By Frosty Wooldridge
The Nazi Hermann Goering said, “Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag people along. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
Little known and already forgotten, Robert S. McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, died this week—after a lengthy life of 93 years. The world won’t blink, but I winced in my distress for a man who caused so much death and misery in his power tenure—and all for nothing.
Whereas McNamara lived a long existence, he cut short 58,300 American soldiers’ lives and horribly disfigured the lives of 350,000 more from war wounds. On the Vietnamese side, he killed several million people and poisoned the countryside with Agent Orange.
McNamara created orphans, widows, widowers, amputees, refugees and more human misery than most Americans can imagine. Documentation shows that 150,000 to 200,000 Vietnam Vets committed suicide since 1975---all from the traumas they suffered while serving in the steaming jungles of Vietnam. McNamara’s perpetration of that war still kills Americans with cancers that formed 20 years later from exposure to Agent Orange. No one knows how many lives suffer from drugs and alcoholism stemming from their service in Vietnam.
Much like Hitler, McNamara illustrated the power of one man’s intentions. He built a consensus for his Domino’s Theory of communist conquest. While Lyndon Baines Johnson sided with McNamara, along with Congress, none of them understood the folly of their “Fog of War.” They never declared ‘war’ on North Vietnam. They called it a ‘conflict’.
The U.S. Army drafted my college roommate out of our room to my great distress. He got shot to hell in a firefight within two months of landing in Vietnam. His last letter to me before his death said, “They won’t let us win this war or lose it…we are getting killed for nothing.” By 1968, I found myself in U.S. Army Basic Training for ROTC at Fort Benning, Georgia. I’ll never forget Drill Sergeant Pierce screaming, “You maggots are gonna’ die, but if you learn the low crawl well enough, you might luck out and come back alive!”
While stepping forward on forced marches, we sang, “I wanna’ go to Vietnam, I wanna’ fight the Vietnam…I wanna’ go see Ho Chi Mingh to pull the whiskers on his chin…I wanna’ be an Air Born Ranger so I can live a life of danger….”
I wanted to vomit every day I suffered from the concocted indoctrination. The late author David Halberstam, The Best and Brightest, exposed the Vietnam War as a complete fraud. Back at college, two guys on my floor died terrible deaths and one of them, Bobby Driskol, got shot up so bad, that today, he’s got plastic tubes running all over one side of his body from an AK-47 round slicing up the left side of his chest.
After my commissioning as a 2nd Lt., I saw enough horrors of war to last me a lifetime at Fort Riley and Fort Sam Houston. Guys returned with arms, legs and faces missing. Napalm, or jellied gasoline, burned off guys’ eyelids, ears, noses and lips. Hideous beyond comprehension! I suffered depression going to sleep and waking up. I felt sickened, yet the ‘Silent Majority’ bought the war and sent their kids off to die at 300 dead ‘patriots’ a week. The conflict dragged on for 10 years.
Why? Money! Huge amounts of money drove that war. Corporations and stock holders made billions. While our young men died horrific deaths and suffered the lunacy of mass insanity, the citizens of this country failed their kids, failed integrity and failed to speak out against that war. Finally, in the late 60s and early 70s, millions of college students marched to stop the war, “Hell no! We won’t go!” By then, even TV anchor Walter Cronkite felt we lost the war.
By that time, McNamara realized his folly. Three decades later, he wrote a book, Fog of War, where he admitted his grave error.
I found all of it particularly intriguing because U.S. Senators and House reps made sure their kids escaped Vietnam by student deferments, quick marriages with instant kids, or like former Vice President Dick Cheney—five deferments until the war ended. In other words, the rich and powerful sent poor kids and blacks off to die, but protected their own.
If hell exists, McNamara must be feeling his flesh sizzle right about now and for all eternity. Same goes for LBJ and RMN.
"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." George Orwell
Today, we race ahead 30 years later with George W. Bush, who hid out in the National Guard and got drunk every weekend while he ‘served’ during the Vietnam War. As our 43rd president, Bush, single-mindedly created the Weapons of Mass destruction charade in Iraq like McNamara created the Domino’s Theory. Instead of reason, both men used fear.
I wince in my angst for the untold misery, suffering and horrors that Bush created by his lies and illicit war upon Iraq. While 17 Saudi Arabia-born terrorists committed 9/11 that killed 3,000 innocent people, Bush killed 100,000 innocents, created 2.5 million refugees, destroyed an entire country, killed 4,000 young American military volunteers, horrifically wounded another 35,000, bankrupted the USA, and utilized uranium depleted bombs that will create birth defects, much like Agent Orange, for decades. No telling how many American suicides will result from the Iraq War!
He called it a “War on Terror” when he left our southern borders open to any terrorists that wanted to waltz into the USA 24/7.
I recommend both McNamara, Bush and Cheney share a jail cell in hell. For neighbors in that cell block, they might include Westmoreland, Bundy, corporate heads and all the misfits that perpetrated and contracted the Vietnam War for 10 years. For all the men extending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the same fate!
How much will the Vietnam and Iraq Wars mean in history’s eyes? You might take your hand and stick it into a pail of water. While your hand remains, you cause ‘something’ or some kind of ‘effect’, but once you withdraw your hand, everything returns to the original condition.
That happened in Vietnam and it will repeat in Iraq. We cannot take an ancient civilization along with its culture and religion, and turn it into a sophisticated democracy in a few years with military hegemony. The day we leave, they will return to their tribal war-prone roots.
The sage advice of Thomas Jefferson, “We must not entangle ourselves in the affairs of foreign countries.”
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." Hitler
McNamara fooled us and Bush lied. Same results: millions of deaths for nothing! Ironically, citizens of the world find themselves in greater human misery, terror and fear.
“How fortunate for leaders that average men do not think.” Hitler
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Comments
Frosty said, "If hell exists, McNamara must be feeling his flesh sizzle right about now and for all eternity. Same goes for LBJ and RMN."
You quote very selectively your "Religious belief" of hell. Your anger is understood given what you, your comrades and friends went through in that time. And I do not advocate what was done.
BUT,
Another perhaps much more important aspect of Religious faith is Forgiveness. We all err, sometimes horribly, but to err is human, to forgive divine. If you quote religion, be prepared for what fate also has in store for you. Perhaps faith is about changing our fate?
McNamara acknowledged his error in judgment, you said so yourself.
Does he not deserve forgiveness?
Most faiths that access Sacred Knowledge have a version of this. Kharma, forgiveness, etc.
McNamara is dead. Wiser ones than you and I have said don't speak ill of the dead.
Vietnam was a very long time ago.
Isn't it time for forgiveness?
The sooner 911 is exposed the sooner we will have peace on earth.
Bush/Cheny/Rove/Powell/Rice et al belong in prison.
In the eyes of every other country on the planet , America remains tarnished and viewed as war criminal torturing scum.
Interesting point to forgive someone like Hitler, Stalin, Caesar, Castro, LBJ, RMN, Bush, Saddam, bin Laden and others that killed so many and brought so much pain and misery to so many. Since there is another Bush or McNamara around the corner, I'd rather educate humanity in preventing such maniacs to wield their power on the innocents. And, perhaps pity those tyrants more than forgive them. I would be curious how many of the 58,300 Vietnam War dead, if they could, would pity LBJ and McNamara? FW
That all depends if certain people ask. Acknowledging error long after the fact, when it is obvious to all but idiots, is not repentance.
Nor does repentance automatically obviate atonement.
McNamara's lay the foundation for Bushes. And Bushes lay the foundation for Armageddon.
For some people there just is no forgiveness, because they never in all of eternity would stoop to ask. Why should they? They're always right. Pun intended.
I've lived a long time. Long enough to know that nothing in the world will prevent another Bush or McNamara or Obama with his "smart" wars. As long as governments allow people and their organizations to profit off war, and those organizations to turn government into whorehouses, there will be other Bushes until the world destroys itself.
This is the best article that I've seen from Frosty Woolridge. Thanks for sharing your personal experiences with Vietnam.
I lost a brother to Vietnam, who came home and finally succumbed to Hodgkin's disease linked to Agent Orange.
It especially sickened me to be reminded of Dubya's service and then moves on to "lead" our country.
It's all so very disgusting.
It is up to God to judge, but if he is Hell, I could care less.
So it's McNamara AND Bush, not President Johnson and Bush?
Johnson is the one who is responsible for those dead soldiers of the Vietnam war, or did you not realize some of us out here lived thru that time?
By the way, who ENDED the Vietnam war, in case you know?
Humans should not be in the death business, leave forgiveness to God
very nice article. the scum of the earth learned from Herr Goebles well. Expose 911. And no time for forgiveness. The afgan people delt with the brits before, with ruskies...now us and uk time the get the lesson in guerila warfare...pity all the boys/girls in uniform...
Isn't all this forgiveness and lack of punishment like completely ignoring what happened and not holding them accountable? Which is exactly what happened in this case? I also think this tells me this was perfectly acceptable for what McNamara did and no action would come his way. Hey, let's go for a picnic. Who cared what McNamara did?
Mr. Sir, Very nice article, I concur with you.
I notice an advertisement on the site for Ann Coulter with the words "first fearless free".
How about "biased assinine conservative"?
Are you really unbiased?
mcnamara/johnson and their families are war criminals and should be hung.
mc and lbj should be disinterred and hung from the washington monument. Their families should be proscribed of all assetts to the point of poverty. Then hopefully some of them would kill themselves. Anybody who thinks these pieces of dung should be forgiven is an idiotic fool who themselves should be at least castrated/sterilized. Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Perle/Zakheim are all criminals of the same as mc/lbj. They should be indicted for capitol offenses, tried and hung from the washinton monument, with appropriate prosciption of family assetts.
wow ... comments go all the way from hatred to forgiveness.
Any one can mouth the words 'Forgive me' without the need for sincerity or of any understanding of the immensity of what they ask..... probably why vengeance is best left to the Divine
How can you "forgive" a murderer? He couldn't even admit he was wrong from the beginning about the Indochina Invasion. All he knew about was Ford cars. I love my car, but it is not a living human, and has no soul. And to take 30 years to admit that invasion didn't work, and to admit the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" was fabricated? The man was evil, evil, evil.
Yet, what do we have today? More lies, more mayhem, more murders, more expense. Would that US deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan were just around the 4-5 thousand mark. Even those deaths are unforgiveable. The "body count" for these "wars" is grossly understated, because if your eyes are still blinking, or you can have someone pull you onto a plane out of Iraq/Afghan, and then die, you are not counted as a "death". The number is closer to 75,000. If you later find you can't handle PTSD, or other post-Iraq/Afghan disabilities, and kill yourself, that is not a "death" in the body count either. But it is to me. Watching my close buddy
Patrick slowly die from prostate cancer, brought on by having Agent Orange all over him, his clothes, his bedding, etc. in Vietnam (he couldn't even shoot straight), and my nephew Jimmy go nuts after 2 tours in Iraq (and he was a killer), and kill his sweet wife, I would drive my neighbor's Humvee back and forth over McNamara and Cheney's bodies until I ran out of gas.
Forgive? F, no. Draw the line. No one in the Bush administration ever saw combat, or blood, or an arm fly off. Deferments, OK. But to send our boys into useless combat (still happening, under Obama) without having been in it yourself, is a criminal act in my book. Petraeus and McChrystal just want another star.
They haven't lost a limb, or cut up an Arab/Persian/Pashtun. Who gives them the right to condemn other Patricks or Jimmys?
For oil? Or to stop "communism"? I just wish there was a Hell, and these dudes would slide right down there.
Eh?
Sorry. Forgot. Powell did 2 tours in Vietnam. And look what he did in front of the UN about the WMD? Coward/liar traitor.
The fact of the matter is that Obama is taking us down the same line(s) that Bush did. We are getting more involved with Afganistan, we are still in Iraq and there are no huge shipments of troops home, the wars are still going etc etc. Obama still hasn't canceled or stopped the various NSA wiretapping programs that everybody howled about. Also according to some press accounts the Obama CIA pumped 400 million dollars into Iran to help the recent revolution try.
The concept that this is some kind of evil war with McNamara, or Bush, conviently forgets all the other wars and conflicts the US has been involved with almost since its founding.
Bottom line if you blame "evil Bush" and you have any integrety, you also have to blame "evil Obama" for he has continued the wars and the wiretapping. The Dems complained about GITMO but can't even get the money to close it down...and they control congress.
Thus the same old crap.
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