Friday, March 13, 2026
1954, Viet Minh General Giáp opened the assault on French forces at Dien Bien Phu
2005 Terry Ratzmann shot and killed seven members of the Living Church of God, including the minister, at Sheraton Inn in Brookfield, Wisconsin, before killing himself
2012 Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it would no longer publish printed versions of its encyclopaedia
2025 The UN Human Rights Council accused Israel of committing genocidal acts and other war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, including committing gender-based violence and sexual assault against prisoners and the systematic destruction of healthcare systems in the region. Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the reports and accusations, calling them biased and "antisemitic"
2025 During a meeting at the White House with Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte, President Donald Trump refuses to rule out the U.S. annexation of Greenland when questioned.
2025 The Trump administration reportedly ordered the U.S. military to plan options to expand the presence of American troops in Panama and potentially try to reclaim the Panama Canal.
In bed at 9:30, up at 7. 36/15/40/30 Severe weather warning: High winds. 25-35, gusts to 60 mph. Winter Storm Watch, heavy snow & blowing snow, Saturday and Sunday, blizzard conditions. 130/78/57 114 205.6
Morning meds at 10 a.m. Trulicity at 3:30 p..m.
Some anniversary thoughts (from a year ago):
First, I was 12 years old when the epic battle of Dien Bein Phu started. It ended almost 2 months later with an ignominious defeat of the French forces and the beginning of the end of France's overseas empire. Algeria would follow. It all seemed so foreign, remote, and exotic to me. 11 years later, I would step off a C-130 onto Vietnamese soil at Chu Lai, 23 years old and without any clear understanding of what was going on in Vietnam and why my sorry boots were on its ground. Ten years later, Marine H-34 helicopters were ferrying desperate, frantic, fleeing Vietnamese from rooftops in Saigon to American ships offshore. Our Dien Bien Phu took not two months but about 10 years, in the course of which millions of lives were lost, badly impaired, or otherwise badly affected. Shame on us; shame of the U.S.
Second, Encyclopaedia Britannica's decision 13 years ago to stop publishing its print edition makes me wonder about the future of printed books, indeed of print media generally. The profound impact of social media on our lives in just the last 25 years (Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter) makes me wonder whether modern homo sapiens is undergoing a rapid evolutionary adjustment because of which even Wikipedia will become passe. What will human communication be like in the next 25 years? What will learning be like? The world and Western Culture, or what remains of either, will be unrecognizable. Sarah and Andy will be about at the age I am now, perhaps wondering the kinds of things that I wonder now. Will the world have experienced and survived one or more nuclear wars by then? What will be the effects of climate change? Will it be a 1984 world? A Brave New World? A world run by 1s and 0s, algorithms, and AI? Is there more reason to be hopeful of the coming world or despairing?
Nostalgically, the Britannica anniversary makes me remember the hours I spent lying on the floor at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue in Chicago, reading our family encyclopedia, the multi-volume Grolier's The Book of Knowledge. My Dad, with his PTSD, always demanded of my sister and me "a little peace and quiet." I sought quiet refuge in the thousands of essays in The Book of Knowledge, which also introduced me to the wide world outside our tiny, roachy, 3 rooms in the basement at 7303 S. Emerald Avenue.
Happy Horseshit, Trump-style. From last night's late night talk shows:
“The Trump administration Republicans say the Iran war is both a short excursion and a longer war, and it’s pretty much complete and it’s also just beginning and high oil prices are a sacrifice we have to make, but also oil prices are coming down. And also high oil prices are actually a good thing, and we already won but we might have to stay for four days or five weeks, or six months, jump in the Strait of Hormuz for oil tankers because if it stays closed, oil prices that are coming down will go up and we’ll lose the war we’ve already won. Sure makes sense to me.” — SETH MEYERS
“The Trump administration has been clear from the beginning that the goal of the war is stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — or it's about regime change, or it’s about freedom for the Iranian people, or it’s about destroying their ballistic missile factories, or it’s because Iran posed an imminent threat, or it’s because Israel made us do it, or it’s because this whole time Lindsey Graham has been a trickster god sent here to sow chaos by convincing Trump to go to war.” — SETH MEYERS
Here's what I wrote of the "Happy Horseshit" in 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, the government documents 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.
Nice answer. Yeah, we’re killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians, but so are the VC and NVA, so it’s all OK. We’re fighting on behalf of capitalism and freedom in the form of a puppet government in Saigon. The other guys are Commies. What more need be said?
It is a sad and hard 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’ stinking of Spam. 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 professional 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 an organized 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 have paid in foreign wars only to lead to the nation’s 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 in July, 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 after my arrival 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 conditions 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 indication 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 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.
On February 28, 1966, I hitched a ride to the Air Force side of the airbase with orders to Marine Air Control Squadron-6 at Camp Schwab on the northern end of Okinawa. Those of us at the TAC Center were more than ready to return to Japan or Okinawa and there were Marines in those locations who were eager to get to Vietnam, to get their combat zone experience and campaign ribbons. I was happy to be getting out. Instead of a C-130 Hercules, I was on a sleek, silver Air Force troop mover, a KC-135, the Air Force version of a Boeing 707 but with no first class or business class compartments and no windows. After a long wait in a waiting area, we boarded and waited to take off. I thought about what a nice rocket or mortar target the plane made – big, shiny, and stationary. It wasn’t moving. After a long wait, we were told a fire warning light was on and had to be checked out. We were kept on the aircraft for a long time – sweating and thirsty and thinking still of what a fine target the aircraft made – while the technicians tried to figure out why the light remained on. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be a hell of a note to ‘buy the farm’ sitting in an Air Force plane on the Air Force runway waiting to get out of DaNang?” I remembered wondering whether I was going to ‘buy the farm’ when I had landed 8 months previously at Chu Lai. Eventually, we were taken off the aircraft until the problem was identified and fixed. We piled back into the aircraft, tired, pissed off and wanting to get the hell out of Vietnam. We flew to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa and I got transportation of some sort to Camp Schwab, my next duty station.
I left Vietnam wondering “what was that all about?” “What’s going to come of all this?” I would have preferred to be going to Japan rather than Okinawa, but I was happy just to be getting out of the Alice in Wonderland, Catch-22 world of Vietnam. I was 24 years, 6 months and 4 days old when I departed Vietnam; my father had been 24 years, 6 months, and 8 days old when he departed Iwo Jima. I aged more than 8 months during my 8 months in Vietnam, but not nearly as much as my father aged during his one month on Iwo Jima. Semper Fi.
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