Author: Fred Eberlein fred.eberlein@gmail.com

For me, Memorial Day is not a day of celebration, flag-waving, and parades. It’s a day of mourning. A day to remember all who died as a result of war – American, Enemy, Civilian. All fellow human beings whose lives ended too soon. All denied the chance to live another day; few with a say in the events that led to their demise.

Memorial Day reminds me more of our weaknesses than our strengths. The cries of life irrevocably lost is silenced by the rhetoric of those in power who use Memorial Day for building political capital, and war for creating personal wealth. They are easy to recognize – never in the middle of the action but far removed from it. Like schoolboys playing with toy soldiers, they find joy in a horror they know nothing of.

Continue reading Memorial Day 2017 – A day of remembrance for all

Of all the monuments, memorials, and mementos left from the Vietnam War nothing is more lasting than the effects of Operation Trail Dust.

Trail Dust, Mule Train, and Ranch Hand were the catchy names given the US Government to programs to defoliate Vietnam for purposes of “food denial” and to clear “key routes.”

It was determined that “crop destruction” wouldn’t go down well politically, so the term “food denial” was used instead in the National Security Action Memorandum signed by President Kennedy on November 30, 1961.

We didn’t want to starve anybody, just deny them food.

Agents Pink, Green, Purple, and Orange provided another facade to the poisonous array of chemicals that would be showered upon the Vietnamese, to set them free. The real name for these toxins, phenoxy herbicides, was considerably less appealing and hard for the well-bred member of the Kennedy Administration, their successors, or the public, to digest.

Color-coating made the use of 2,4-D (dichlorophenoxyacetic acid), and 2,4,5-T (trichlorophenoxyacetic acid), and the combination of the two into Agent Orange, palatable. This served to deflect public awareness of our use of chemical warfare in Vietnam and made it easier for the Administration’s perpetrators to rationalize and distance themselves from the insanity of their actions.

Continue reading Chemical Warfare: A Lasting Impression

When President Lyndon Johnson heard angry protesters bellowing this chant outside the White House in 1968, he reckoned it a conspiracy. Surely, he thought, somebody had paid for this show of support for the enemy.

The man who was determined to help “little nations” and protect them from “tyranny and aggression,” should have spent more time studying the history of Vietnam, and its northern leader Ho Chi Minh, than preoccupying himself with the motives of protestors outside the white house gates.

Being driven more by political instinct at home than a desire to understand the enemy he was confronting abroad, Johnson errored in the extreme. When Martin Luther King criticized “Western arrogance” as having “everything to teach others and nothing to learn,” he was describing Johnson, and his team of the so-called “best and brightest.”

Vietnam was a country long before the US entered it, and long before the French arrived in 1858. However, US historical accounts, particularly regarding the war, are weak with respect to Vietnam’s far-reaching past.

Why does this matter?

First, as a fundamental principle of military engagement, it’s crucial to know your enemy. We didn’t. Instead, we assumed our powerful military would win the day. As Johnson said: “America wins the wars that she undertakes.” This may have been true prior to the 1950’s when America exercised equal measures of brains and brawn. But, with the military build-up that followed WWII, the US resembled Goliath. Massive, powerful, and so confident that it failed to imagine the game plan of an opponent who played by a different set of rules.

Continue reading “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong are gonna win!”

The military-industrial complex was and is a time-bomb.

In hindsight, it seems President Eisenhower was delivering more of a prediction, than a warning, when he spoke of a “military-industrial complex” in his short (15:44) farewell address, on January 17, 1961.

Ike, soft-spoken and modest, was not the kind of person who would have pretended to know what the future holds. But it seems evident now, after 50 years of serving his country (from West Point in 1911 through his second term as President ending in January 1961),  that Eisenhower may have known more than he realized.

Having witnessed the Nazi war machine, the use of nuclear weapons (a decision he opposed) to bring an end to the war with Japan, and the rise of the Soviet Union, Eisenhower recognized that we had entered an era unlike any before. “American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well,” he said. “But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.”

Calling for “good judgment” and “balance” (a word used 9 times in his address), Eisenhower counseled that we “must not fail to comprehend” the “grave implications” of imbalance, and special interests. “We must learn,” he said, “how to compose differences not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.“

If Eisenhower’s words were understood, they most definitely were not heeded.

The military-industrial complex was and is a time-bomb. Its explosive body is made up of thousands of defense contractors itching to rake in profits for themselves, and their shareholders. Its fuse is the weak and inferior minded politician, he who speaks of “peace and freedom” but who is forever angling for historical recognition which, in the American tradition, means finding a war to “win”.

Continue reading Eisenhower – 56 years later