HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH
One of the people John Barleycorn uses as an advisor is a South Bend professor of history, a much published author, who remembers the turmoil of the Vietnam war period quite well.
Before we continue with Steve’s story, I want to share with you some of the professor’s comments: By the winter of 1968-69, even very conservative and intensely patriotic people, in ever larger numbers, were coming to the conclusion that we either could not or would not, win the Vietnam war. “Would not” meant that we could win if we did what had to be done, but that the voter-conscious politicians and their corporate allies in Washington were going to continue to undercut our troops and refuse them the right to do what they were going to have to do in order to win that war. Some of these officials were concerned that overplaying our hand might bring the Chinese Army into the war, like Korea. There were others who were simply incompetent. The only people profiting were corporations that had lucrative military contracts. And it didn’t matter whether it was “could not” or “would not” by 1968-69. It was past the point of arguing any further. It was time to quit whipping a dead horse. And those who were now saying that it was time to get the hell out of Vietnam weren’t cowards, communists or anti-patriotic. Calling them such names was part of the game being played by diehards in Washington who were confusing the issue while covering their butts, and continuing to screw up military actions.
In our current era, when the people in Washington decided to invade Iraq, the first thing our military said to them was: We’re not leading the invasion if you’re going to do to us what you did to those of us who served in Vietnam. Never again will the U.S. military allow itself to be put into that kind of intolerable position and we’ll resign our commissions rather than end up there. And in particular, that means that you keep television reporters and cameramen, who know nothing about war, out of our hair, so we never again have to put up with being portrayed on TV as though we delighted in creating the maximum number of civilian deaths.
In 1968-69, the majority of those people who had decided that it was time to quit were not knee-jerk liberals like the ones who had decided to follow Jane Fonda and other screwballs like her. If they had arrested Jane Fonda for treason, and sent her to prison, I would have regarded that as being exactly what she deserved. I had no sympathy whatsoever for the schmucks reading Reston’s columns in the New York Times, and reciting all their airy-fairy fantasies about how “nice” the world was, and how we just needed to learn how to be nice to one another. When I saw these people reciting their memorized lines at anti-war protests, their stupidity and lack of ordinary common sense made me want to puke. From Machiavelli to John Calvin to Reinhold Niebuhr to Martin Luther King Jr., sensible people have noted the same truth over and over again. At all times and in all places, the majority of the people will act on what they see as their own best interest, at the expense of other people. There will be times when justice and peace can only be obtained by using policemen and soldiers. But thinking you can win any war if you just try hard enough is also a recipe for disaster: even a general like Napoleon can march on Moscow and get most of his army killed by trying the impossible. The question of whether we should have stayed in Vietnam or gotten out is not the issue here however. The big disgrace to America, the professor told me, was to his mind the way people treated the returning Vietnam vets, who were ordinary men and women who had tried their hardest to do what their country had ordered them to do. That was totally inexcusable and so disgusting, he said, that it still makes his stomach turn. And he believes that people like the ones who insulted Steve C. and other returning veterans should be held up to the ultimate public contempt. For myself I told the professor, if I had been a returning American soldier like Steve C. who had served in Vietnam and did the best I could in that hopeless, impossible political situation—and then been called a baby killer, I would have wanted to beat that butt-hole’s face to a bloody pulp. It is time to start giving people like Steve C. the honor they deserve. And now that we have returning veterans from Iraq, John Barleycorn is saying that this time around, American civilians damned well learn to respect our Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force personnel by showing them the honor they deserve for doing what we ourselves asked them to do.
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