Thursday, July 06, 2006

Memorial Day

May, 2002
This generally hallowed day generates within me feelings of sarcasm more than anything else. Perhaps that is due to memories of my own welcome back from two of my three tours in Vietnam. I know that a lot of these men who are honored today, the majority of which were probably not yet into the estate of manhood, had no choice in where they were and what they were doing when their life suddnly ended violently. It is often stated, on Memorial Day, that we Americans, and many others in the world, owe a great debt to these men, and that is not to be denied. The fact that his holiday keeps their memory alive is only to be contrasted with the reality of the observances which is cocerned only with the spending of money. Those who were killed ultimately had no choice, but we know now that their leaders had many choices that they did not use or were not aware of. We know that Pearl Harbor was tipped off in more than one way, only no one could “connect-those-dots” either. Korea was one of those “slippery slopes” we hear about from timt to time. We slid all the way back down the North Korean part of the place. Why did we go in? Why did we go north of the 32nd parallel? What else could have been done. Why Vietnam? Well, that answer is easy. It concerns the Falling Domino Theory. If Vietnam should fall to Ho-Chi-Mihn, then within a year all of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Taiway and possibly Japan and Hawaii would fall to communism. Secretary of Defence McNamara has written in 1995, that he and President Johnson knew the war was lost in 1966, and that we fought all the rest of it, the big part of it, those last six years, killing those 50,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese to try to “save the presidency,” to save Johnson and Nixon from disgrace. The Gulf War brought home men with “strange illnesses.” They are still dying, and they are told by the United States government that it has nothing to do with their fighting for the United States in the Persian Gulf. They gave for Halliburton, Exxon, and other great giants of American commerce. What other choices were available -before- the Kuwait invasion, or after, for that matter? We know that when the attack on the Twin Towers was being finalized, the American president was spending a month in Texas, to escape the “humdrum” of life in the Capitol. His administration was doubtless at work, but there was no center to events. What else could have been done?
Israel and the Arabs are at low-grade war, Pakistan and India are ready for Glory. And it goes on and on. Maybe we can make some small changes; here’s one: Let’s not ever honor another fallen soldier or lost sailor without convening a war crimes convention to address the fault of those who led their young men into war. Let us make Memorial Day really memorial by declairing that war is a crime against mankind, the universe and God.
It is a travesty that we “honor” young men who were killed by their own countries for the personal enrichment of their leaders. These leaders grow old and get rich; the young men get glory.