Wednesday, April 29, 2026
1970 US and South Vietnamese forces launched an incursion into Cambodia
1975 US began to evacuate its citizens from Saigon in Operation Frequent Wind in response to advancing North Vietnamese forces, bringing an end to the Vietnam War
1992 Jury acquitted Los Angeles Police Department officers on charges of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King; the decision sparked massive riots in the city
2022 World's longest glass-bottomed bridge, the Bach Long (White Dragon), 632m long, opened in Moc Chau Island mountain park and resort, Vietnam
In bed at7, not due to sleepiness, but attempting to lessen the right-side back pain that had plagued me all day, got up at 6 a.m. 0610 132/74/54 120 207.2; 62/53/62/49/
Morning meds at 11 a.m., half-dose of Bisoprolol at a6:40 .m.
Heart of Darkness. I've read Parts I and II of the novel, and started the concluding Part III, about to meet Mr. Kurtz. . .
I finished the book mid-afternoon. I think it's a novelistic expression of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous lines from The Gulag Archipelago:
Marlowe, the narrator, is the hero/protagonist of the novel, but the central character is the enigmatic Kurtz, who appears in only a relatively few pages of the entire book. Kurtz is the mystery man. He is described as brilliant, poetic, good-natured, and altogether admirable early in the tale, but turns out to be a greedy, self-centered despot by the end of the book, the character who looks back on his life, shortly before his death, and utters the famous words: "The horror. The horror." Actually, it appears that he is not only reflecting on his own life, with its cataclysmic fall from grace, but also on European colonialism, and exploitation, of the rest of the world, using the Belgian Congo as an exemplar. Marlowe is a bit harder to characterize. He is nowhere near the tyrannical murderer that Kurtz became from his unconstrained life in the jungle, but it's clear he recognizes the Solzhenitsyn duality in himself and presumably all human beings. He feels a strange loyalty to Kurtz I suppose only because he recognizes his duality, the On the Waterfront Terry Malloy quality: “You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender, I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.” Of courser, Kurtz wasn't 'a bum,' but rather a king, a ruler of the middle of the jungle where he lived. The plot of the novel ends with Marlowe returning to the London, "a river-bound imperial city", a dark place on a dark river, which pretends to be civilized but whose inhabitants, at least the powerful among them, are no more civilized than the "savages" exploited by Kurtz. He returns some letter that Kurtz had entrusted to him before he died to Kurtz's fiancée, and lies to her. He tells her that Kurtz's last words were not "The horror. The horror", but rather the fiancée's name. It's an enigmatic ending to an enigmatic story.“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
In September 1908, Belgium formally annexed the Congo Free State (CFS) from King Leopold II, transitioning it into the Belgian Congo. This significant political shift occurred after years of international and domestic pressure due to widespread reports of atrocities committed under Leopold's rule, which had resulted in the deaths of an estimated ten million Congolese. Initially established as a personal fiefdom by Leopold, the CFS had been characterized by brutal exploitation and forced labor, particularly in the collection of rubber and ivory. However, following the annexation, there was a noted decrease in the most severe abuses, although colonial rule continued to exert political and economic control over the Congolese people.
I have mentioned that the Marquette campus was quiescent in terms of the [Vietnam] war. There were intermittent calls for the ouster of the ROTC units and occasional antiwar letters to the editor in the Marquette Tribune, but visiting the Marquette campus in the late 1960s and the Madison campus was like being in two different countries, only one of which was involved in an unpopular war. The only ripple on the otherwise calm sea of oblivion that was the Marquette campus came after the May 4, 1970 gunning down of four Kent State students during a campus demonstration against the American invasion of Cambodia.
More than 400 college campuses across the country were roiled by Nixon’s Cambodia incursion and the killing of the Kent State students. At Marquette there were anonymous bomb threats that almost certainly had more to do with disrupting final examinations than with any moral or political outrage over Cambodia or Kent State. Dean Boden asked me, a couple of other men with military backgrounds, and two former Milwaukee cops to stay at the law school from closing time on the night of the threatened bombing until 8 the following morning. We agreed of course and of course there was no bombing. (I still wonder what it was he thought we could do if there was a bomber afoot intent on blowing up the law school.)
It is a curious thing to compare the radicalism and highly activist opposition to the war at Madison and the lack of it at Marquette. The longer the war continued, the more apparent it became to most people that there was no longer any justification – if there ever had been – for the suffering resulting from the continued American intervention. People were being killed and horribly injured by the tens of thousands. The land was salted with unexploded bombs and other ordnance and with thousands of anti-personnel land mines. The soil and water and people were being poisoned daily by the dioxin and other chemical defoliants sprayed by American C130s and other aircraft. The war was a continuing atrocity carried on by the American government in the name of the American people, carried on by an overwhelmingly “Christian” people against mostly Buddhist and animist people. Students on “secular” campuses could see the immorality of the war, why not Catholic students? Why did Catholic students sit on their hands while so many Protestants and Jews and ‘non-believers’ were raising clenched fists against the government?The answer, I think, lay in the Catholic school system and the authoritarian structure of the Church, i.e., American (which was to say, Irish-) Catholic culture. Most of the students at Marquette and Holy Cross and Notre Dame and so on came from Catholic high schools and Catholic elementary schools. They were raised on a philosophy of “do what the good sisters tell you,” “do what the good fathers tell you,” “do what the bishops and cardinals and popes tell you.” Whether directly or indirectly they had been schooled on the poppycock from chapter 13 of Paul’s epistle to the Romans:
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing.
How could the Roman authorities – and imperial warmongers of whatever era - not love this guy? Once the Church got into bed with the emperors after the conversion of Constantine, this passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans really came into its own in terms of keeping Christians in line: obey the Roman authorities and obey your bishops and you’ll stay out of trouble and go to Heaven. From Paul through Constantine through the Catholic grade schools and high schools to the Catholic campuses during the Vietnam War: pray, pay, and obey. The most active war and draft resisters at Madison were not Catholic or even Christian students from Wisconsin’s cities and villages and farms. They were Jews from the East Coast, post-Holocaust Jews who, no surprise, hardly accepted the notion that “those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” Neither did I, but the Catholic culture ingrained in me by the parish priests, the Sisters of Providence, the Irish Christian Brothers and the Jesuits, the culture that prepared me for Marine Corps enculturation, ensured that I would not be one to march against the war. Alas.
Today is also the anniversary of the beginning of the evacuation from Saigon in 1975, Saigon that was soon to become Ho Chi Minh City. I'll never forget that day either, not only the evacuation of our embassy personnel and thousands of Vietnamese afraid for their lives as the NVA/VC army enteree the city, but the profound national shame and embarassment over the war we had foolishly begun 10 years before, only to lose so ignominiously.
The Vietnam War was the nation's longest and costliest conflict of the Cold War. Over 8.7 million Americans served in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam era from 1964 to 197. More than 3.4 million were deployed to Southeast Asia, and approximately 2.7 million of those served in the Republic of Vietnam. More than 58,000 of them were killed. More than 300,000 were wounded. Even more were injured in ways that didn't rate a Purple Heart. Most of us left Vietnam without visible wounds, but Vietnam never left us.
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