by Matthew Hoh









It has been more than nine years since I resigned in protest over the escalation of the Afghan War from my position as a Political Officer with the US State Department in Afghanistan. It had been my third time to war, along with several years of working in positions effecting war policy in Washington, DC with the Department of Defense (DOD) and the State Department. My resignation in 2009 was not taken lightly by my superiors and my reasons for opposing President Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan found support amongst both military officers and civilian officials at senior levels in Kabul and Washington.

I was repeatedly asked not to resign and was offered a more senior position within the State Department. Richard Holbrooke, then the President’s appointed representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan told me he agreed with 95% of what I had written and asked me to join his staff, while the US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, told me my analysis was one of the best he had encountered and stated he would write an introduction endorsing my resignation letter if I remained with the US Embassy in Afghanistan for the remainder of my tour. In conversation with the US deputy ambassador to Afghanistan he agreed the war was not just unwinnable, but also corrupt, and stated he would not let his children serve in such a war. Further support for my views was provided by my counterparts who were serving as political officers in the most violent parts of Afghanistan: Kandahar, Helmand, Kunar, Nuristan and Oruzgan Provinces. These men and women made clear their agreement with my assessment and my resignation. The support from the military was equally effusive and genuine, often such support included apologies along the lines of “I’d like to resign too, but I’ve got kids heading to college in a few years…” (the golden handcuffs are an incredibly instrumental and integral aspect of the US Empire’s infrastructure). When I asked Karen DeYoung, the Washington Post correspondent who wrote the front page, above the fold story on my resignation for the Post, why she wrote such a piece about me, she replied she could not find anyone at the Pentagon, State Department or White House who disagreed with me.

I relate the above not to cheer lead for myself, although the sadness and despondency from witnessing the wars up close and from afar and their cruel constant murder, does, at times, necessitate such crutches for me, but to relay my own personal observation of the great lie of war in action; the ability of the machine of war to propel itself forward even when those most intimate with the war, those most responsible for it and without whose support and effort the war could not continue, carry on the war whilst knowing and living the lie full well.

Nearly almost a decade after my resignation, there are reports of a possible peace deal in the making for Afghanistan. What I recognize, so clearly and sickeningly, just as my mind, and my soul, can recall the bright scarlet red of fresh arterial blood that dulls in contact with dust and cloth, or the clay-like frozen set jaw of a dead young man, whether he have been called an Afghan, American or Iraqi, are the same lies of the war that were so skillfully and effectively utilized by politicians, generals and the media to escalate the war in 2009 now being recirculated to defeat any current attempts for peace.

Sacrifice does not confer sanctity

When President Obama entered office in 2009 less than 30,000 US troops were in Afghanistan. Within a year and a half that number would reach100,000 US military personnel along with 30,000 NATO soldiers from Europe and over 100,000 private contractors. Since 2001, more than 2400 US service members have been killed in Afghanistan, nearly 1800 of them since 2009. European armies have had more than 1100 soldiers killed and more than1700 contractors have been killed while performing jobs that in previous wars would have been done by US soldiers. Tens of thousands have been physically wounded while hundreds of thousands suffer from traumatic brain injuries, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), moral injury, depression, substance abuse and other “hidden” wounds of war. These hidden wounds have very real consequences: the US Department of Veterans Affairs reports young men and women who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq (a great many of them have served multiple deployments to both wars) have suicide rates six times higher than their civilian peers, while infantry units, those that have performed the most killing and dying, have been seen to have suicide rates fourteen times higher than young civilian men their own age. In real numbers that means, since 2001, likely more than 9,000 US veterans who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq have been lost to suicide after returning home.

Read entire article on counterpunch.


Matthew Hoh is a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy and a member of Veterans For Peace.

Tuesday, January 1, 2018 By Maj. Danny Jsursen

This piece originally appeared on Antiwar.com.

Most New Year’s resolutions last but a few days. By late January, the crowd in the gym dwindles down to its normal size. Most resolutions are fantasy, a simple act of wishful thinking. We all know this. Still, dreams are what make life tolerable. So, in that spirit, let’s take a break from the standard critique of existing U.S. foreign policy and conjure a world as it should be, not as it is. Consider this the ultimate New Year’s make believe – a resolution to swear off militarism and forever war in the Greater Middle East.

It would begin with a restructuring of the entire legal framework for American war-making. US soldiers still kill and die – and bomb at least seven countries – under two outdated Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). One, in 2001, authorized the president to battle the culprits of the 9/11 attacks, the Al Qaeda organization. The other, in 2003, approved the tragic-comic invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. Neither resolution is relevant to the fights at hand, which, therefore are only of dubious legality. In 2019, the US Congress should reassert its constitutional primacy in warfare, overturn the old AUMFs, and demonstrate the courage to debate and vote on each of America’s ongoing wars. If the people’s representatives truly believe any of the ongoing shooting wars – in Syria, Libya, Niger, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – are worth fighting, then let them say so publicly and declare war.

My guess is that most congressmen, knowing the prevailing public skepticism of ongoing overseas interventions, wouldn’t authorize the continuation of these disastrous campaigns. America’s forever warfare state might wither under the light of legitimate oversight. Nevertheless, no matter how Congress voted, the very act of public debate and accountability would be a refreshing change for our ostensible republic. When it comes to the momentous decisions of war and peace, more, not less, transparency should be the norm in 2019.

Read complete article on Antiwar.com.

             Help Bellingham’s Veterans For Peace Celebrate Armistice Day 2018!
   Sunday, November 11th, 10:30 AM at the Church of the Assumption, 2116 Cornwall Ave

Bellingham's Veterans For Peace and supporters of peace will be standing in solemn commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the end of the First World War across the street from the Church of the Assumption, 2116 Cornwall Ave, on Sunday, November 11 at 10:30 AM.

One hundred years ago this month the world celebrated peace as a universal principle. The last round of World War I was fired on November 11, 1918.  All the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War went silent during the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of that eleventh month.  Nations mourning their dead collectively called for an end to the butchery of all wars.  Armistice Day was born and designated as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated."

After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to rename and designate November 11 as a national holiday, Veterans Day.  Commemorating an end to hostilities quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war.  Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.
 
Acclaimed author Kurt Vonnegut lived the misery of World War II as a U.S. infantryman in Europe and wrote of the rebranding in "Breakfast of Champions":

"Armistice Day has become Veterans Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans Day is not. So, I will throw Veterans Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things. Veterans Day celebrates 'heroes' and encourages going off to kill and be killed in a future war -- or one of our current wars."

Next Sunday thousands of churches across the world, including Bellingham’s Church of the Assumption, will ring their bells 11 times slowly in solemn remembrance at 11 in the morning to mark the end of the war that, in retrospect, ended peace.  It's time for Americans to reclaim Armistice Day.
 
Join us in silent tribute, with worldwide millions, in commemoration of the Armistice centennial.


The author of this post is Veterans For Peace Lifetime Member and Vietnam Veteran Gene Marx, the Communications Coordinator of the CPL Jonathan Santos Memorial Veterans For Peace Chapter 111.

September 10, 2018

Web site destroyed, intimidation, and a “revenge flight.”

This account is long and disturbing, but so is the story.

The West Coast Action Alliance’s extensive web site was taken down and completely destroyed in July 2018 without our knowledge or consent. It contained more than four years’ worth of legal analysis, reporting, and whistleblower materials on the US Navy’s unprecedented expansion of warfare activities that are affecting communities in western Washington’s Whidbey Island, the San Juans, and the Olympic Peninsula.

While some readers who are Navy personnel or Navy supporters may rejoice, we remind you that the First Amendment is among the freedoms that many Americans have defended with their lives.

The good news is the web site can still be found (minus many of the large files) by going to the Wayback Machine, typing in westcoastactionalliance.org, clicking on “browse history,” and choosing the most recent version from July 2018.

The West Coast Action Alliance is part of a large citizen network, but we are also part of a small cadre of people who for years have been doing the tedious detective work of analyzing the Navy’s thousand-page Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) and Environmental Assessments (EA), all of which claim none of the Navy’s extraordinarily loud and disturbing activities in our region will have any “significant impacts” on wildlife, habitat, our communities, our drinking water, or our economies. Analysis, commentary and suggestions for letter-writing are the kinds of information we shared on this web site. It also served as a law library on this issue.

 1. What we know about how the web site was destroyed: Despite our annual subscription fee for web hosting being fully paid with six months left on it, not only was the entire web site destroyed, the backup file was also quickly dispatched. When asked for an explanation, a web host company representative said the reason, despite our fully paid subscription, was because of a separate, overdue “support” charge of $7.19, of which we were not aware. The company has still not coherently explained what this additional “support” charge was for, nor why we weren’t notified that it was due.

In early 2018, this web host, 1and1.com, reduced by 75% the amount of time a backup would be made available, from thirty days to seven. In addition to failing to notify us of this, they also failed to notify us that the destruction of our web site was imminent because of this overdue $7.19 “support” charge. Despite thorough searches of our files, no email or other notifications of termination of service from 1and1.com have ever been found.

Read complete account on West Coast Action Alliance.

Men younger than this war could now be sent there to die, we have a responsibility to stop that from happening
 



Joe Glenton is a British Army veteran and writer. He was court-martialed and jailed, in 2009, for refusing to return to Afghanistan because he opposed the war. 


Donald Trump has requested more British troops be sent to Afghanistan. It is very likely the crisis-hit UK government will agree. Neither the request nor the answer are related to Afghan, British or US security in a meaningful sense.
 
It is telling that so many of those whose arguments for leaving the EU were based on national sovereignty are silent on US control of British foreign policy. I support leaving the EU but recognise Britain's relationship with the US is far more toxic for our own country and the wider world.
 
Let us recall, for example, there are no EU military colonies in Britain, that the EU does not to all intents and purposes control our nuclear arsenal and that the EU dragged us into precisely zero illegal middle eastern wars. These things are all true of the US and affront UK sovereignty.
 
Deployments at the direction of belligerent US leaders must be at least forcefully opposed. With a UK military reduced in manpower due to austerity and a series of epic vanity projects – carriers, submarines, fighter jets – being built largely to support US, not British, global reach the time is ripe to consciously uncouple from the US.

Read complete article in joe.co.uk.

Monday, April 09, 2018 By Yoav Litvin, Truthout | Interview







In 2018, the term "identity politics" is often associated with the promotion of tokenized personalities rather than on the representation and advancement of oppressed communities within society. This form of identity politics often revolves around empty partisan placards and exclusive single-issue platforms rather than on forming inclusive alliances meant to stimulate fundamental structural change. As such, it reinforces a populism that serves white supremacy and patriarchy.

The crisis of identity politics has undermined the concept of intersectionality, which is viewed as critical to the struggle for liberation from all forms of oppression. The recent assassination of the Brazilian Black queer activist Marielle Franco and the consequent public uproar demonstrate the threat intersectional leaders pose to the ruling establishment that uses division and preserves privilege to stifle change. Leaders such as Franco serve a vital unifying role in a peoples' transnational solidarity movement that embraces -- rather than eliminates -- identities.

Ashanti Monts-Treviska co-manages a social enterprise, Cascadia Deaf Nation, which focuses on creating a member-owned cooperative model that co-creates thriving spaces with Deaf Black Indigenous People of Color (DBIPOC*) in British Columbia, Washington State and Oregon. Monts-Treviska is currently a doctoral student in transformative studies and consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell is a Pacific Indigenous scholar and transformative coach who intermingles Indigenous epistemology and Western philosophies.

Together, Monts-Treviska and Ebalaroza-Tunnell facilitate spaces for dialogue that shift paradigms and challenge the status quo. They are currently working on producing a resilience and adaptability workshop to address the dynamics between trigger and response.

In this interview, Monts-Treviska and Ebalaroza-Tunnell discuss the importance of intersectionality and decolonization as fundamental aspects of building a just and equitable society.

Read entire article on truth-out.


The author of this piece is Veterans For Peace Chapter 111 Member and former Israel Defense Forces Veteran Yoav Litvin.

For Immediate Release                                       
April 11, 2018                                                                                                                                           
                    Veterans: U.S. Attack on Syria Could Lead to Nuclear War
                               Call for Veterans and GI’s to Resist Illegal Orders

A leading veterans’ organization is warning that a U.S. attack on Syria could lead to a nuclear war. Russian military forces in Syria will undoubtedly be among the targets of U.S. missiles.  Russia has said it will shoot down U.S. missiles, and attack the “platforms from which they are fired,” i.e. U.S. ships.

“Why the rush to war?” asked Gerry Condon, president of Veterans For Peace.  “Why is the mass media cheerleading for war instead of asking hard questions?  Why are Democratic and Republican politicians trying to out-do one another with calls for ever more massive attacks on Syria?

“There is no proof yet of a Syrian government gas attack, only a video made by a fundamentalist rebel group that wants more U.S. intervention.  Even if the reports are true, a military response will only lead to more death and destruction, and dangerous escalations.

“We are talking about a direct confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers,” said Condon. “Why would the U.S. risk nuclear war over dubious chemical weapons claims?

“Veterans have longer memories than the press and the politicians,” said Condon.  “We remember how we were lied into the Iraq War with false reports of ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ U.S. wars throughout the Middle East have caused millions of deaths and destroyed entire societies.  Our soldiers and their families have also paid an extremely high price. Veterans, GI’s and their families will not accept another war based on lies. We will be protesting in the streets, in the suites, at media outlets and at military bases."

All military personnel, from low ranking GI’s to the top generals and admirals, have an obligation to disobey illegal orders. Orders to carry out acts of war against a sovereign nation that is not threatening the U.S. are illegal orders.

“We swore an oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” said Condon. “Right now those enemies are those who would rush our country recklessly into another devastating war.”

Contact: Gerry Condon at 206-499-1220.


The submitter 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.

3/16/18

By Conor Friedersdorf  




When U.S. Army soldiers ended their massacre of elderly men, women, and children in a South Vietnamese hamlet 50 years ago—on March 16, 1968—perhaps 500 civilians lay dead.

The green troops expected to meet Vietcong forces, but instead found unarmed families. “During the next few hours, the civilians were murdered,” Seymour Hersh later wrote. “Many were rounded up in small groups and shot, others were flung into a drainage ditch at one edge of the hamlet and shot, and many more were shot at random in or near their homes. Some of the younger women and girls were raped and then murdered. After the shootings, the G.I.s systematically burned each home, destroyed the livestock and food, and fouled the area’s drinking supplies.”

The My Lai massacre still shocks the conscience.

It’s hard to fathom how a group of young American men, most of whom would never have killed anyone but for the Vietnam War, spiraled out of control together, perpetrating atrocities that rival any committed in the annals of human warfare.

And yet, whenever a country’s civilian leaders decide to send young men to fight any war of sustained length, it is almost certain that discipline will break down somewhere, that savagery will take hold sometime, and that shameful evil will be done, as had happened during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War.

A country can minimize the evil perpetrated in its name, by its soldiers, by going to war only as a last resort; maintaining discipline as best as is humanly possible during armed conflict; holding war criminals responsible for their deeds; and treating those who stop or uncover crimes against humanity as heroes rather than villains. The hero of the My Lai massacre was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr. Along with the members of his crew, Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn, he began observing the U.S. troops in Sơn Mỹ Village from the air, believing them to be attacking enemy forces. It took time for him to realize that the soldiers of Company C were committing mass murder. At that moment, he could easily have just flown away.

Instead, he landed his helicopter, confronted heavily armed child killers and rapists amid their killing frenzy, and saved the lives of at least 11 civilians. As The New York Times described it decades later in his obituary:
 
He touched down near a bunker in which a group of about 10 civilians were being menaced by American troops. Using hand signals, Mr. Thompson persuaded the Vietnamese to come out while ordering his gunner and his crew chief to shoot any American soldiers who opened fire on the civilians. None did. Mr. Thompson radioed for a helicopter gunship to evacuate the group, and then his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, pulled a boy from a nearby irrigation ditch, and their helicopter flew him to safety.
 
Upon returning to base he reported what he saw. And that likely saved many more innocents, for commanders ordered a halt to an operation that had been planned to include forays into other nearby hamlets where more killings could have taken place.

When I reflect on the My Lai massacre, I cannot put myself in the minds of the dozens of men who perpetrated it nor the three who risked their lives to intervene. I don’t know if anyone can fully explain either savagery or heroism in war.

But a country needn’t solve any mystery to know how it ought to respond to mass murder. And that’s why, in my judgment, the U.S. should feel the most shame for the fact that just one man, Lieutenant William Calley, was ever punished for the mass killings. Found guilty of murdering no less than 20 people, he was sentenced to life in prison, but put on house arrest instead after President Nixon intervened. In the end, even he served just three-and-a-half years of house arrest. Then he went free.

He is now 74.

And Hugh Thompson? After news of the My Lai massacre reached the United States, this was his experience:
 
“After it broke, I was not a good guy. I was sure not being invited to Annapolis or     West Point or any other university that I’ve been to since, because I was a traitor. I was a communist. I was a sympathizer. I was neither one of those, I didn’t think. I was very confused about why I was being treated this way, because how wrong can it be helping a fellow human? And I’m no pacifist either. You know, I’m not one of these peacenik guys. So I was just very confused, and that went on for about 30 years.

“I became invisible. When it first broke, people thought everybody was picking on  Lieutenant Calley. Believe me, Lieutenant Calley was very guilty. There is no way to get around it. But we, being Americans, we cheer for the underdog, so that’s what people were thinking. They thought the establishment was picking on this little guy. The turmoil the United States was in during this time was quite significant. We had demonstrations on every campus in the United States except about three, and I guarantee they were right outside your gate, because we had been there too long. We were [the demonstrators said] nothing but a bunch of baby killers, you know, and it was just a bad time for America.

And Congress came after me real hard. A very senior congressman made a public statement that if anybody goes to jail in this My Lai stuff, it will be the helicopter pilot.”
 
He later told 60 Minutes, “I’d received death threats over the phone. Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up.” He and his crew did not receive the Soldier’s Medal until 1998. He lived to see the Army teach his behavior as a model of good soldiering. He died in 2006.

If the Armed Forces could train its members so that the murder of civilians would never again occur, and so that all soldiers possessed the moral rectitude and courage of Hugh Thompson, it would—and the moral risks inherent in wars of choice would shrink. Unfortunately, no army can totally eliminate war crimes perpetrated by its worst soldiers, nor can any army simply replicate the best of its men.

Meanwhile, the government’s unwillingness to prosecute torturers, despite its treaty obligations, shows that it sometimes remains willing to tolerate war criminals as it fights its enemies, and that the public is often oblivious to misbehavior by its soldiers.

That’s why, even though the Armed Forces have learned from My Lai, the surest way for the U.S. to avoid its next crime against humanity is for it to avoid wars of choice. Admittedly, the possibility of war crimes cannot by itself tell us whether it is prudent or imprudent to participate in a given conflict; but the next time that a war is being considered, rather than pretend that no American soldier would ever intentionally rape, maim, or murder, the near certainty that sustained war will include atrocities perpetrated by Americans should always at least weigh against waging it.

By Gene Marx




By now most of the world has stopped caring about the panic that gripped Hawaii one Sunday last month for all of 38 minutes. The false missile alert after all was just that. No harm done. Americans have even managed to settle back into their comfort zones watching Korean American snowboarder Chloe Kim conquer the halfpipe at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. In spite of a core message of peace and reunification an undercurrent of US and North Korean hostility continues to run below the surface. And while overtures of dialogue from both sides of the 38th parallel may have raised hopes since the Opening ceremony, harsh rhetoric could easily return when the Olympic flame is extinguished and the athletes return home.

OK. So where are we now?  
 
First of all the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a nuclear state. We need to get over it. Outside of the collapsing apartheid government of South Africa in 1989, NO nuclear power has ever unilaterally, much less voluntarily disarmed. And the Hawaiian chaos could have easily been misread by North Korean leaders as a cover for an attack by the US military. With little or no room for error and nothing to lose at that point, officials in Pyongyang might have easily opted for an immediate counterattack based on its limited, ground-based early warning detection assets, setting off a spiraling thermonuclear holocaust in a worst case.
 
The atomic age is replete with near nuclear catastrophes, and billions of lives still hang in the balance seven decades after the Trinity detonation. In a recent article in The New Yorker, Sidney D. Drell a groundbreaking researcher and physicist who served for nearly half a century as a top adviser to the United States government on military technology and arms control, considered it a miracle – “so far beyond my normal optimism” - that no other city since Nagasaki had been destroyed by a nuclear weapon. Given all the close calls and mistakes since then our species continues to exist on borrowed time.
 
It would seem that the time for talking, diplomatic dialogue, is long overdue.
 
The United States has appeared to endorse a closer post-Olympics engagement between South and North Korea with an eye to eventual US-North Korean talks, but has agreed with Seoul that sanctions must be intensified to push Pyongyang to negotiate an end to its nuclear weapons program. U.S. Vice President Pence said Washington would keep up its maximum pressure campaign against Pyongyang, but at the same time would be open to talks without pre-conditions.
 
Clearly, however, insisting that North Korea disarm is a non-starter. The Kim Jong Un regime, understandably, equates survival with nuclear weaponization.
 
In fact believing that further sanctions and Security Council pressure will break the DPRK commitment to the bomb is a risky naiveté. With no reasonable threshold anticipated in either case, the Trump administration might well take a lesson from the Richard Nixon template of normalizing relations with a future, legitimate atomic adversary. The nuclear rise of a bellicose outlier like “Red” China in 1972 demanded resolution. A time-line of deliberate negotiations - Track 2 interactions, followed by more open discussions - arguably eliminated that nuclear stress.
 
A Sino-Soviet dispute, coupled with China’s willingness to talk, certainly paved the way for Nixon, but that effort rewrote history. It started and concluded with dialogue, an option that should always be “on the table” but is rarely, if ever, a first consideration since war and military intervention have been the foreign policy solutions of choice for the 21st century.

 
The author of this post is Veterans For Peace Lifetime Member, Past VFP Board Secretary and Naval Aviation Veteran Gene Marx. He is also an active member of the CPL Jonathan Santos Memorial Veterans For Peace Chapter 111 and lives in Bellingham, Washington with his wife, Victoria.

By Mike Hastie

I just got through watching Episode 5 of the Burns/Novick documentary The Vietnam War. The title of the episode is This Is What We Do (July 1967-December 1967). I am only going to make remarks about this episode. Please keep that in mind. I have probably watched 7 episodes of this 18-hour series. I felt that Episode 5 had a tremendous amount of information in it, along with some powerful historical footage. You can critique that information and put it under a microscope if you want to. But, I want to refine what I saw to write this article. If I were a conservative Vietnam veteran, I would find this episode very disturbing. I have not forgotten my conservative upbringing, as I was raised in the military because my father was a career Army Officer and combat veteran in North Africa during World War II. The pathology of this episode was that the war was over by November 1967. Of course you could say the war was over before it started. As someone on the left, I think most of us know this. The United States was nothing more than the identical twin sibling of French Imperialism. It is not that complicated. So, I'm going to look at just this episode, as I'm going to put another hat on that says, “Proud to Be a Vietnam Veteran." If a Vietnam veteran is wearing that baseball cap when he is watching Episode 5, he might later become very depressed. If he was watching that episode with some other Vietnam veterans at a Vet Center, he might want to drive his car off a cliff when he left that Vet Center to drive home. Now, WHY would he want to do that? It's 1969, and this veteran is in the Central Highlands of Vietnam with an Army unit attached to the 4th Infantry Division. His platoon is caught in an ambushed in the mountains 15 miles South of An Khe. In a matter of minutes, 14 of his fellow soldiers are killed with AK-47 small arms fire. Four others are critically wounded, including both medics. Within minutes after the ambush, the Viet Cong vanished. The RTO (Radio Telephone Operator) calls in Medevac helicopters from Fort Radcliff. The Vietnam veteran who watched Episode 5, was on that mission, and lost three very close buddies, one of them on the helicopter during the flight back to 8th Field Hospital, who happened to be one of the medics. The two of them read each other's letters from home. They knew every member of each other's family, and had shared many pictures. When this soldier returned to the United States, he suffered from many years of depression and lost just about everything due to his alcoholism. Eventually, he was able to sober up, and joined three communities that saved his life. Between AA, church, and the Vet Center, he was able to put his life back together. Twice a month, he meets with half a dozen close friends who are also vets, who share similar conservative values. Now, let's go back to Episode 5, and remember all the dead Marines who were killed near the DMZ, called, “Dead Marine Zone," by one Marine who was interviewed in the episode.

Remember, these Marines are not too empathetic about all the Vietnamese being killed. Because, at the time, their instincts are obsessed with moment to moment survival. And then, there is Hill 875, involving the Army 173rd Airborne, also covered in the episode.  A lot of Americans were killed and wounded on Hill 875. One of my best friends was on Hill 875. He put his best friend in a body bag, piece by piece. That has never left him, as I see him occasionally in Salem, Oregon. He has devoted his life to helping veterans who get caught up in the criminal justice system because of their raging PTSD. And, after soldiers of the 173rd finally got to the top of the hill, the enemy was gone, and the U.S. Military High Command decided to abandon Hill 875. Later, a U.S. commander said, " It wasn't worth it." So, my friend who was on Hill 875 might be watching Episode 5, as I need to talk to him. I wonder what he has to say about it, although I have heard him express some very angry opinions in the past. By November 1967, 20,000 Americans have been killed in Vietnam. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara is replaced by Clark Clifford. McNamara privately admits to President Johnson that he believes the war in Vietnam is unwinnable, and that is brought out in Episode 5. So, let’s go back to the Vietnam veteran who was in that ambush in 1969. He is the one who watched Episode 5. So, let's get this straight, President Johnson decides not to run for reelection in 1968, and President Nixon is elected. By the time Nixon leaves office in utter disgrace on August 9, 1974, over 58,000 Americans are killed in Vietnam. That's 38,000 more after Robert McNamara tells President Johnson that the war in Vietnam is unwinnable. When the war is over, 300,000 Americans are wounded, and more Vietnam veterans will commit suicide than were killed in Vietnam. Can you imagine what is going through the head of that veteran who was ambushed in 1969 by the Viet Cong, and... by his own government? He went to Vietnam in a cattle car, riddled with bull shit. The Viet Cong tried to kill him, but they did not betray him like his immoral government. As Malcolm X once said: “To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal. You see, I could conceive death, but I could not conceive betrayal."

Can you imagine what is going on with tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans who will be watching Episode 5? Not only was it to “Save Face," but how do you stop a war that is making millions and millions of dollars for corporations across the United States? For me, W A R stands for, Wealthy Are Richer. When politicians and the rich start sending their kids to war, I'll start believing in noble causes. When Episode 5 finished, it ended with the Rolling Stones playing “Paint It Black." When I got to Vietnam in 1970, as an Army medic, my naive little head was eventually catapulted into another world. My Core belief system as someone who was raised in the military was completely dismantled. There was a Medevac helicopter in my unit that had the word, WHY painted on the nose with large white letters. I saw American teenagers die in Vietnam for absolutely no noble cause. The philosophical denial part of me died a long time ago. And, for the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, who were killed in that war, along with millions who were wounded, and the physical and spiritual destruction of those countries, it will be a genocide that will be left for the ages. The most powerful military force the world has ever seen, bombed the holy hell out of three of the poorest countries in the world. That is immorality that is beyond comprehension. America, you will get away with nothing...

Mike Hastie
Army Medic Vietnam