Why Don't We Get It?

We Never Seem to Learn…


When I first came back from Asia, I found myself in a blue funk and I wasn't sure why. Sure, I was glad to be home after three years plus serving our nation. But the return was without bells and whistles. For the return, we were herded aboard troop ships, stacked up in beds six feet high, fed three crummy meals a day and shunted off at Oakland after twenty three days for an unceremonious debriefing and eventual discharge. I had disabilities but I was so happy to be home I didn’t claim them. But that happiness didn’t last long. When I got out and mixed it up with regular folks, I discovered something that was truly disturbing. Most people didn't know what was happening, more importantly, didn't care.

I asked myself what was I doing overseas if nobody cared about what was going on? Admittedly, this was a very early time and there was very little publicity when the Advisers went in beginning in 1960. Things didn’t start with a big kick-off and lots of fan-fare; in fact, most Americans didn’t even know that by 1960 there were thousands of Advisers in this far-away land and others poised to go. And most people in those days were more concerned with their own problems than any problems in some far off Asian land.

It was my first real insights as to how Americans think. For the most part, I discovered that most Americans thought the world revolved around themselves;. that if it didn't happen in America, it couldn't really be all that important. That frame of mind has not changed much in more than forty years. We still feel that America is where it’s happening. You can see it in our truncated news coverage. And you can see it when you discuss foreign affairs with others…. What Americans fail to realize is that with the exception of a few who are dependent on America, most people from around the world couldn't care less about what happens in America. Not only do they have their own concerns, but America’s super-power status was wearing thin and people saw how we treated our friends. .

In those days, the big threat was communism. We were told that if we weren't careful communism would take over the rest of the world and we would be left isolated. We couldn't afford to let that happen. Then somebody coined the idea of "falling dominoes" and backing away from a commitment to our Asian allies no longer seemed possible or even feasible
.
We should have learned at that time that if the French with all of their modern equipment couldn't fend off the North Vietnamese, then our chances would be rather slim, too.

Eisenhower tried to warn us of what might happen if the military industrial complex got too strong. But the hawks were overpowering and there was simply too much profit to be gained through a war. I hate to sound cynical but our recent wars have convinced me that the economic benefits of war seem to flow to those who congregate at the threshold of power.

On rethinking Iraq, It's amazing to me that an entire new generation, unschooled in what happened before, seemed to be amenable to being sucked into another war that all of the elements of Vietnam and no easy way out!.... Of course, the cast of characters had changed but not much. There were still some of the loonies around like Rummy who even scared Kissenger, quite a sinister mastermind himself, and of course, Cheney, who was Rummy's room-mate back in Princeton. Baker is there, too, mostly behind the scenes now content to carve the big deals for himself and Fortunate Son's dad, who never saw a deal with Arabs that he didn't like. (Make no mistake about it: The limb doesn't fall far from the tree; only in this case it fell to the ground short a few important genes.)

Anyway, in a strange way life goes on. And we keep making the same mistakes over and over again for the benefit of a few. Only, those mistakes involves the lives, hopes and ambitions of young, honest people with their whole lives in front of them.

Vietnam was a dumb war that could have been avoided in my judgment. Why should the French have maintained their colony in Indo China? What gave them the right? And why the dickens did we rush out to support them? Would they have come to our aid?

When your purpose is not clear, when your motives are not for what is right but what is expedient, you are bound to hold a losing hand. . Were not the people of Vietnam entitled to freedom as much as we were? These contradictions bounced around in my mind for many years afterwards..

But it was clear to me that if our leaders had read the columns of Walter Lippmann syndicated in the Stars and Stripes they may have thought differently about going in. Walter laid it out like a Greek tragedy. And he had done his homework perhaps all too well! And all we had to do was read it to see what we are in for. But Americans in power seem to draw hubris from their own inflated egos combined with a lack of understanding of the real world that ultimately winds up with our youth's bodies broken and bleeding on foreign battlefields.

Now we seem to be very much in a position that is reminiscent of the Tet offensive, with all of the government saying that things are going well while our eyes show us pictures of the Viet Cong marching to the outskirts of Saigon. Something was as wrong with that picture as it is wrong with the picture we are being forced to look at today. Somebody is not being honest with us or themselves. Again, we have to go back and examine motives. What were our motives? What was our proof?

Of course, we had no basis for going in to Iraq and staying there is just compounding the problem. It’s like admitting to making a mistake by marrying somebody you don’t love and attempt to correct the problem by deciding to stick it out for the sake of the kids. Well, to me that begins to sound like a mistake followed by another mistake. I hate to seem maudlin but it would seem that after all of this time we should have learned something. And maybe that is not to place our trust in those who are only interested in exploiting our patriotism for their own ends. In the end, America like the Mafia, has dumbed down and the rest of us are being forced to live with it. Will the whole damn thing blow up in our faces? It could when the population realizes that our government has failed on every count to provide protection for us, its citizenry, and that is the basis for the relationship that ties us to our society in the first place. When we wake up to discover that the Compact that binds us to society and society to us no longer works, we may think differently.

Les Aaron