats per minutes for 10 minutes. Tiredness, no energy.
A Man-Made Disaster, by Joshua Hammer is an excellent review of to recent publications, "Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb," by James M. Scott, and "The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War," by Malcolm Gladwell. It reminds those of us who need reminding, which is almost all of us Americans and other Westerners, that the purposeful killing of civilians as a strategy of warfare, was not started by radical Muslim Arabs but by Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchhill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the ironically-called "Good War," i.e., the Second World War. The review is lengthy and well worth reading: 12 columns over three large pages of the New York Review of Books, April9, 2026 issue. Some excerpts:
The prospect of widespread firebombing obsessed military planners. In 1944 US Air Force officers even consulted Canadian and British insurance adjusters who had worked in Tokyo at the time of the earthquake, including one who had assisted with the redesign of the city. Incendiary bombs, they calculated, “would destroy 70 per cent of the houses in the six major cities and would result in the estimated death of 560,000 persons.” Apocalyptic destruction of city after city, they believed, would break the will of the Japanese to continue the war.
US bombers ended up dropping hundreds of tons of incendiaries on Japanese cities between March and July 1945, killing 333,000 people and injuring 473,000. Today, however, the firebombings remain a footnote to the atomic blasts that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. A full moral reckoning of the horror they inflicted has never taken place.
Scott has, at one level, written a classic war story: a mix of colorful and clashing personalities, tense dogfights, and epic human suffering. But he is aiming at something deeper here: a meticulous examination of how and why the old rules of war were cast aside and men came to embrace a new level of barbarity.
. . . . .
At 5:36 PM on March 9, 1945, weeks after British bombers incinerated the German city of Dresden, the first of a squadron of 325 B-29 bombers, representing 84 percent of LeMay’s entire arsenal, took off from Saipan, bound for Tokyo. The aircraft had been stripped of their conventional armaments so they could carry more clusters of small incendiary munitions. Scott writes:
An aerial freight train of terror rumbled through the capital’s skies. Nearly ten tons of bombs fell on average each minute of the attack. The clusters blew open a couple of thousand feet above the ground, scattering six-pound canisters of napalm. Those hexagonal cylinders guided by canvas streamers tore through the tile roofs of homes and shops, factories and businesses, spraying flaming jellied gasoline on walls, tatami mats, and mattresses
Once LeMay got started, his pace accelerated. Over the next weeks, night after night, bombing raids reduced fifty-eight Japanese cities, including Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Kawasaki, and Kobe, to ruins and caused millions of casualties. Only the dropping of the atomic bombs in August ended LeMay’s incendiary spree.
. . . .
In the late 1930s the US National Defense Research Committee enlisted some of the country’s preeminent chemists, including Louis Fieser of Harvard and Hoyt Hottel of MIT, to develop conventional weapons as a counterpart to its Manhattan Project. Fieser traveled to Delaware to investigate a DuPont hydrocarbon known as divinylacetylene, which made paint burst into flames. That led to experiments with incendiary gels and the development of a sticky goo made of gasoline and aluminum palmitate that clung to bodies and kept burning—napalm. A delivery system was invented by an organic chemist, E.B. Hershberg.
. . . . .
Was the firebombing justified? . . . Though smaller in scale than the firebombings of World War II, Russia’s actions [in Ukraine] raise the question of what defines a war crime and how perpetrators should be held to account. Neither Gladwell nor Scott addresses this head on, but according to the definitions established by international accords, the firebombings of Japan and Germany certainly fit the definition of war crimes.
. . . . .
(LeMay later became notorious for remarking in a 1968 memoir that the US should bomb North Vietnam “back to the stone age” and for being George Wallace’s running mate during his presidential campaign that year.)
. . . . .
. . . US and Japanese historians who agree that the relentless incendiary attacks followed by the atomic bombs did force Japan’s surrender in August 1945, thus avoiding an even more prolonged conflict.
I've written before in this journal/blog about my moral doubts about the bombing of Hiroshima and especially of Nagasaki. I've written too about the firebombing employed by the British and American air forces in WW II. I wish I could find those reflections in the couple of thousand pages of the journal, but alas, I can't do a word search and don't have an index of the more than 1,100 days on which I have written entries. I note, however, that after the horrendous slaughter of Iwo Jima, the 4th Marine Division, of which my father a member, was slated to participate in the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands, the need for which was obviated by the firebombings of Japanese cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I add, however, that there is some doubt in my mind as to whether he personally was slated for the homeland invasion, but his condition after Iwo Jima, about which I wrote extensively in my memoir, was sufficiently troubled that the Marines resisted discharging him in November of 1945 when he finally came home, almost three months after the conclusion of the Pacific war.
