48 yrs ago - destroy everything in the village that was "walking, crawling or growing

[billy.pilgrim]

Occasionally we find out

Hey billy.pilgrim; I'm just being curious. I've been following the comments on this very interesting thread since you started it, and I'm just curious as to your interest in the My Lai events and Lt. Calley, and why you keep the subject of it alive. Did you have relatives involved? Were you directly or indirectly involved?

sorry I took so long, been busy and watching basketball.

what about you, no one close involved seems hard to believe.

I'm just doing my best, here and there, to keep some truth, in one of those major pivotal teachable moments in our history, alive before the Howard (Fox) Campbell, Jr. rewrite blinds the right.
Also, to poke at all those vets out there who still lie to their kids and grandkids about how they were spit on (Johnny at lnf heard it from his dad or uncle) or the all too common (my stalker Hugh from upstate or possibly here was one of these) I volunteered to go to Viet Nam but they stationed me in Italy or Germany or wherever because they needed my special skill.

The protest was never against the troops. The protest was against the government sponsoring this war, it was against the military establishment and the companies and people who profited from the war, but because more people didn’t keep hammering with the truth and what it could have taught us about the idiocy of imposing power over people who wanted freedom, we now have forever wars and a population being taught to bow to the military.

My Lai is only a representative of the hundreds of similar atrocities, but My Lai slipped past the cover-up and was huge in exposing the truth.

The only spitting on vets came from the right and was directed at protesting vets by right-wingers, but people who can be tricked into believing that FDR caused the Great Depression, can be convinced to shut down anything and to support anything. All protest is un-American, and all disagreement is a sign of disloyalty. Follow the Leader.

I’m not sure how anyone who was draft age in the 60s isn’t connected. For the millions who died, for the elderly and children who died horrible deaths, for the fighters who spent a lifetime trying to rid their country of Colonial rule, for those on all sides – from the ones who were caught up in their particular side’s slogan filled speeches glorifying war to those who followed the law when called, for those who lost friends and family and those who endured prison or had to leave the country, for and even for the physical scars to the country, I think a truthful understanding of Viet Nam would serve to make us better in the present.

Its’ not that we haven’t destroyed country after country in the name of profit (oppression), but Viet Nam exposed how easy it is to gin up a little fear and turn it into huge profits for our own increasingly smaller ruling class and their brand-new mercenary military.
Without people remembering history, you end up with crap history and lies about fighting for freedom, rather than the reality of abandoning allies, supporting Colonial oppression and violating treaties. It’s easy to see that we were the bad guys in Viet Nam and for a while it looked as if we wanted to learn a lesson. Now the story of Viet Nam, sanitized by the forever right-wing rewrite, is a lesson about blindly supporting violence and oppression.




“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free."
Guess who

[neoplacebo]

The inherent hypocrisy in the Declaration of Independence was never mentioned in my civics classes in school. The document excluded everybody but white male property owners as holders of those unalienable rights. maga

[billy.pilgrim]

The inherent hypocrisy in the Declaration of Independence was never mentioned in my civics classes in school. The document excluded everybody but white male property owners as holders of those unalienable rights. maga

Different quote

[billy.pilgrim]

https://notevenpast.org/kill-anything-t ... urse-2013/



"Murder, rape, abuse, arson, arrest, imprisonment, and torture were, in Turse’s words, a “daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam” (6). More than this, they were carried out on orders issued from the uppermost echelons of the American army. They were “the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest level of the military” (6). The outcome? The statistics Turse assembles almost speak for themselves: 58,000 American, 254,000 South Vietnamese, and 1.7 North Vietnamese soldiers dead; 65,000 North Vietnamese and 3.8 million South Vietnamese civilians dead. And these are conservative estimates. Add to that 5.3 million wounded civilians, eleven million refugees, and as many as four million exposed to toxic herbicides like Agent Orange. “[A]ll wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” Viet Thanh Nguyen has written in a different context.[1] With Kill Anything, Turse plunges into the fray of this second war, taking aim at staid diplomatic histories that fail to take stock of the purposeful barbarity of the American military’s actions in Vietnam."

[Leo Lyons]

Hey billy.pilgrim; I'm just being curious. I've been following the comments on this very interesting thread since you started it, and I'm just curious as to your interest in the My Lai events and Lt. Calley, and why you keep the subject of it alive. Did you have relatives involved? Were you directly or indirectly involved?

sorry I took so long, been busy and watching basketball.
Sorry I took so long myself. Between hospitalization, moving around, and setting up a new mobile laptop, I've been off the grid

what about you, no one close involved; seems hard to believe.
I inserted punctuation so I could figure this line out; I think I got it right. Yes, I had some family involved in the Vietnam conflict, but none in the My Lai incident; that I know of.

I'm just doing my best, here and there, to keep some truth, in one of those major pivotal teachable moments in our history, alive before the Howard (Fox) Campbell, Jr. rewrite blinds the right.
I don't watch any of the news propaganda shows. I watch local AM & PM local news and that's it. I doubt there's many people who know what The My Lai incident is. If it's not a smartphone or laptop app, they've no clue.

Also, to poke at all those vets out there who still lie to their kids and grandkids about how they were spit on (Johnny at lnf heard it from his dad or uncle) or the all too common (my stalker Hugh from upstate or possibly here was one of these) I volunteered to go to Viet Nam but they stationed me in Italy or Germany or wherever because they needed my special skill.
There was spitting. And cursing. And name calling. I saw it when I went with relatives to pick up returning relatives. As to locations and dates, I'll keep that to myself for personal reasons.

The protest was never against the troops. The protest was against the government sponsoring this war, it was against the military establishment and the companies and people who profited from the war, but because more people didn’t keep hammering with the truth and what it could have taught us about the idiocy of imposing power over people who wanted freedom, we now have forever wars and a population being taught to bow to the military. My Lai is only a representative of the hundreds of similar atrocities, but My Lai slipped past the cover-up and was huge in exposing the truth.
The only spitting on vets came from the right and was directed at protesting vets by right-wingers, but people who can be tricked into believing that FDR caused the Great Depression, can be convinced to shut down anything and to support anything. All protest is un-American, and all disagreement is a sign of disloyalty. Follow the Leader.
We didn't stick around long enough to ask political opinions.

I’m not sure how anyone who was draft age in the 60s isn’t connected. For the millions who died, for the elderly and children who died horrible deaths, for the fighters who spent a lifetime trying to rid their country of Colonial rule, for those on all sides – from the ones who were caught up in their particular side’s slogan filled speeches glorifying war to those who followed the law when called, for those who lost friends and family and those who endured prison or had to leave the country, for and even for the physical scars to the country, I think a truthful understanding of Viet Nam would serve to make us better in the present.

Its’ not that we haven’t destroyed country after country in the name of profit (oppression), but Viet Nam exposed how easy it is to gin up a little fear and turn it into huge profits for our own increasingly smaller ruling class and their brand-new mercenary military.
Without people remembering history, you end up with crap history and lies about fighting for freedom, rather than the reality of abandoning allies, supporting Colonial oppression and violating treaties. It’s easy to see that we were the bad guys in Viet Nam and for a while it looked as if we wanted to learn a lesson. Now the story of Viet Nam, sanitized by the forever right-wing rewrite, is a lesson about blindly supporting violence and oppression.

Regardless how each of us as an individual felt about Vietnam, whether it was right or wrong, it happened; it's history along with the atrocities, murders, rapes, and pillaging; the same actions as has occurred in the many, many human conflicts throughout the entire history of man's existence on this earth. As long as man, a greedy creature, has a desire to dominate others or take possession of other's belongings, the fighting will continue to happen. Although I'm not a religious person, I have to say that's the result of man's sinful nature.

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
Guess who
Thomas Jefferson; but he only reiterated the rights afforded us by our Creator. The greedy man chooses his own path.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts, but I'll ask again: "Did you have relatives involved? Were you directly or indirectly involved?"

[Vrede too]

Fallujah Forgotten

Insert current POTUS here:

[billy.pilgrim]

. For Leo



"On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square. The first lines of his speech repeated verbatim the famous second paragraph of America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence.

All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.”

Those are undeniable truths ..."


The rest of what our friend and WWll Allie wrote here

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5139/

[billy.pilgrim]

Fallujah Forgotten

Insert current POTUS here:

Fallujah is exactly why we should have discussed the real Vietnam war.

[Vrede too]

Fallujah is exactly why we should have discussed the real Vietnam war.

the American public could not care less.

[neoplacebo]

The American public could not care less because the American public in general is not furnishing the soldiers anymore; since the draft ended fifty some years ago, the biggest part of military manpower, other than the Service Academy graduates, is lower socioeconomic in demographics. I for one think the draft should be reinstated; I think it's an equitable thing. Of course, even with the draft, folks like Clinton and trump and others will slink out of any service. After all, our idol, Israel, has mandatory military service for all young folks. They have to create as many enemies for us as possible so our poor soldiers can come save them and blast somebody in retribution. But, back on topic, the Vietnam war achieved massive resistance BECAUSE it affected just about everybody; it ain't like that these days. Our country's wars are now perceived by most Americans in the same way as automobile accidents to other people are perceived; it doesn't concern them. They don't know what they're missing.

[Vrede too]

http://www.blueridgedebate.com/forum/vi ... ble#p96644

‘Terrible Idea’: Senators Slam Trump Plan To Pardon Vets Accused Of War Crimes
Sen. Mitt Romney said it would be “unthinkable” to pardon service members who were “legitimately convicted of committing war crimes.”

Also appalled:
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard, Iraq War veteran
U.S. Army Gen. retired Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Illinois Army National Guard Major, Iraq war double amputee after the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter she was co-piloting was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade fired by Iraqi insurgents

The dishonorable, lifelong cowardly Chickenhawk in Chief plans to abet dishonorable, cowardly war criminals.

Fallujah Forgotten

Fallujah is exactly why we should have discussed the real Vietnam war.

GOP congressman, defending accused war criminal, says his unit 'killed probably hundreds of civilians' in Iraq combat

California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, defending a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes in Iraq, said his own unit "killed probably hundreds of civilians," unintentionally, during his 2004 tour as a Marine field artillery officer in Fallujah, Iraq.

In an interview with Barstool Sports' Zero Blog Thirty podcast, Hunter explained his support of Navy SEAL Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, who has been accused of war crimes and is being considered for pardon by President Trump.

"I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians, if not scores, if not hundreds of civilians," Hunter said. "Probably killed women and children, if there were any left in the city when we invaded. So do I get judged too?"

... Gallagher faces a premeditated-murder charge for the stabbing death in 2017 of a teenage ISIS fighter who was brought in for medical treatment. Gallagher allegedly posed for a picture with the prisoner’s body. “I frankly don't care if he was killed, I just don't care," Hunter said about the ISIS fighter. He added: "Even if everything that the prosecutors say is true in this case, then, you know, Eddie Gallagher should still be given a break, I think."

Last week, Hunter defended Gallagher, who was turned in by members of his unit, while speaking at a town hall meeting in Ramona, Calif. The congressman, who is facing trial on federal corruption charges after allegedly misusing over $250,000 of federal campaign funds for personal use, said he’s “done the exact same thing” as Gallagher, taking photos of people he presumably captured or killed while at war....

Nothing to see here, just a corrupt, dishonorable, cowardly, admitted war criminal making excuses for a denying, dishonorable, cowardly war criminal that may soon be pardoned by the lifelong cowardly, dishonorable Chickenhawk in Chief.

[billy.pilgrim]

https://notevenpast.org/kill-anything-t ... urse-2013/



"Murder, rape, abuse, arson, arrest, imprisonment, and torture were, in Turse’s words, a “daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam” (6). More than this, they were carried out on orders issued from the uppermost echelons of the American army. They were “the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest level of the military” (6). The outcome? The statistics Turse assembles almost speak for themselves: 58,000 American, 254,000 South Vietnamese, and 1.7 North Vietnamese soldiers dead; 65,000 North Vietnamese and 3.8 million South Vietnamese civilians dead. And these are conservative estimates. Add to that 5.3 million wounded civilians, eleven million refugees, and as many as four million exposed to toxic herbicides like Agent Orange. “[A]ll wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” Viet Thanh Nguyen has written in a different context.[1] With Kill Anything, Turse plunges into the fray of this second war, taking aim at staid diplomatic histories that fail to take stock of the purposeful barbarity of the American military’s actions in Vietnam."

52 years and everything from the bumper stickers to the textbooks still lie about this war that should never have been.

[Vrede too]

Fallujah Forgotten

Fallujah is exactly why we should have discussed the real Vietnam war.

The girl in the Kent State photo: She was only 14. Here’s how her life turned out

Last May, when Mary Ann Vecchio watched the video of George Floyd’s dying moments, she felt herself plummet through time and space — to a day almost exactly 50 years earlier. On that May 4 afternoon in 1970, the world was just as riveted by an image that showed the life draining out of a young man on the ground, this one a black-and-white still photo.

Mary Ann was at the center of that photo, her arms raised in anguish, begging for help.

That photo, of her kneeling over the body of Kent State University student Jeffrey Miller, is one of the most important images of the 20th century. Taken by student photographer John Filo, it captures Mary Ann’s raw grief and disbelief at the realization that the nation’s soldiers had just fired at its own children.

The Kent State Pietà, as it’s sometimes called, is one of those rare photos that fundamentally changed the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Like the image of the solitary protester standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Or the photo of Kim Phuc, the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing the napalm that has just incinerated her home. Or the image of Aylan Kurdi’s tiny, 3-year-old body facedown in the sand, he and his mother and brother having drowned while fleeing Syria.

Long, but all interesting to me. A few more excerpts:

... Mary Ann dropped to the pavement and waited until the smoke had cleared to look up. Jeffrey Miller, the student she’d been talking to, was facedown on the ground; he’d been shot through the mouth. She knelt over his body as blood seeped onto the pavement. Other students walked by, too stunned or confused to look. “Doesn’t anyone see what just happened here?” she remembers crying. “Why is no one helping him?” As the soldiers approached, their guns at the ready, she recalls asking them a question that countless others across the country would soon ask as well: “Why did you do this?”

Nearby were more bodies. Allison Krause was shot in the chest; William Schroeder in the back. Sandy Scheuer, who was just passing through the area on her way to class, was struck by a bullet that hit her jugular vein. Four dead in Ohio....

. He went straight toward the action, where a student in the no man’s land between soldiers and students waved a black flag.

John snapped a photo thinking, “OK, I’ve got my picture.” A moment later, the soldiers formed a rifle line. “I put my camera to my eye and trained it on one of the soldiers,” he says. “He aimed toward me, and then his gun goes off. The next thing I know, a bullet hits a tree next to me and a chunk of bark flew off.”

John dropped to the ground and waited out the 13 seconds of gunfire. When the smoke cleared, he stood and patted his arms and legs, checking to see if he’d been hit. “It was like slow motion. I just kept wondering, ‘How come I’m not shot?’”

Then, not 10 feet away, he saw a body on the ground. John was running out of film as he saw a girl kneel beside the body. “I knew the boy was dead, but I could tell she didn’t know,” he told me. “I could see something building in her, and all of a sudden she lets out this scream and I shoot. I shoot one more picture, and I’m out of film.” By the time he had reloaded his camera, the girl was gone.

John remembers the soldiers ordering students who were lingering at the scene to disperse — “or they’d shoot again.”

Of course they did.

... Many people refused to believe the nearly 6-foot-tall girl with the long, flowing hair and the mournful face was only 14. Her family received calls and letters calling her a drug addict, a tramp, a communist. The governor of Florida said she was “part of a nationally organized conspiracy of professional agitators” that was “responsible for the students’ death.”

There's just something about Florida governors.

... Nixon issued a statement saying that the students’ actions had invited the tragedy. Privately, he called them “bums.” And a Gallup poll found that 58% of Americans blamed the students for their own deaths; only 11% blamed the National Guard.

The FBI also questioned John. They demanded his film, he says, and when he refused, he remembers them tailing him for nearly a week. He says his phone rang nonstop with crank callers insisting that the photo was fake. He got hate mail, including a letter that, as he recalls, read, “I had a friend die in Vietnam. You’re next.” ...

Death threats

Back in Opa-locka, Mary Ann couldn’t go to Royal Castle for a burger without reporters and hecklers following her. Death threats filled the Vecchio family mailbox. “It’s too bad it wasn’t you that was shot.” “What you need is a good beating until you bleed red.” “I hope you enjoyed sleeping with all those Negroes and dope fiends.” “The deaths of the Kent State four lies on the conscience of yourself.”

... John went on to have a successful career as a photographer. (Today he’s the head of photography for CBS.) He says that not a day went by that he didn’t think about the Kent State students — or Mary Ann. Sometimes he had nightmares about her. When he became a father and looked in his daughter’s eyes, he saw Mary Ann’s eyes. He tortured himself by wondering how he’d feel if someone had taken his daughter’s photo in such a vulnerable moment. “I thought about reaching out to her many times,” he says. “But I figured she hated me.”

... . But Mary Ann surprised everyone. “I saw the anguish in his eyes,” she says of John, “and, you know, I felt sorry for him.” She smiled, took his hand and hugged him. They both cried.

Even though they’d never before met, Mary Ann says that she and John had the instant bond of a pair of old army buddies. “It was kind of a war,” she says. And neither of them had ever really been recognized as among the casualties. Kent State had haunted them both, from opposite ends of the lens.

Later that day, as Mary Ann spoke to the assembled group about the trauma of the Kent State shootings, John had an epiphany about the power of his photo. “It was because she was 14, because of her youth, that she ran to help, that she ran to do something. There were other people, 18, 19, 20 years old, who didn’t get close to the body. She did because she was a kid. She was a kid reacting to the horror in front of her. Had she not been 14, the picture wouldn’t have had the impact it did.”

... After (respiratory) school, the woman who perhaps had been the most visible symbol of protest against the Vietnam War worked at the Miami VA hospital, where she cared for men who’d served in that war. But she never told them she was the girl from the Kent State photo. Sometimes, she says, she wanted to tell the veterans who she was so she could explain that the protesters weren’t anti-soldier, just antiwar, and that they did what they did to bring soldiers home. Instead, she operated on a “no-need-to-know policy.” She wanted “to be in the vets’ shoes,” she says. “I had to make a connection on a spiritual level.”

Irony.

... Mary Ann is retired now — she didn’t remarry or have children — and leads a quiet life, growing avocados and oranges on a small plot at the edge of the Florida Everglades. Payne, who keeps in regular touch with her and has invited her to speak to his classes at Emerson, credits her “incredibly strong spirit” for her survival. “She also still has that unaffected purity,” he says. “That’s what you saw in the photo on May 4th. And that’s still who she is.”

Charlotte says Mary Ann is more like a neighborhood sprite. She pops in to see their older neighbors, bathing them and delivering home-cooked meals. She gets offers to work for pay, but she prefers to “be that surprise person that shows up with banana bread.”

Last May, however, when she watched the video of George Floyd’s death, she was so shaken, it was as if the electronic scrim of her TV had dissolved. She jumped off her couch and yelled at the crowd in the video, “Why is no one helping him?” She sobs as she describes that moment to me. “Doesn’t anyone see what’s going on?”

“Mary Ann,” I say. “It seems to me that you’re still that girl in the photo, you’re still that girl saying, ‘Doesn’t anyone see what’s happening here?’”

She stops crying abruptly. “But it’s been 50 years,” she says. “Why can’t I move on?”

What would it take to move on? I ask.

“Maybe if I do some good for the planet,” she says. She tells me that she does small, secret acts of charity every weekend, when she goes “undercover” to the Walmart parking lot near her home and leaves canned foods, staples and her homegrown avocados in an empty shopping cart for someone to discover. “I feel like I need to do something good,” she says, crying again.

You’ve already done something profoundly good, I tell her. “In that moment when you knelt over Jeffrey Miller’s body,” I say, “you expressed the grief and horror that so many people were feeling. You helped end the Vietnam War.”

“You can say that,” she says, “but I can’t feel it.” ...

[Vrede too]

The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on Sunday, June 13, 1971. Thank you, Daniel Ellsberg.

The Secrets and Lies of the Vietnam War, Exposed in One Epic Document

[billy.pilgrim]

The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on Sunday, June 13, 1971. Thank you, Daniel Ellsberg.

The Secrets and Lies of the Vietnam War, Exposed in One Epic Document

"published excerpts in 1971. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers infuriated a country sick of the war, the body bags of young Americans, the photographs of Vietnamese civilians fleeing U.S. air attacks and the endless protests and counterprotests that were dividing the country as nothing had since the Civil War."

Yep, all true.

"The lies revealed in the papers were of a generational scale, and, for much of the American public, this grand deception seeded a suspicion of government that is even more widespread today."

Big leap here. Thirty years later Americans were all too ready and supportive of cheney's lies about Afghanistan and Iraq to ask even the simplest of questions.
And this author's take on republican's current perceived "suspicion of government" isn't about concerns over making war, or for that matter about any legitimate concerns about government lies, today it's all about ghosts and goblins - pedophile pizza parlors, the deep state, stolen elections, sharia law and a host of other lies used by politicians and trolls to fire up the republican base.

Nothing has changed from the 60s.

[Vrede too]

"published excerpts in 1971. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers infuriated a country sick of the war, the body bags of young Americans, the photographs of Vietnamese civilians fleeing U.S. air attacks and the endless protests and counterprotests that were dividing the country as nothing had since the Civil War."

Yep, all true.

"The lies revealed in the papers were of a generational scale, and, for much of the American public, this grand deception seeded a suspicion of government that is even more widespread today."

Big leap here. Thirty years later Americans were all too ready and supportive of cheney's lies about Afghanistan and Iraq to ask even the simplest of questions.
And this author's take on republican's current perceived "suspicion of government" isn't about concerns over making war, or for that matter about any legitimate concerns about government lies, today it's all about ghosts and goblins - pedophile pizza parlors, the deep state, stolen elections, sharia law and a host of other lies used by politicians and trolls to fire up the republican base.

Nothing has changed from the 60s.

Don't forget the lies about the "window of vulnerability" and Central America that came first. I concede that the lessons of the Pentagon Papers applied largely to just Vietnam and were then twisted by the right-wing and national security state such that they became unrecognizable to we hippies and real patriots.

[billy.pilgrim]

"published excerpts in 1971. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers infuriated a country sick of the war, the body bags of young Americans, the photographs of Vietnamese civilians fleeing U.S. air attacks and the endless protests and counterprotests that were dividing the country as nothing had since the Civil War."

Yep, all true.

"The lies revealed in the papers were of a generational scale, and, for much of the American public, this grand deception seeded a suspicion of government that is even more widespread today."

Big leap here. Thirty years later Americans were all too ready and supportive of cheney's lies about Afghanistan and Iraq to ask even the simplest of questions.
And this author's take on republican's current perceived "suspicion of government" isn't about concerns over making war, or for that matter about any legitimate concerns about government lies, today it's all about ghosts and goblins - pedophile pizza parlors, the deep state, stolen elections, sharia law and a host of other lies used by politicians and trolls to fire up the republican base.

Nothing has changed from the 60s.

Don't forget the lies about the "window of vulnerability" and Central America that came first. I concede that the lessons of the Pentagon Papers applied largely to just Vietnam and were then twisted by the right-wing and national security state such that they became unrecognizable to we hippies and real patriots.

Now we are mostly required to thank vets for their service without knowing what they did, why they joined or who they are.

Discounts and many a thank you, thank you as we all bow down to America's patriots - including those who couldn't get a job, those looking for uncle nanny and retirement after 20 years, those with sick family members who couldn't get health insurance, people too stupid to form their own fact based opinions and those who simply wanted to kill people different than their own folk for the fun and excitement of it all.

There is a myriad of reasons people join. Thanking Steven Green or Timmy McVeigh for their service and handing out 10 and 15% discounts at Home Depot, drug stores and movie theaters to similar scum, assholes and idiots shouldn't be where we are on lil bush's Forever Wars For Fun and Profit, but it's the New US (us).

[Vrede too]

Now we are mostly required to thank vets for their service without knowing what they did, why they joined or who they are.

Discounts and many a thank you, thank you as we all bow down to America's patriots - including those who couldn't get a job, those looking for uncle nanny and retirement after 20 years, those with sick family members who couldn't get health insurance, people too stupid to form their own fact based opinions and those who simply wanted to kill people different than their own folk for the fun and excitement of it all.

There is a myriad of reasons people join. Thanking Steven Green or Timmy McVeigh for their service and handing out 10 and 15% discounts at Home Depot, drug stores and movie theaters to similar scum, assholes and idiots shouldn't be where we are on lil bush's Forever Wars For Fun and Profit, but it's the New US (us).

Is it our fault that so little has changed in 50 years?

[neoplacebo]

Goddamnit, I don't know of any fucking discounts, free donuts, or good looking girls with no underwear crossing their legs real slow for my benefit. I did get a VA loan to buy a house two different times. I've thought for a long time that the draft should be reinstated. My experience in the military only reinforced my opinion of that. And I've been out 43 years.

[billy.pilgrim]

Goddamnit, I don't know of any fucking discounts, free donuts, or good looking girls with no underwear crossing their legs real slow for my benefit. I did get a VA loan to buy a house two different times. I've thought for a long time that the draft should be reinstated. My experience in the military only reinforced my opinion of that. And I've been out 43 years.

Here are a few hundred

https://militarybenefits.info/military-discounts/#home