Before the smoke and tear gas have even cleared from the next militarized police de-escalation failure, Americans should be gearing up for the annual Theatre of the Absurd on Capitol Hill, known formerly as the Senate and House Armed Services Committee markup discussions for the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). But mostly they’re not.

The thing is, most Americans don’t follow this Civics 101 process, or could care less. Perhaps if they knew that 63% of the US discretionary budget allocated to the arms industry so our military can obliterate brown people for our freedom, they might pay closer attention. A lot of us have either succumbed to grounded prospects and the futility of dealing with the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex or caved to the bloated economics of media fear cards and the military elite narrative. The rest of us are still pushing our boulders uphill, futilely persisting with Sisyphean expectations of reasonable reductions (read: crumbs) to Pentagon spending. On the other hand, things might be looking up. With an economy on life support in the middle of a global pandemic, with streets convulsing with police abuse and racial protests, and no end in sight, at least it’s taken our minds off of our catastrophic climate collapse. And so far, no threat of an asteroid collision.

Here’s a bizarre concept for a new normal. What if our empathetically bereft House and Senate Armed Service Committee number crunchers ignored Defense industry donors for once and threw the rest of us, including the marginalized, the poor, and the disenfranchised, some of those reallocated domestic crumbs? There has never been a more fitting time. Social distancing or no social distancing, a tsunami of righteous indignation is a clear indicator that enough has never been more than enough than now, today, if the smoke ever clears.

And here are just a few of the numbers, reasonable reductions to the Trump Pentagon budget that could significantly fulfill domestic priorities, thanks to People Over Pentagon  and a bill introduced in the House this week by Representatives Barbara Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal to cut $350 billion worth of waste from the Pentagon budget to invest in our local communities. A few examples:

• Don’t create a Space Force—save $2.6 billion. Does the US really need a Starship Fleet Command before we join the United Federation of Planets and choose to actually conduct deep space exploration, research, defense, peacekeeping, and diplomacy. Creating a new space bureaucracy will undermine effectiveness and increase costs and is unlikely to significantly add to US capabilities in this domain.
  
• Eliminate the Overseas Contingency Operations account—save $68.8 billion to $174 billion. There is bipartisan consensus that the overseas contingency operations account has become nothing more than a slush fund for Pentagon programs that have no connection to emergencies or contingencies.
• Cut service contracting by 15 percent—save $26 billion. Several analyses, including one conducted by the Project on Government Oversight, have found that hiring private contractors to perform work that would otherwise be performed by civilians, or not at all, has increased costs.
• End use-it-or-lose-it contract spending—save $18 billion. Branches of the military are afraid that if they spend less than their budget allows, Congress might send them less money in the next year. They often try to spend everything that’s left instead of admitting they can operate on less.   
• Defer or cancel development of the B-21 Bomber—save $3 billion. The Air Force currently operates a fleet of 157 long-range bombers, which will be able to keep flying until at least 2040. The Air Force estimates the new B-21 would begin operating about five to ten years from now. This manned bomber would be entirely irrelevant, looking for a mission.
• Replace future F-35s with F-16s and F-18s—save $2.4 billion. The F-35 program has already fallen nearly a decade behind schedule with a price tag that has more than doubled, $80 to $100 billion per. Nothing is slowing down the acquisition of the most expensive lemon in DOD history, despite flaws and huge cost overruns.
• Cancel the Ford-class carrier program—save $1 billion. Knowing the role carriers play in projecting power, US adversaries have been developing and deploying weapons to keep them at bay. Aircraft carriers are sitting ducks to adversaries’ anti-ship missiles, placing more than 5,000 US sailors in enemy crosshairs in every potential confrontation.
  
• Authorize a Base Realignment and Closure process—save $2 billion per year. Multiple administrations have requested that Congress authorize a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round to improve capabilities and get rid of excess capacity. Any BRAC round should also include adequate funding for the Office of Economic Adjustment to help affected communities transition.
• Reduce our active troop presence in Europe to 40,000—save $1.5 billion. Cold War I is so over. Eastern Europe has switched sides, and America’s European allies now possess a collective GDP and population larger than the US.  Why are American military personnel still stationed on the continent
  

                                  
At $740 billion per year, this year’s budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is at one of its highest levels since World War II – more than the next seven nations in the world combined, five of which are US allies. This arms industry cash is ready for pasture.

Just as we are exposing the rot in our militarized police and calling for its defunding and dismantling, so we must expose the rot in our interventionist foreign policy and call for the moral imperative of defunding the Pentagon. Decreasing Pentagon funds would allow for greater investments at home – healthcare and infrastructure, confronting militarism and racism, quality education, affordable housing, renewable energy and more. Recent polling indicates that a majority of American voters finally agree.
   
Mark Twain wrote of US interventionism, “Trampling on the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”
 
Today enduring with apathy is no longer an option for the donor class. A sincere social compact with working people and marginalized communities can be readily achieved by legitimate Congressional oversight and annual reallocations of Pentagon funds. This new normal will end wasteful spending that only benefits Pentagon contractors and their wealthy shareholders, resulting instead in human security for the rest of us. With the murder of George Floyd and its justifiable outcry, the near and future ramifications of dismissing such a compact now and in a post-pandemic world, are clearer now than ever before - with or without an asteroid.


The author of this post is Gene Marx, a former Naval Flight Officer and Past National Board of Directors Secretary of Veterans for Peace. He is currently the Communications Coordinator for Bellingham’s VFP Chapter 111. He can be reached at ejmarx2@gmail.com.

A Letter to the Wall
A Reminiscence in Isolation: For George

I have thought a lot about George lately, one of my ghosts from a past that has been lucky enough to span decades. Luckily, George has never been a triggered recollection, just a benign spectral from my misdirected youth. And at least for now, for this letter to the Wall,  just call him George, although his full name and rank are etched in black granite on Panel 26E, Line 48.

I almost never know what prompts my high school version of George to show up. I was listening to some Stones and Creedence last week from a favorite Vietnam era playlist…perfect self-isolation rock. Also Memorial Day is coming up, so who knows? Our lifelines barely crossed, only once as a matter of fact, in the summer of 1965. We were both non-essential workers, stuck in a fast food restaurant, slogging out our last summer at minimum wage before we had to take LBJ’s draft seriously. Neither of us were Fortunate Sons, obviously, both just navigating the grinds of adolescence, topped off by the daily preoccupations and upheavals of a foreshadowed war in Vietnam.
 
Aside from the shared angst of uncertain futures we had virtually nothing in common. Hometown parents and teachers must have loved George, a reserved, hard-working math-club type, straight A student, from a no-frills, Catholic family.  Two years older, my life was his parallel universe in miniature. I was an unbridled college freshman, committed to nothing more than a draft-deferred C+ average, the next weekend, and a military aviation career like my father. Nonetheless, a year at Tech and the suspect worldliness that went with it were street credentials enough for George to look up to me.
 
After hours of flipping burgers and scraping grease, our idle conversation occasionally touched on our tenuous prospects, like this one time. “Hey, man, thought about where you’re going to college?” A National Honor Society and California Scholarship Federation standout like George should be able to write his own ticket.
 
“I think I’m going to help my folks out, Gene, and sign up with the Marines.” Scholarship or not, things were tight at home and George thought the extra bucks and the GI Bill would really help. The sky was the limit after that, and he was probably right.
 
“George, come on, man. You gotta be shitting me!” It was all I could come up when I could take a breath. Tact was not a strong suit of mine at nineteen. “George, do the math, that’s your thing. Nam’ll be history before you can even graduate. Get your ass in Berkeley, or Notre Dame, wherever, for chrissake. Wait it out.”
 
I think he said he had five or six brothers and sisters, that it was just not that easy. It made me feel like I actually was “a fortunate son…the fortunate one.” The way things turned out who could argue? Decades later I still wish I would have pushed the issue, but given George’s circumstances, would it have made any difference?  Probably not. I knew damn well, though, that there was a gunny sergeant out there, somewhere, who would eat him alive, scholarship or no scholarship.
 
It was two years later when I read of George’s death - “Killed in action from small-arms fire September 10 in Quang Tri, South Vietnam” - in a casualty listicle below the fold of our local daily. By that time, a dispassionate subscriber would also learn that George “served as a rifleman with an unknown unit...his remains were recovered.” Always missing were the details that mattered: the impact on his family, shattered dreams, the untapped potential. Barely nineteen, George had been in Vietnam for less than a month.
 
Years ago in an alternate reality, my generation was engulfed by another geopolitical pandemic, one tracked not by epidemiologists but militarists, and spread by the lies of American hubris. While the Vietnam War was nothing more than a nightly news distraction at first, over time it mutated into a more dominant strain, finally killing millions. Some, like George, and so many others sharing a common betrayal, are arrayed in Constitution Gardens. Like COVID-19, there was never an end in sight and surviving such random chaos seemed like just as much of a crapshoot then, as it is now…but with much better music.


The author of this post is Gene Marx, a former Naval Flight Officer and Past National Board of Directors Secretary of Veterans for Peace. He is currently the Communications Coordinator for Bellingham’s VFP Chapter 111. He can be reached at ejmarx2@gmail.com.


Please register here to and participate in New York City VFP’s 2020 Memorial Day Commemoration to be held via Zoom at 2 pm EDT, Monday, May 25. If you want to share your Letter to The Wall or a memory of someone killed in war during the Program, please email nycvfp@gmail.com.

At the end of April, 2014, Veterans For Peace hosted a series of speakers, musicians, and actors in New York City at the historic Judson Church to launch our Full Disclosure program. We are working to countermand the Pentagon's attempts to hack into our nation's memory of the Vietnam War. The Department of Defense is trying to make this war into a noble enterprise worth commemorating and celebrating. We are trying to deepen the context of this discussion -- bringing in the moral issues that compelled hundreds of thousands of Americans to take to the streets in protest; bringing in the courage of soldiers and veterans who joined in the resistance against the war; and, perhaps most importantly, bringing in the voices of the Southeast Asian peoples who endured our invasion. I wrote the following flyer to coax people through the doors.

The usual question -- who won the war?-- is hopelessly naive.
The real question that needs to be answered is this: Who owns the war?
Who gets to do the moral triage after the ceasefire is declared?
Who gets to declare who was right and who was wrong? 

Is it the soldier coming home wounded in body, mind, and soul?
Or the farmer whose land is sown with blood and unexploded ordnance?
Or the families with loved ones buried in the ground?
Or the families with loved ones maimed in body and mind?

Is it, perhaps, all of the above?

These are important questions to ask. 
For if we have learned anything over the years, it is this: 
those who own the present moment will shape the past
to form the future for the next generation to come.

We need to know who gets to tell the narrative.
Who gets to tell the young not just where or when.
But why. And to whom. And for what.
Who gets to hold the mirror?

We who have suffered through these wars know there is no closure.
There is only sorting away and dusting off when the occasion arises.
Our war never goes away, but that doesn't mean that our children 
are condemned to fight the next one.

We need to abolish war. We need all of our stories to be told.
We need full disclosure.


Doug Rawlings is the author of three books of poetry and a co-founder of Veterans For Peace, a nationwide organization of veterans and their allies dedicated to abolishing war as an instrument of national policy. For more, see veteransforpeace.org.

"We need not whine about being under stay home orders, remember the world is dealing not only with the coronavirus, but war too. War the US has a hand in. While they march in Lansing with their assault rifles for show could they understand the idea of justice? Of burying the innocent killed due to the never ending "right" we think we have. Substitute God for Allah. Substitute Iman with Pastor. Substitute yourself with the writer." 
                                                                                                          
Divine Justice
By a Friend from Yemen

Today we buried my neighbor’s daughter. As we lowered her broken five-year-old body into the ground, I was able to make out on the white burial shroud the contours of her head and her slightly open mouth.

I went down into the hole with her father and brother, and we slid the tiny corpse into its final resting slot. I took a last look at the child who was no more, a casualty of the daily bombardment, then climbed out of the grave and the diggers proceeded to refill the hole.

On the walk back home, I kept thinking of the imam’s words from the Friday sermon, earlier in the day: “She is now with Allah and His angels.”

“Inshallah,” I said to myself, “I hope so.” What gave me pause for reflection, however, was what the imam said next: “Allah never forgets the wrong-doers and His justice will be served on the Final Day.”

“Justice?” I kept thinking all the way to the house and shaking my head. According to my imam, Hitler, Saddam, Idi Amin and all other undeniably bad people get what’s coming to them in the afterlife. Of course, we can’t check on this and there is no evidence for it so we are left to just…”believe it.”

Good and innocent people suffer and die every minute of every day. Many people who have done horrible things live long lives in luxury and comfort and then die peacefully in their sleep. If there is some kind of divine justice at work here on this planet, then it must be very different from the human concept of justice.

Millions of malnourished and parasite-infested children in developing countries do not deserve their fate, at least not by any moral standards I understand, but they keep suffering and dying nonetheless. And the suggestion that good times await these children in heaven after they die is not only impossible to prove, it's also heartless.

If God is all-good and all-powerful, then why does He allow suffering to happen? And why so much suffering? Over the millennia, brilliant theologians, in thousands of volumes, have wrestled with this “problem of evil”, as they call it. None of them - neither Christian, nor Muslim, nor Jew – has been able to come up with a single convincing answer – not one.

The argument from evil is a devastating assault on monotheism. Many people who at one time considered themselves religious turned to atheism not because they were persuaded by logical argument but because the horror of the world’s evil shattered their faith. Elie Wiesel poignantly speaks for them in recalling his experiences in a Nazi death camp, hearing the cries of the children, screaming from the midst of the blazing ovens:

“Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my Faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never”.

The argument from evil haunts monotheists. Qualify his understanding of God as much as he will in order to distance the deity from responsibility for evil, the monotheist no less than the atheist is painfully aware of how short all arguments fall.

The problem of evil is an overwhelming burden for the monotheist. It is his great tragedy.

By now, I was approaching my house, and I caught sight of three children playing in the street. I used to see my neighbor’s daughter play with these children every day.

She will not play with them anymore.

As I was about to open the gate leading to my house, two jets streaked across the sky to my left. The missiles slung under their wings glinted in the afternoon sun, and I knew they were on their way to visit death and destruction on some hapless victims somewhere else.

It dawned on me, at that moment, that there is no warm and cozy blanket of justice covering our planet. The only justice we have is that which we make for ourselves.

I watched the jets recede into the horizon.

“Justice,” I said to myself as I swung the gate open, and stepped in.


The author of this post is Mohamed from Yemen, with an introduction by Connie Wicker from Michigan.

“Unless an enlightened citizenry on campuses, in town halls, in community centers, in places of work, play and worship, is aroused and demands our government step back from the brink, we may find the life of our nation, our own lives, and the lives of our loved ones, irrevocably changed.”  Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, 2017

Presidential candidate, Army National Guard Major and Congressional Representative from Hawaii Tulsi Gabbard has repeatedly advocated for such enlightenment to expose the true costs of war during her 2020 campaign, but likely or not, you did not hear it. Just as it dismissed the Dennis Kucinich antiwar platform during his 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, corporate media has all but erased her anti-interventionist war message since the day she announced her run in February 2019, and barring any debate participation by her since November.

Update: Representative Tulsi Gabbard suspended her campaign on March 19, 2020.

Between the fading bugles of Veterans Day weekend and the crass rants of Black Friday, my day-long musings invariably return to Vietnam, but this year there was a new wrinkle to my abstractions. You see, my granddaughter, Kaya, turns 14 next week and she has never lived in a time when her country wasn’t waging an unrelenting interventionist war somewhere. Not for one single moment, and I couldn’t let it go.

So, what does that have to do with Vietnam? Well, as I grew up and unavoidably served in combat, I never thought “my war” was ever going to end. Never. It was always the mainspring of my very existence, and that of my contemporaries. It was also a monster with an insatiable appetite that devoured friends, relationships, plans and dreams, and no one could – or would – kill it, not a diplomat, not an elected Congress or President, no one.

Today we know our bloody intervention in Indochina was also very much like its evil twin, the disastrous war in Afghanistan - an illegal occupation to prop up a corrupt government, fueled on hubris, with no discernible end state. Still, US forces avoided calling the war in Vietnam unwinnable 50 years ago, just as Pentagon talking points mandate for its ongoing Afghanistan mess. Such military myopia is incessant, but when I first set foot in Da Nang in 1971, it was clear to me the best and the brightest had failed. The American military by any standards had lost in ignominy, thousands of US lives before I had even arrived, with still no end in sight.

Moreover, as historian and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich emphasized in a recent op-ed, “With the sole exception of Vietnam, the ongoing Afghanistan war represents the greatest failure in U.S. military history. Today, all but a few diehards understand that Vietnam was a debacle of epic proportions. With Afghanistan, it’s different: In both political and military circles, the urge to dodge the truth remains strong.”

Not surprisingly, dodging the truth is still paramount for the perpetrators. Selling even a hopelessly failed Afghan war continues to fuel exponentially the war machine’s bottom line, House and Senate campaign coffers and burgeoning defense budgets. Yet, after eighteen years, untold casualties, and $1 trillion in the short term – another trillion over the next 40 years for post 9/11 veterans’ care - it would seem the “master” planners and unbloodied patriots on Capitol Hill owe the rest of us a long-overdue explanation, if not an apology. But don't hold your breath. Neither outreach is expected, while the repercussions of unrestrained hegemony continue to plunder future generations.
    
Just recently, as if a reverberation from my Vietnam reveries, social justice and environmental activist Jean-Louis Bourgeois noted, “For Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan is not a reason for shame. This is not about America; in fact, this is where American exceptionalism gets us into trouble. The shame is to deny the reality of the situation.”

Someday, when the existential consequences of perpetual war are well beyond catastrophic, culpable elders will be tasked with explaining to my granddaughter Kaya and her contemporaries why once again, a half century after Vietnam, those that could – elected Chief Executives, Congress and all the Presidents’ men and women, as well as a shamelessly complicit corporate media - did nothing to kill their monster.


Gene Marx is a former Naval Flight Officer and Past National Board of Directors Secretary of Veterans for Peace. He is currently the Communications Coordinator for Bellingham’s VFP Chapter 111. He can be reached at ejmarx2@gmail.com.

More than a few US invasions ago, beginning with Afghanistan in 2001, transport aircraft chartered by the US military have shuttled almost 3 million troops through Shannon Airport. My youngest son and his gun truck company made the stopover trips through County Clare to the carnage in the Middle East twice, in 2003 and 2004; even disembarking for the terminal lounge in full battle dress while their aircraft was being refueled. There was never an attempt by the soldiers to hide this unwitting disregard for Irish neutrality. To my son’s knowledge there was never a search of the planes and his troops were armed to the teeth, in violation not only of the Irish constitution but also the Hague Convention restricting the movement of troops or munitions by neutral countries.

While not exactly hidden in plain sight, this US-Hiberno cooperative received very little global attention until peace and human rights activists pushed back, most prominently Western Ireland’s Shannonwatch, by monitoring, posting and publishing all US military movement flights into and over Shannon Airport, more than 600 landings a year since 2012. While unchecked power tends to remain absolutely unchecked, opposition to this ongoing illegal military alliance is heating up.  Dublin’s MEP Clare Daly has always been among its more vocal opponents. Responding to a regional poll denoting a growing resistance, she remarked, “A country with a policy of positive neutrality would not facilitate the massive, devastating displacement of tens of millions of people through wars whose only purpose is to keep the gears of the military-industrial complex oiled.”
 
On June 6, former mayor of Galway and TD Catherine Connolly, after standing in solidarity with Shannon Airport activists, voiced her frustration in an interview, “We’re facilitating the murder and slaughter of innocent people…and Shannon, unfortunately, is an absolute integral part of that. On any given night there are more military aircraft or more civilian aircraft carrying military than there are ordinary flights. We’ve set up Shannon now to depend on our collusion with wars abroad.”

As a growing majority continues to oppose this affront to Irish neutrality, Shannon remains square one for all US now and future wars. One likely rationale, according to Shannonwatch’s John Lannon: “From the US point of view it’s a means to suck in another previously neutral or unaligned country into their coalition and ultimately into NATO. So we are being dragged into something that is destructive, something that is causing millions of people to be displaced from their homes and probably millions to die directly from the wars in the Middle East.”

This year opposition to the militarism of Shannon Airport clearly went global. On March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, two US veterans, longtime anti-war activists and Veterans For Peace members Ken Mayers and Tarak Kauff, attempted to expose this clear breach of international law at Shannon by unfurling on the apron a large banner that read Respect Irish Neutrality, U.S. War Machine Out of Shannon Airport!  As one would expect, the peace-vets were abruptly apprehended by airport security and Gardaí, and long story short, their passports were confiscated. They are still in Ireland grappling with an Irish legal labyrinth and one excruciating delay after another, for trespassing.

By contrast, in December 2010, Ken and Tarak and more than 130 other peace veterans were arrested at the Obama White House during an anti-war demonstration, amidst numerous banners and just as much righteous indignation. Cuffed, dragged through the snow to awaiting vans, and jailed, they were released in less than a day. Some were even given the option to return for trials, and a few of them did just that. Conversely, on July 11 the Dublin High Court denied the VFP exiles’ appeal of bail conditions, requiring them to stay in Ireland until their trial date is set, possibly - but not necessarily - this October. It seems the US Justice Department’s treatment of dissidents might be rubbing off on the Irish courts.

In 2018 Patrick Smyth of The Irish Times wrote, “The trouble with the concept of ‘neutrality’ as an expression of a fundamental Irish foreign policy values is that it is loaded with contested political meaning and historical resonances above and beyond the simple desire to remain militarily non-aligned. Some of its subtext clearly resonates with national aspirations, notably a desire not to be complicit in great power or neo-imperialist military adventures.”
 
Perhaps so, but that was last year. That non-alignment ship has long sailed, along with a rich Irish tradition of resistance. Ireland is all in now, a player, and fully vested in the bloodshed of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, as well as future war zones. Only now this alliance with the US military, facilitating a globe-circling havoc launched from Garrison Shannon, is in full view.



The author of this piece is Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington. Gene is a Vietnam veteran and former Naval Flight Officer aboard the USS Coral Sea in 1971-72. He is a past Secretary of the Veterans for Peace National Board of Directors and is currently a member of VFP-111. He lives in Bellingham with his wife, Victoria.

Gene Marx


Sir,

Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Afghanistan before that, transport aircraft, chartered by the US military, have shuttled almost 3 million troops through Shannon Airport. My youngest son and his gun truck company made the stopover trips to the carnage twice, in 2003 and 2004; even disembarking for the terminal lounge in full battle dress while their aircraft was being refueled. There was never an attempt by the soldiers to hide this unwitting disregard for Irish neutrality. To my son’s knowledge there was never a search of the planes and his troops were armed to the teeth, in violation of not only the Irish constitution but also the Hague Convention.

Last St. Patrick’s Day two US veterans, longtime anti-war activists and Veterans For Peace members Ken Mayers and Tarak Kauff, attempted to expose this clear breach of international law at Shannon by unfurling a large banner on the apron that read Respect Irish Neutrality, U.S. War Machine Out of Shannon Airport!  As one would expect, my peace-vet friends were abruptly apprehended by airport security and Gardaí, and long story short, their passports were confiscated and they are still in Ireland awaiting trial. More than four months now, one excruciating delay after another with no end in sight. It’s as if the US Justice Department’s treatment of dissidents might be rubbing off on the Irish courts. My great-great-grandfather Mícheál Smyth of County Mayo has got to be freaking out.
  
Your readership deserves far more coverage of this international law violation than it has received thus far. Polls continue to show that nearly six out of every ten Irish citizens oppose the U.S. military co-opting Shannon Airport, “a de facto American military base,” in Dublin MEP Clare Daly’s words. The Irish government however seems content to allow this occupation of County Clare to continue, with not only Irish neutrality at stake but Ireland’s rich heritage of resisting imperialism the obvious collateral damage.

It is far past time to end this thing. Please support the VFP veterans’ bail to include a promise to return. Rest assured they’ll be back. There is nothing they would like more now than a trial.


This piece originally appeared in the Irish Examiner.



The author of this post is Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington. Gene is a Vietnam veteran and former Naval Flight Officer with VAQ-135 aboard the USS Coral Sea in 1971-72. Past Secretary of the VFP National Board of Directors, Gene is currently a member of VFP-111.

In 2012 President Barack Obama announced his government was willing to spend $63 million on a series of commemorations of the American War in Vietnam stretching over a decade, we in Veterans For Peace knew we had to respond.

Part of a Veterans For Peace campaign to counter the Pentagon’s effort to rewrite history includes a letter writing campaign. Over the past four years we have collected and delivered, on Memorial Day, 400 letters written to The Wall.  We print the letters out and then put them into envelopes marked "Please Read Me". At 10:30am on Memorial Day we descend into The Wall in Washington, DC to solemnly place these letters where they belong at the feet of the names on that memorial. They are read by visitors to The Wall throughout the weekend and then are placed into the National Parks Archives. We take this ceremony very seriously. It is not a political gimmick. It is an act of reverence.
 

So, if you reading this, that’s a good start. Let me tell you something about this sacred place, something you would have never known otherwise. For me it begins with line 122 of the panel you’re facing, knee-high and to your left. That’s where my name should be, somewhere close to my best friend, had another detonation taken place. But that’s a much longer story.

My friend Captain Richard C. Halpin was never going to have a long story, much like every name arrayed on these polished granite panels to your left and right. His was ended instantaneously by a surface-to-air missile on March 29, 1972, near Tchepone, Laos.  (I ran into one of Dick’s wingmen years later and learned that Dick had volunteered to fly this sortie in place of a fatigued roommate.) His combat tour was over. His bags - as it turned out, his personal effects - were packed for home. He was listed as missing in action for years until teeth fragments of his were found in 1986.

Dick had dreams. Survive this deployment, get home to California in one piece, catch up with friends, do some surfing, and eventually teach high school history. Like most of us, he was behind the power curve. He had a lot of catching up to do, but he’d have been great. Unlikely famous, but his students would have never forgotten “Mr. Halpin,” a funny, engaging guy, always piquing their curiosities. What a waste.

Capt. Richard Halpin’s name should have never been in this death pool, for so many reasons. The crewman he replaced has lived with his own moral injury for decades, having co-opted Dick’s slot in history. And family and friends will continue to die a little every time they visit Panel 2 West. Most of the other visitors to other panels on future Memorial Days will never understand why anyone fought and died in that faraway conflict. Why Vietnam? Who lost, who won. Go ahead, ask someone. I couldn’t have told you in 1972, not really, Dick either. It was just our war, but the lies and treachery of Truman to Nixon fed the grinder.

Just walk away; knowing full well that The Wall is the last memorial of its kind. Our 21st century interventionist conflicts are much too numerous to even track, much less memorialize future KIAs. Soon a Global War on Terrorism Memorial, not far from where you’re standing, will serve as an altar to this country’s first multigenerational war without end. Our first living war memorial, built on the same lies.

Now do yourself and your family a favor. Read two books, Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse.

You’re welcome.



The author of this post is Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington. Gene is a Vietnam veteran and former Naval Flight Officer with VAQ-135 aboard the USS Coral Sea in 1971-72. Past Secretary of the VFP National Board of Directors, Gene is currently a member of VFP-111. Letters to The Wall is a project of VFP's Vietnam Full Disclosure campaign.

Maj. Danny Sjursen

This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.

What if they called a war and no one came? Well, now’s the time folks. The apparent march to war with Iran represents a pivotal moment in the historical arc – the rise and fall – of our republic come empire. This potential war is so unnecessary, so irrational, that it borders on the absurd. Still, since the U.S. now fields a professional, volunteer military, few citizens have “skin in the game.” As such, they could hardly care less.

Unlike in past wars – think Vietnam – there is no longer a built in, established antiwar movement. This is unfortunate, and, dangerous for a democracy. See the US Government operates with near impunity in foreign affairs, waging global war without the consent of the people and, essentially, uninterested in what the people have to say at all. It should not be thus in a healthy republic. People should not fear their government; governments should fear their people.

So let me propose something seemingly ludicrous. It’s this: since Americans only trust the military among various branches of government, and since that military is both over adulated and ultimately responsible for waging these insane wars, it is within the military that active dissent must begin. That’s right, to stop the war America needs clean cut, seemingly conservative, all-American soldiers and officers to start refusing to fight. The people will back them; trust me. These guys are heroes after all, right? I mean few will pay attention to some aging hippie protester – even if he or she is correct – but even Republicans might tune in to hear what a combat vet has to say.

Remember, we soldiers take an oath not to a particular president or a certain government but to the Constitution. And that constitution has been violated time and again for some 75 years as US presidents play emperor and wage unilateral wars without the required, and clearly stipulated, consent of Congress, I.e. the people’s representatives. Thus, one could argue – and I’m doing just that – that a massive military “sit-down-strike” of sorts would be both legal and moral.

Sure, it’s a long shot. But there is historical precedence for dissent within the US military. It is an unknown but vibrant history worthy of a brief recounting. Back in the mid-19th century, many US Army officers were so appalled by the futility and brutality of the three American attempts to subjugate the Seminole tribe in Florida that a staggering portion of the young subalterns simply resigned.

There was also dissent in the ranks during the Mexican-American War of conquest. Though they did their duty, many officers were appalled by the blatant aggression of their country. A young lieutenant – and future general / president – named US Grant stated that he knew “the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” It’s unlikely that very many Americans even know that prominent statesmen, too, have often been against wars.

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Maj. Danny Sjursen, a Truthdig regular contributor, is a retired U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, "Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge." He lives in Lawrence, Kan. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his new podcast "Fortress on a Hill," co-hosted with fellow vet Chris "Henri" Henrikson.