archived: 14 - 27 Mar, 2004 Back Next
JUNKIE EDITOR MICHAEL
CARMICHAEL
(“Michael’s Cornucopia”)
“It sounds unlikely, but this summer might just see an alliance of commerce, populist entertainment and feel-good concern combine to weaken President George Bush and hand votes to his expected Democrat rival John Kerry.
On the other hand, the film could tank, like one of its director's other monster-budget summer openings, Godzilla.
May 28 sees the worldwide release of The Day After Tomorrow, the eco-armageddon story to beat all others.
The first trailers for the film, released on the internet last week, give a taste of the scale of the eco-horrors to come. Filmed in a combination of slick computer generated special effects and faux newscast verité, tidal waves sweep across cities and snow piles halfway up the towers of Manhattan as disjointed voices articulate the chaos around them.” – Guardian Unlimited (England)
Carmichael: Let's hope that life will imitate art - which is often the case - and this film will actually have them voting in the aisles. I wish that the DNC could set up voter registration booths inside the theaters of America for this film. Kerry should attend the Hollywood premiere.
_______________
Carmichael:
The international press is flooded with stories based on interviews with the
handful of Britons released from Camps X-Ray and Delta on Guantanamo earlier
this week. The reports are shocking, and they are damaging America's reputation
in the world, which has been on a steady and accelerating decline since Bush
assumed the office he now holds.
Prisoners were fed rotten food, forced to drink polluted water,
beaten, tortured, forced to take injections of unknown drugs, threatened,
humiliated, subjected to a multiplicity of techniques of psychological torture
and mind control - including unnecessarily grotesque and disfiguring
amputations.
Bush's America has taken a deep plunge in the opinion polls of the
global village.
John Kerry should call for an prompt and thorough investigation
into the outrageous policies at Guantanamo, as well as the immediate replacement
of all of those in charge of the regimen of brutality that is still taking place
under the stars and stripes.
Democratic Senators and Congressmen should swiftly introduce
legislation to bring an immediate halt to these beastly atrocities.
RELATED ARTICLES: Here are some of the more significant articles appearing which describe the treatment prisoners have been receiving:
My Hell in Camp X-Ray
By Rosa Prince and Gary Jones
The Mirror UK
Ex-Guantánamo Detainee Charges Beating
By PATRICK E. TYLER
________________
Outrageous!
Ahmad Chalabi was convicted in absentia in Jordan of massive
fraud.
Funds missing from Chalabi's Petra Bank were assessed at over
$200,000,000.
Chalabi lived in the lap of luxury in his palace in Switzerland,
while he sold intel to the CIA and other intelligence agencies until they
realized the true value of his information.
The CIA severed its ties with Chalabi in 1995, but he was
reincarnated as the primary source of intel for the NY Times and OSP in the run
up to the war in Iraq.
After the conquest of Baghdad, Chalabi was appointed to the
governing council in Iraq, most of whom are regarded as traitors by the majority
of the Iraqi people.
In the Middle East, Chalabi's credibility is less than zero, but
he is still receiving $4,000,000 from Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. Marvelous! For
John Kerry!
I presume that someone in the Kerry campaign is taking note of the
mushrooming Chalabi scandal, and I trust that they will bring this appalling
case to the broader attention of the American public.
RELATED ARTICLE:
Pentagon Pays Iraq Group, Supplier of
Incorrect Spy Data
By DOUGLAS JEHL
HERMAN BRANNEN
(“Brotherhood of Veterans”)
Before I entered the Marine Corps in 1965, I knew of a “brotherhood of veterans.” It certainly wasn’t any of the veteran’s organizations, like Amvets, VFW, or American Legion, but I understood it.
There was a group of guys about my father’s age, most in their forties or fifties, who were all veterans of WWII. They drank beer together, and had the occasional game of dime-limit poker, or sat on the porch of one of our suburban houses and chatted about sports, politics or neighborhood happenings. The only thing I never heard them speak of was the War. It was as if that was an unspoken rule of the conversation. It simply was not discussed.
If one of us neighborhood boys was pertinent enough to ask a direct question pertaining to the War, we were quickly put in our place, and the conversation would resume as if uninterrupted.
After a tour of duty in Viet Nam, I came to understand that brotherhood.
One can watch war movies, read books about war, study combat photos and films, but until one has been plunged into the surrealistic hellish nightmare that is war, one cannot fathom the horror of it all.
Upon describing it to the uninitiated, one would be thought insane or a pathological liar.
There is nothing in our reality to which it compares.
On the other hand, it is comforting to be in the company of those who have been into the abyss. There is no need to discuss it, to relive the insanity. But in being with others who were there, we know that we did not create the experience in our mind. I am not insane. It is not the product of some psychotic delusion. This brother beside me was there. He saw it too. That is the essence of “the brotherhood.”
I was medically discharged from the Marine Corps in 1969, as a result of rocket shrapnel and a couple of AK47 rounds I encountered at the siege of Khe Sahn.
After a couple of minimum wage jobs, I decided to take advantage of the G.I. Bill education benefits and enrolled at the state university.
I was plunged into a whole new reality. Off to see the wizard, as it were.
Those were wild and wonderful days. There was a smorgasbord of political and social organizations on campus. Drugs were cheap and plentiful. Walking out of the student center, one would encounter young entrepreneurs hawking, “grass, hash, acid.” The sexual revolution was being enthusiastically waged, and there was a feeling among the young that we were on the verge of something wonderfully earth-shattering. We were changing the world, making it a better place. We would replace war, bigotry, hate and oppression with love and laid-back grooviness. We didn’t really have a plan for implementing this wonderfulness, but there was a general sense of direction. If everyone was immersed in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, well hell, things just had to get better.
I don’t remember exactly how, but there was a core group of about five or six of us, all “just back in the real world,” who gravitated together. We were a diverse group, from a wide variety of socio-economic, ethnic and religious backgrounds. The only common denominator was the Viet Nam experience.
We rented a big house and moved in together. Over the next five years, some came, some left, one committed suicide, but there was always a core group of Viet Nam Vets.
I was certainly not one of the intellectuals in the group. I took enough courses to earn the full amount available from the GI Bill, and worked part-time as a bartender-bouncer at a local bar. As I recall, my primary interests were beer, motorcycles and coeds, not necessarily in any given order.
Like those vets of my father’s time, we rarely discussed the war, if at all. Once you asked “Who were you with?” And the answer came… “One Nine,” or “First Air Cav,” or maybe even “I was up at the Rockpile.”
“How bout you?”
Nothing else was required. That said everything.
Our views on Viet Nam were unanimous. The war was not winnable. The suits in the government had their heads up their asses. The United States was involved in some sort of cold-war pissing contest, while the Vietnamese were fighting for their country. We knew that the South Vietnamese had no heart. They knew theirs was a lost cause. We had all been in situations where we forced the ARVN to fight, and threatened to shoot them if they ran. We knew, without a doubt, what the outcome would ultimately be and considered any additional American life lost to be a waste, nothing more than the price of some impotent old politicians trying to show that they had balls. We knew it was easy not to back down and admit you were wrong when you weren’t the one hugging the ground, mouth metallic with fear, wiping wet, warm pieces of your late buddy off your face and clothing.
At some point, one of the brighter and more thoughtful of our group of vets, decided to organize a chapter of Viet Nam Vets Against The War on campus.
The idea was simply to inform people about the war, and to combat some of the ludicrous propaganda that was being disseminated about Viet Nam.
Most of us were not joiners. We were free of the structure of the military and didn’t want to fall in line behind anyone.
In addition, we had been made aware that we were not welcome at the local VFW. We had long hair and beards, and did not agree that the solution to the Viet Nam war was to drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi. And besides, Viet Nam wasn’t a “real war,” like WWII.
We were not considered to be “real veterans.”
However all of us agreed to help out.
The format of VVAW activities was simple; a campus organization or, in some cases, a professor would invite us to a discussion about Viet Nam. Usually there would be representatives of the Campus Conservative Organization, or maybe ROTC, to provide an alternative (read pro-war) point of view. It was not a formal debate setting, but a roundtable discussion that was often quite raucous and rancorous. I recall responding to an ROTC officer, who had questioned our masculinity and patriotism, with “You need to put a sock in it and sit down. We said we were opposed to the Viet Nam war, not that we were pacifists.”
The primary other activity that we enjoyed immensely was our counter-recruiter activities. When a military recruiter came on campus, they would typically set up a table in or just outside the student center from which they would pass out brochures and chat up students coming and going.
We would dress in our combat fatigues and set up a “straight scoop” table beside the recruiters. When a student approached the recruiters and the recruiters went into their spiel, we would gather round the student and suggest questions for them to ask the recruiter. We would correct the recruiter if we felt he was being less than honest, and frankly, by being loud, argumentative and boisterous, made the recruiter’s job nearly impossible.
We used to laugh when we heard that organizations like VVAW were “communist sympathizers” or “dangerous radicals.” We were just being a pain in the ass and having fun doing it.
Of course we garnered our share of attention from the authorities.
Our house was the scene of weekly parties, and those parties were a who’s who of campus organizations. There would be women who were in NOW, representatives of SDS, Black Student Union, and the myriad of other left-leaning student organizations that existed during that time. There was also the odd assortment of musicians, artists, hippies, Jesus freaks, groupies, hanger-oners and the occasional sorority girl or frat boy out for a walk on the wild side.
In 1971, there was an FBI agent that came around a lot. He even brought his wife to a party one night. He wore a little red star pin, and claimed to be a member of the Communist Workers’ Party, but we knew better. There wasn’t a Communist Workers’ Party on campus, or if so, it was a party of one. He was one of those guys who looked like he was wearing a suit even when he wasn’t. But he was a nice enough guy, and always donated generously when we made a beer and Boone’s Farm run so we made him just as welcome as anyone else. The night his wife came along, she brought a big platter of cheese straws and a raw vegetable platter with ranch dip in the middle. She had a great time, drank a little too much, and danced with all the guys. I guess that’s why he never brought her with him again.
I do not, however, remember a lot of political discussion. I remember the smell of beer, marijuana and patchouli, the sound of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead, cranked up to mind-numbing decibel levels, and lots of young people dancing, laughing and amorously entwined in secluded corners .
Our house was the object of so many visits by the police that we finally put a sign on the door that said “Attention Pigs! Wipe your feet before kicking in the door!”
It was a heady time, and we thought it would last forever.
Of course, life goes on. We grew up, graduated, got jobs, wives and kids and lost touch.
Fifteen years later I tried to locate the old crowd. Among them was a school principal, a school teacher, a lobbyist for trial lawyers, a book reviewer for a metropolitan newspaper and an industrial engineer.
I was amused to find out that the coordinator of Students for a Democratic Society, and a Weatherman radical, was the regional sales manager for an industrial air-conditioning company.
The fiery young woman I remembered as president of the campus chapter of NOW attempted to describe the job she had in Washington. As nearly as I understood it, she was lost in a cubicle in some huge bureaucracy, crunching numbers and shuffling papers.
Another fifteen years slipped by. We gained weight, lost hair, made a lot of money, got divorced, married younger women and put our kids in therapy.
We vets grew further apart, and a funny thing began to happen to many of my brothers. They started to forget. I suppose in their minds the pictures got fuzzy. Somehow the war images got romanticized and softened. They began to remember it fondly, and talk about the camaraderie, the valor and other military myths. Concern about POW’s and MIA’s turned into a right-wing Rambo fantasy.
When McNamara expressed doubts about his role in Viet Nam, I started to see patches and pins that said, “Screw you McNamara.” Bumper stickers started appearing that said “Jane Fonda – American Traitor Bitch.” Conversations with brothers changed. I started to hear a frighteningly nationalistic and militaristic tone.
Of late, this tone has reached a crescendo. Viet Nam vets are attacking other Viet Nam vets with vitriol unequaled in any time.
When John McCain was running for president, I received emails that referred to him as “The Manchurian Candidate,” accusing him of collaborating with the enemy, in spite of his heroic record as a POW. Ostensibly, the attack originated with those who thought McCain a “dangerous liberal.”
Now another decorated American is under attack.
An alleged Viet Nam vet named Ted Sampley from Kinston, North Carolina, has started a website called Viet Nam vets against John Kerry (VVAJK). This is the same Samply who has, for years, played upon the grief of the families of MIA’s for his own financial gain. Samply claims to speak for thousands of Viet Nam vets, and refers to John Kerry as “Hanoi John.” He calls vets who support Kerry “Victor Charlies,” the moniker American forces in Viet Nam attached to the Viet Cong.
He has posted photos of John Kerry sharing a stage with Jane Fonda that was later proven to be fake.
Although he represents “thousands of vets,” most of the email his site has received takes vehement issue with his allegations about Kerry. They also point out that our current president apparently used his father’s influence to get into the Texas Air National Guard, ahead of a five year waiting list, only to go AWOL and desert, apparently with impunity. Had the law been enforced equally, Bush would have served time with Tom Hayden and others who avoided the draft.
Ultimately, Samply had to eliminate his guestbook due to “abuses of the privilege.”
Time continues to slip away.
Most of us who served in Viet Nam as teenagers are now greybeards. I frequently think of that rhetorical question, “How the hell did I get so old?”
I wonder, too, what happened to that brotherhood of vets that was so dear. Even if our politics differed, we were all vets. We had all had our trial by fire.
I suppose I can thank, to some extent, our president, who promised to be the “great uniter.” I have never seen our country so divided.
Even during the Viet Nam war, when the VVAW was harassing recruiters who came on campus, when the students walked off, we would joke and talk with the recruiters, and they’d say, “Where were you, man?” And we didn’t have to say much… just Chu Lai, or Khe Sahn, or the name of some other god-forsaken piece of Vietnamese real estate, and they’d nod, and say “Yeah, heard it was pretty hot up there.”
At the end of the day we’d invite them to have a beer with us at one of the local bars. They rarely accepted, but the offer was always there.
It reminded me a lot of that old cartoon of the wolf and the sheep dog. They do battle all day, but at the end of the day, the wolf says, “Good night, Ralph,” and the sheep dog says “Good night, George,” and they walk off into the sunset, arm-in-arm.
That’s the way we were. At opposite ends of the spectrum politically, but we were brothers.
God, how I miss that.
Junkie: Brannen’s insights are one that politicians should heed before starting the next conflict and one that progressives should read to understand the respective view points of veterans.
Brannen’s article also accentuates Bush’s failure to honor the service of veterans. These articles are instructive:
“The Bush administration stopped a group of former American POWs from collecting federal court-ordered compensation for their torture by Saddam Hussein's government during the Gulf War.” – Intervention
“Where are all the weapons of Mass Destruction?" Richard Dvorin demanded in his letter. "Where are the stockpiles of Chemical and Biological weapons?" His son's life, he wrote, "has been snuffed out in a meaningless war." . . . The number of military families that oppose Operation Iraqi Freedom, though never measured, is probably small. But a nascent antiwar movement has begun to find a toehold among parents, spouses and other relatives of active-duty, reserve and National Guard troops.” – Washington Post
“An Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran says Army officials at Fort Knox, Ky., refused him medical treatment after he talked publicly about poor care at the base, which helped spark hearings in Congress. Fort Knox officials charged that soldier, Lt. Jullian Goodrum, with being absent without leave and cut off his pay after he then went to a private doctor who hospitalized him for serious mental stress from Iraq, Goodrum said.” – United Press International
“And Kerry may be getting an unintended boost from the Bush administration's proposed budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs in the next fiscal year. After three years of mostly cordial relations with the administration, leaders of veterans' organizations and a union that represents VA workers are voicing strong criticism of Bush's fiscal 2005 budget plan. They assert that the budget would only worsen the backlog in processing disability claims, reduce the number of VA nursing home beds just as the number of veterans who need long-term care is swelling and force some veterans to pay a fee simply to gain access to the VA health care system.” – Washington Post
Last Update: 03/23/2006