I am a product of the 60‘s...a flower child...if you will...most of my childhood and all of my adolescence took place with the Vietnam War as its back drop. The Vietnam War is etched into my psyche...it colored every experience... high school friends who worried about being drafted, heated debates at school, those who were drafted and came home messed up and those who never came home.
Every Sunday our family would pile into the car and drive 30-minutes to my Grandparents beach home in San Clemente. Their home located on the shoreline cliffs was a few minutes walk to the beach. I fondly remember Sunday dinners in San Clemente. The adults had spirited and intellectual discussions revolving around politics, religion, and the war. Mostly I just listened to my father, older brother and grandfather rationally debate the war. We could be ‘rational‘; after all we were in sunny southern California...and Vietnam was far away. My older brother was strongly encouraged to go to college...men in college were not drafted. An impressionable teenager, I watched the evening news and heard the mounting ‘causality’ reports. I picked up my parents copies of ‘Life’ and ‘Time’ Magazine and stared at the horrific images of war. I could not image how humans could be so barbaric to one another. I asked my parents, ‘why’...My father who had served in the Korean War was bitter and told me it was because ‘we need a good war to stimulate the economy’...My paternal grandfather, Harry L. Williams, was a wise and thoughtful man who I adored. He was a philosopher and a minister. He was a voracious reader. His library shelves were packed with books of every type...religious, political, and historical. He must know the answer...I thought. When I asked my Grandfather 'why'...he gave me the standard answer...the baby food that the government was feeding the American people...at the time there was a political theory, called the ‘domino-theory of Communist Expansion’. Basically the argument for war was, if we don’t stop them now ‘over there’ they will come get us here...(sound familiar). My grandfather in all his wisdom gave me THAT answer and for a moment I was disappointed...and then he stopped and stared me straight in the eye and said...but ‘don’t you believe it’. He went on to try and explain things that at the time were way over my head...I think I decided to end the conversation and go surfing...it was just too much for me to take in. However, his words have stayed with me to this day. I do not believe our government to tell us the real reasons we are a nation consumed with war. That was 40 years ago. The scars and wounds of Vietnam remain and I would like to know why can’t we learn from history. I have provided two links to videos that capture some of the feelings and images of that era and some facts about the war. They are beginning to sound eerily familiar....
Richard Rubenstein in his book ‘Reason to Kill’ states that the ‘political decision to go to war should be taken with the utmost caution, because while in a democracy we can fix most of our mistakes by throwing the rascals out or changing policies, we cannot resuscitate the dead or cure those permanently maimed in body or spirit’.
We have now been in Afghanistan for 10 years. The American people seem to have grown numb to the fact that we are a nation at war and that the violence continues...
We have now been in Afghanistan for 10 years. The American people seem to have grown numb to the fact that we are a nation at war and that the violence continues...
If I am being asked to lay my son at the alter of the Military Industrial Complex there better be a dam good reason. So far the government has failed to answer me...and I am taking my Grandfather’s advice, “Don’t you Believe Them’.
