By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
It’s Veterans Day again, my 50th now. We begin.
The scene above is from The Best Years of Our Lives. For those of you who haven’t seen the film, this is a bit of a spoiler. My assignment for you is to watch the film, even if you have to rent it online for a couple of bucks.
I am at an end with Veterans Day and the parades and “honoring.” As a combat vet, it was always bullshit, hollow crap that made my skin crawl. I have held that back for half a century, not anymore.
The real holiday is Remembrance Day, and it is an anti-war holiday. Nothing about military or uniforms or drum beating. It’s about pain and suffering, bombed out cities, refugees, concentration camps, children without parents, broken bodies and lives ground into nothingness.
No tearful dragging out the medals and crying around a flag. I spent years as a photographer and historian documenting battlefields, the monuments from the world wars, the graveyards. Before digital, I have enough photographs to fill a steamer trunk.
Watch the movie.
It is the job of each of us to stop those who promote war, particularly those who have never known war. Think of Colonel Lindsey Graham, a fake Air Force lawyer who joined to have sex with young airmen and then promoted himself to Colonel with a fat retirement after serving no active duty at all. The pilots from Charleston would hang him by his gonads if allowed, he is despised.
I was stupid enough, raised on John Wayne films, to join the Marine Corps in 1968, refuse a commission and see combat in Vietnam. What I saw was injustice and corruption, a Marine Corps as corrupt and incompetent as any organization on earth. I served with great people. They were great. This is what my good friend, then Corporal Karl Foster of Albuquerque said often:
“The Marine Corps is a festering pimple on the asshole of my sanity.”
He had it engrave on his Zippo lighter. Karl has been dead now for 48 years. Many of my best friends have been dead for 48 or 49 years, a bit of a coincidence.
Vietnam was a slaughter, a thousand miles beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we hear so much whining about on TV nowadays. It was supposed to be a lesson, for America to stop trying to rule the world and for Americans to stop killing on behalf of liars, cowards and phonies.
This is why we have “Remembrance Day,” so that those awake, alive and alert might remember that cowards and assholes like Trump and “W,” men who shirk the wars they love so much, are the real enemy of humanity. America has no enemies, America is an idea long dead, dead at the hands of the ignorant who pissed on our honor and freedoms after 9/11, warring on the poor and innocent on behalf of Wall Street and Israel.
Not everyone has the benefit of what so many of us learned in Vietnam. Of those who learned and are still alive, too many have forgotten the real values we learned, the real nature of comradeship, of our collective hatred of war and America’s military machine and the suffering it caused.
It is so difficult to put aside the fear, the exceptionalism, the fake patriotism and remember that we are simply human beings.
From what I see of today’s military experience, it is remote from what American’s saw in two hundred years of equally insane wars. Air conditioning and catering, fat paychecks, this is supposed to make illegal occupation and enslavement of free people justified.
Our excuse was either the draft or, for some of us, simply curiosity. I got my fill of curiosity.
Leave the flags home, see this film, maybe some others, Gettysburg for instance, Full Metal Jacket.
Piss on Schindler’s List, by the way, a well made film of total fiction.
To the list:
Platoon, Das Boot. I just went through a series of top 100 film lists, they were offensive.
America has troops at war, many highly paid professionals operating illegally aided by tens of thousands of private military contractors and up to 80,000 Saudi paid terrorists with ISIS and al Qaeda.
Along with that, the US has along with its arsenals the Nazi gangs of Eastern Europe, a pack of thugs and murderers.
If our next war, a war to the death, was against those who have sold us the last few wars, this might well be something I could get behind. But today’s military is silenced, no whistelblowers but a handful, no protests, no video, no fragging stories, only silence.
Simply put, we are no longer as good as our enemies. We are so much less a real America at home, race hatred, killer police, blatant facism, rule by force and cash, finding something about America to kill the innocent and poor of:
Yemen
Syria
Iraq
Afghanistan
Pakistan
The Philippines…
and what might we be doing in Colombia, Uruguay, Bolivia, Venezuela and Brazil?
or
Niger, South Sudan, Somalia, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Libya, Tunisia, Chad, Mauritania?
Why are we fighting in Myanmar? Does anyone know where it is?
What is clear is that everything America touches turns to shit. There is no question of this. So we play in Poland and Norway, in Romania and Ukraine, in Georgia and Azerbaijan, we build bases, we build secret prisons, we dig mass graves, we kidnap and torture, we murder and murder and murder.
We used to call it “fighting for freedom.”
It is time we Remembered. Time we remembered who and what we are supposed to be.
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
ATTENTION READERS
We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully InformedIn fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.
About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
One of my favorite movies. Thank you for this article and for your SERVICES.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Charlie-Liteky-activist-who-renounced-his-Medal-10875732.php
Charlie Liteky, activist who renounced his Medal of Honor, dies
By Kurtis Alexander
Updated 8:18 pm, Sunday, January 22, 2017
Quote:
“Charlie Liteky, a former Army chaplain who received a Medal of Honor for carrying more than 20 wounded soldiers to safety in Vietnam but later renounced the award as a bold protest against U.S. foreign policy, died Friday. He was 85.
A resident of San Francisco, Mr. Liteky had been a relentless champion for peace for decades, winning respect not only in antiwar circles during the Cold War and ensuing American conflicts in the Middle East but also from onetime colleagues and admirers in the military.
At a protest outside a training base in Fort Benning, Ga., where Mr. Liteky twice was sent to prison for his pacifist acts, Army paratroopers and Navy commandos were said to come outside the gates on occasion to meet Mr. Liteky and thank him for his service.
“He was a person who took his beliefs and his values very seriously,” said longtime friend David Hartsough of San Francisco. “If you love your neighbor and your neighbor is getting beat up, he did something about it. He believed that people in Central America and people in Vietnam and people all over the world were his friends and family.””
Chaplain Captain Charlie Angelo Liteky another real hero of the Viet Nam War
https://nypost.com/2018/11/12/remembering-the-end-of-wwi-a-century-later-in-100-photos/slide-1/
The history books are full of lies which never get corrected. Thank you Gordon and VT for your effort to correct the lies. A picture is worth a thousand words.
plz see this
Cell Towers and Targeted Individuals by Richard Lighthouse
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/757833
The scene from Best Years of Our Lives which always made me wonder, was the soda fountain patron who after talking to Homer about we were fighting the wrong people, gets punched and falls back through a glass counter, and Homer pins on the fellows American flag pin. Powerful scene, wonderful classic movie. But in 1947, the guy was right, even if it was disrespectful to the disabled Homer.
A sinister numbness has enveloped our view of war. Instead of last option it has moved to first option. Instead of justified, it has become necessary. Instead of horrific, it has become honorable. Instead of nobody wins, it has become, we always win. When they say, ‘Thank you for your service” , what they mean is cooperation.
Thank you for cooperating with the callousness of hell bent for leather domination and cold calculated murder of innocent people. Thank you for turning the other cheek and keeping quiet. Thank you for following orders without legal justification. Thank you for your service to corporations. Thank you for your blind obedience. You have served with distinction and honor befitting a hunting dog. You have assisted boosting our pride based on domination and greed. You may have a piece of sky cake, and a tin whistle.
It is the beginning of the “Carnival” (carne vale = flesh go off)and ends on Ash-Wednesday when you have to go to church to ,get your devils sign on your forhead. The time for Clowns and Fools which is now in politics the whole year
An image came to my mind after reading this article, it was the first time i had opened an NVA soldiers backpack , he was in pieces nearby , removing the articles inside revealed letters and photographs of family members and a girl looking hopefully into the future with a whimsical smile obviously for the photographer , conflicting emotions arose since the ‘enemy ‘, tumbled dead in the jungle brush , appeared far more humane than bearable, and the broken dreams he left was all the poetry War will give us. i cannot forget that moment , since, in my 20 year old mind, i realized i knew much more about dimensions of Death than the flowering of Life.
Comments are closed.