“He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.”
Isaiah 2:4 (New International Version
Up until this past Sunday it appeared there was hope for a diplomatic settledment to the bloody war in Ukraine. Those hopes were exinguished when Ulranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with the urging of what I’d best describe as a shadow government of leaning Democratic legislators and a few charter members of Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s diplomatic team, demanded more in the way of security guarantees (NATO membership) than Donald Trump was willing to give. As of this morning Zelenskyy may be reconsidering and Marco Rubio, our Secretary of State, is trying to salvage the diplomatic deal Zelensky had originally agreeed to sign.
Where do we go from here. It’s anyone’s guess.
I live in a Kansas City neighborhood called Pendleton Heights and from what I’m reading on our local social media, my neighbors, for the most part, are siding with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and are decidedly against any approach Donald Trump and his team might undertake to stop the bloody conflict. “Stand with Ukraine” seems to be the current battle cry. The blue and yellow Ukranian flags are a very prominent feature on our neighborhood Facebook page.
I don’t know for sure what means, but it sounds too much like, “let the fighting continue until every last drop of Ukraninan blood has been shed.
Now, I don’t want to get crossways with my neighbors, but I find myself thinking differently about the conflict. I want the bleeding and suffereing and dying to stop!
I grew up as a child of what has become known as America’s “greatest generation.” Our mothers and fathers fought their way through the Great Depression and followed that economic conflict by engaging in a world war. Young Americans fought a two front war while their parents took jobs in defense plants producing the weaponry essential to defeating two totalitarian regimes. I had an uncle, for example, who was wounded at Anzio and my wife’s mother worked in a defense plant wiring radios for B-25 bombers here in Kansas City. She approached her work diligently and often talked about how she would also pray for the young men who would be flying those bombers.
That world war was, as author Studs Terkel once put it, the “Good War.”
That war ended nearly a hundred years ago and, as I see it, there really hasn’t been what could trul be considered a “Good War” since.
I was too young to serve in the Korean conflict, which wasn’t even considered a war. The United Nations talking heads called it a “police action.” Thousands of young Americans and other Allied troops died before an armistice was decleared in 1953. Thousands died and our leaders called it a “police action.” That’s what I’d call the height of arrogance.
My turn to serve came in 1961 when I joined the Air Force. By 1962 I’d completed basic training was serving on temporary duty in Washington D.C. The assignment was pretty quiet until October, when Russia started instaling nuclear missiles in Cuba, little more than a stone’s throw from the United States. Clearly, President John Kennedy had to respond, and he did. He told Russia’s leaders that we were going to set up a naval blockade of Cuba and that any atack on the United States launched from Cuba would be a considered an attack by the Soviet Union, requiring a full retaliatory attack, including nuclear weaons. We were on the brink of World War III. All American military units were placed on Defcon Status II, which was only one small step from all out war that would almost mean the use of nuclear weapons. For two very tense weeks we watched and waited as Soviet ships carrying even more missiles steamed toward Cuba. We really didn’t know from day to day whether or not the world was going to be cast into a lake of nuclear fire. Thankfully, the Soviets blinked. Their ships turned around and the missies were taken out of Cuba. Nuclear war was averted.The crisis ended and we could all breathe again.
My next call of duty came in 1965 when I volunteered to go to Vietnam. I’d seen a photograph of a Montagnard tribesmen while at work one night and I asked my duty sergeant about the photo. Ge explained that the man was an indigenous tribesman from the Central Hightlands of Vietenam, I mentioned in passing that “I’d like to meet one of those guys.” “It’s easy,” he said. “Just go the orderly room and volunteer.”
He was right. In about two weeks I found myself peering out the window of the Continental Airlines 707 as we made our approach into Tan Son Nhut Airport in the early spring of 1965. To this day I can still occasionally hear the gentle strains of Billie Holiday drifting through the cabin’s PA system — “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places, that this heart of mine embraces …”
When I arrived in country, there were about 15,000 American GIs serving as advisors to the South Vietnamese. By the time my tour was up, there were over 200,000 of us and we were in a full-blown war. At our high-water mark in ‘68 or ‘69, we numbered over half a million.
I was far more fortunate than most of my fellow GIs. My duties as a cryptographic specialist kept me, for the most part, out of harm’s way. There were the occasional mortar and rocket attacks which came when some dumb American politician blustered that we had secured everything at Tan Son Nhut. You could count on incoming mail, courtesy of “Charlie,” as soon as the boast hit the airwaves. Whenever it happened we’d try to send word up the chain of command to tell the politicians to shut up about security at Tan Son Nhut. “Tell them they need to pay more attention to graft and kickbacks, the types of things they’re really good at.”
The human memory can retain powerful sights and sounds. I can still feel Vietnam’s oppressive humidity and smell the stench of death that hovered over my body like grave clothes. Once in a while I can hear Charley Bock, our squadron court jester, plunking away on an old beat up guitar and howling, ‘The money makers are makin’ more money all the time,” while the rest of us hooted and applauded in response. “Give ‘em hell, Charlie…give ‘em hell, buddy!”
And so it went. During the 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon pledged “we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.” When he signed the Paris Peace Accord on January 23, 1973, he declared that America had won “peace with honor.”
As I watched the reports of North Vietnamese tanks advancing south toward Saigon, with the remnants of South Vietnam’s rag-tag army fleeing ahead of them, my heart sank. I kept shaking my head in disbelief. “How could this be?” “How could it all come to this?” “How could this be considered peace with honor?”
Within days, North Vietnamese tanks were rumbling through Saigon’s wide boulevards. South Vietnamese loyalists were desperately climbing the U.S. embassy walls, hoping to escape the Communist onslaught. Then, on April 30, 1975, the last helicopter and the last Americans left Vietnam. The war was over.
One night, years after the fall of Saigon, I penned a crude sonnet to commemorate the pain of loss so many of us who served in Vietnam felt. The last three lines, a few lines past the turn, went like this:
“Oh Saigon, bitter Saigon, please restore my youth unseen
For I’ve cast my life as pearls before the swine
Whose the dying then, oh Saigon, yours oar mine?”
There are 58,286 names inscribed on a black granite wall in Washington, D.C. I’ve occasionally wondered how they would have felt about “peace with honor,” had they lived to see North Vietnamese tanks rumbling through the streets of Saigon.
I still feel a sense of betrayal about Vietnam. I’ve tried to temper those feelings, but subsequent events on on the geopolitical scene have made things even more painful. Think of the folly of Iraq, Afghanistan, Benghazi, and now, Eastern Europe. Back in the nineties Nancy and I were vacationing in Vienna. The trip coincided with the conflict in the Balkans. In the evening, as we were leaving to go to dinner, the desk clerk asked us if we were Americans, We said we were and he told us to be very careful. “There are anti American demonstrations going on. Please be careful.”We thanked him and as we made our way out he also said, “You Americans need to come over here and fix this mess.” I got more than a bit offended and asked, “Why is it that our children have to come over here and fix things in your back yard? Is there something wrong with your children that presents them from defending their homeland? “Why are we the ones who have to make all the sacrifices?”
But, the time has come for the madness to end. America has done far more than its fair share in the defense of freedom. We’ve done far more than our fair share to liberate Europe and Asia from totalitarian tyranny. We’ve spent billions of dollars putting the broken pieces of civilization back together.
It’s time for America to put America first!