True as this may seem, may even be, we gain nothing at this late date by singling them out for what they were. I am not in favor of extending the enmity for even one second more, and then there's also the aspects associated with casting pearls before swine.
Any such effort would likely be doomed to fail just as much as it has failed continuously over the past half century. The anti's are instilled to the core with the adamant imperative to wear their disdain on their sleeves, to forge on blind and deaf to any differing view. They are lost to us, and more sadly, to themselves as well. They could be better, and the rest of us all for it. but Gibraltar will crumble first.
Repeating failed methods intended to heal in a hope of altering outcomes is the textbook definition of insanity, and insanity is the very thing we already have far to much of.
I reject any intimations of heroism. We had a commitment and we kept it. We got no fanfare and we expected none. Any such fanfare would have been embarrassing for me/most of us. We weren't in it for the adulation. It was a grueling job that needed doing, and it had become our lot to do so, just as it had going on back to before Valley Forge.
Far more important was reentering the mainstream and getting on with the nuts and bolts of a normal life. For most of us, those expectations were not fulfilled. What our Uncles and Dads came home to was diametrically opposed to what we got. First we were bewildered, then we were angry, then we were unjustifiably ashamed, then we went to cover and maintained a low profile, and we had to deceive folks, including ourselves, into projecting that "I'm OK, You're OK" sham.
We weren't OK. OK was not in our profile, not ever, would net ever be.
But we found a kind of peace.
For me, it was a wonderful Wife, a generational family, and a crack at a humble job that managed the progression to a professional career.
For others it was not so good, and got bad enough to become unendurable. We lost so many; good people with wounds outside and inside that become insurmountable.
Is there blame? Of course there's blame; but blame achieves no redress, no care, no comfort. Might as well blame the Moon for all the good blame achieves.
Is there care, comfort, redress? Redress is a myth, might as well hold your breath forever seeking redress. Is there care, comfort? Yes, and it can be a steep uphill strain to bring it to fruition. I'm OK, you're OK becomes an indomitable wall separating the need from the fruition. It requires a patience and a perseverance that most well meaning helpers can't fully manage.
But still, it does occur, and such successes have extended the process of relief to additional new generations of Veterans too much like ourselves; also despised, also treated with resentment, with harsh animosity. We are the nation for whom a military career has become an exercise in voluntary self imprisonment within a system that has little support from the beneficiaries of their sacrifices, and open antagonism from far too many.
The reflex is to lash back, but there is no appropriate recipient anywhere within view, out there in the open. The prime irritant lives deeply insulated behind layers of convenient fools, well seasoned with vicious psychotic sociopaths. They are encouraged and empowered by cynical manipulators, replenished with fresh cadres who are stoked and guided by the supposed guardians of our youth and their educations, funded by cynical manipulators bent on anarchy and their own warped sense of domination and absolute power.
The Veterans are the new breed of miners canary. How we treat our Veterans is a litmus for the health of our society.
It's not doing so well; not at all.
There are many among us who would improve on that. But the traditional means are undermined, corrupted, co-opted by the very miscreants one might wish to vanquish. Our very decency is mocked and flaunted with aberrant and insulting behavior. That decency becomes the rack upon which right and wrong, honor and benevolence are twisted and destroyed from within. Decency is an implement, a goal, and our most damning impediment; for if we might uphold it, it blocks us from implementing what means would be necessary and effective,. It is a the petard upon which our honest indignation is daily being hoisted.
We need to set the good aside, that it may once again someday brought back out to the daylight that is currently clouded with hatred, greed, and a hunger for absolute and undeserved power.
This discussion started out being about a documentary, an entertainment, a proclamation about the whens, the wheres, hows, the whys surrounding the Vietnam war. I think, however, that what it has really achieved is to highlight how that war undermined a great nation, destroyed its traditional values, and has brought us to the very brink of that nation's redefinition.
If we do not take hold of that redefinition, others will, and they neither share, nor respect, our values.
We did not lose the Vietnam war, we surrendered. What we soldiers achieved was discarded and abandoned in a fit of political expedience, in a mire of self revulsion, in a subtle and deceitful corruption of decent values, with a deliberate and cynical intention to substitute dominance for freedoms.
We were winning when I left.
But winning was never the intention, and when it looked like it might happen anyway, it was manacled and scourged so thoroughly that nothing associated with military and victory could ever be respectable again. For some, for many, for far too many, that was a good thing.
But not for me.
Greg
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