FUBAR

The Vietnam War...

It smashes across my confidence, across my empathy, across my sensibility just as it did so many years ago.

The lying...and the absolute inability to understand a war for independence, much like ours, that America never did understand.  We could not understand national independence movements against a colonial power!   After our Declaration of Independence!  After those immortal words we were playing the role of England!!!!

And why we didn’t understand that is what smashes my confidence, crosses my empathy and crosses my sensibility now more than ever.

The belligerent confidence in the force of arms to solve problems is at the core of this.  At the core is are the scores of War Movies I watched, with John Wayne and others, the just war movies, as we destroyed Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.

The Just War, the end to Hitler, the idealism of destroying fascism.  All those were thrown at us, especially in the good guy, bad guy depiction of the war that was spoon fed to us in my last year of high school.

In 1965 many of my classmates enlisted...many also went to college.  But the nation was ready for war, people even talked that it could erase the humiliation of the “Bay of Pigs”.  After all, this was another just war, using the force of arms to solve problems (Communism).

But in my first year of college, while debating Mitt Romney in a dorm room about Vietnam, I began to read about the history of Southeast Asia.  The nagging history of the Viet Minh, of the Japanese occupation, and of the desire of Vietnam to be independent of colonial domination.

I remember Romney, who openly talked about his father running for President in 1968, in response to the inconsistency of Johnson...The only inconsistency in Johnson was that he was lying so much he didn’t make sense.  The troops were writing home.  The war that could not be lost, was being lost.  And the cure was more troops.

Deferments began to be in jeopardy.  The small groups of concern became thousands of anti-war protests.  The reaction of being called a communist for stating what history has confirmed, Vietnam was the wrong war in the wrong place.

But we didn’t know that then.  There was the threat of Communism.  The Soviet Union supported Vietnam along with China.  This was a struggle of communism versus liberal democracy; of the good guys versus the bad guys.

Besides that, the college students protesting the war were only doing it to save their own skins right?  

But questions grew like, where was the threat to our true national security.  Like, why didn’t the South Vietnamese fight harder.  Why were there constant reports of betrayals, or running from the enemy.

And later, after Tet, the reports of American atrocities.  The thing went seriously sidewise!

By that time, the opposition was overwhelming.  The reports of heroin and other drugs running rampant in the G.I.s.  Of the dirty little secret that was so kept from us when we were young, that war ultimately cannot be justified.

And at the same time the Civil Rights Movement was gaining steam.  We began to see American’s original sin; white supremacy, as G.I.s shot the “little brown people” in a rush to build a body count; with the stated objective  to “kill them all”.

And, at that same time, Native American History was discovered, showing that same strategy had been used against them; that atrocity after atrocity was evident in an American genocide.

The officers, in basic training actually called hunting Viet Cong as Indian hunting...of Viet Cong territory as Indian Territory...the same kill them all approach from 1875 was being used in 1967!

And that was the stated objective of the American effort in Vietnam, kill them all.  

And that lost me.  They lost me while I was a soldier.  They lost me forever.  Genocide was what Germany did!

And my peers, many who served in Vietnam were lost for different reasons, but with the same result; a deep unabashed cynicism; a deep distrust of American government, a FUBAR reality.

And today we look up at Trump, the ultimate FUBAR reaction to a reality that you could make no other reason out of, than to say it was FUBAR....

The reckoning!