My Vietnam War Memories

Yesterday was, as the US Army’s website reminds us, another dubious memorial day, “The Vietnam War Veterans Recognition Act of 2017 was signed into law by President Trump, designating every March 29 as National Vietnam War Veterans Day.” President Bonespurs cynically pronounced a day of memorial for people he called “suckers” and “losers” A friend reminded me, via Facebook, that Friday was when we should all honor the sacrifice that was made for our freedom in that war. The ruling class, like Trump, believes we should celebrate the money they made from profiting on wars and the distraction those wars provided from the damage that they were doing to our nation and the world. From 1955-75, that twenty-year war caused 1.1 million Vietnamese war dead and Vietnamese civilian deaths was in excess of 2.0 million. There is no way to describe the Vietnam War as anything but an empirical invasion of a foreign nation with no national interests justification. The same goes for practically every war the US has entered into since the Revolutionary War, al 107 of them. The US South would argue that even our own Civil War was an empirical invasion. If there is a human history after the USA collapses under the usual internal battles that have destroyed every empire in history, I imagine our national sport will be recorded as “war, with football, baseball, jazz, and Hollywood as recreational distractions.”

“Praise the Lord, this is the Vest residence,” was how Don answered the phone in 1974, the last time I saw him. My little family was passing through Salina, on our way back to Nebraska from visiting my family in Dodge City for some warm-weather holiday, and I took a slightly longer route home to see my old friend,. Don had experienced some rough years since the last time I’d seen him. In early 1970, Don had been one of the most rock-steady drummers I’d ever had the pleasure of playing with. We met while still in high school, he was clinging to the tattered remains of a K.U. college basketball scholarship that was rescinded when his knee wouldn’t recover from a late season high school game injury. I never saw Don play basketball, but he was such a “natural” athlete I have no problem imaging him playing at a level far beyond average.

When we met, I was in the last semester of my dismal high school senior year. Don had been a standout star basketball player at Dodge’s Sacred Heart Cathedral Catholic School, but a knee injury had taken him out of the lineup and blown up his future. In 1965, Vietnam was growing into the threat it would become for all of my generation’s male victims and we were thrashing around a bit trying to figure out where that war would intersect our lives. For some of us, especially the non-white “us,” it was obvious there would be no escape from becoming cannon fodder. The draft loomed large at our 18th birthdays, like a huge black wall blocking every possible escape. Looking back now, I realize that my friends and I played music the way we did as a scream of desperation and protest. For most of us, our WWII fathers did their best to make military “service” seem like an honorable obligation. I know mine did.

From early spring in 1965 until just before I left Kansas for Dallas, Texas in 1968, I lived in a tiny trailer on the south side (“the poor side of the tracks”) of Dodge, with a band on the road or a shared trailer in Hays, Kansas, or in a lean-to on the Arkansas (pronounced are-can-sus in Kansas) River west of town a few miles. One of my fondest memories of Don was while I was on the river, he’d hiked out to spend an afternoon with me hunting. We both had single-shot .22’s, but his was much more of a gun than mine; because he was using it. There wasn’t much to shoot at that day. Usually, I lived on jack rabbits, pheasant, and eggs from the egg distributor who also ran the trailer court where I sometimes lived. We hiked along the river, heading west toward Cimarron, probably talking about whatever gig we’d recently had or one in the future. Don pointed west and said, “See that Blue Jay in the tree?” And I said, “What tree?” (There weren’t and aren’t a lot of trees in Kansas.) He aimed at something and shot. We hiked for a good while and, finally, came to a tree and there was a dead Blue Jay on the ground.

In 1967, I’d bombed out of my Navy physical because of asthma (that I didn’t know I had until the Navy doc flunked me), moved to Dallas for a Trump-style fraudulent “computer tech school,” met the love of my life and was at the tail-end of a brief stint as a folk singer and struggling to survive as sole-support for the two of us. Don and Ed, two ex-bandmates from Kansas, drove to Dallas to hang with me and Ms. Day before heading out to Army basic training. Those two, and Ms. Day, were my best, dearest friends and it felt like we were saying “goodbye” way too early in all of our lives. Ed would go on to specialize in the Army’s pitiful electronics technician program and spent his military time in Germany. Don would become an Army sniper in Vietnam.

My attitude toward the war shifted during the months that I was waiting to be inducted and the day I flunked my physical, thanks to the Hutchinson New’s syndication of David Halberstam’s New York Time’s Vietnam reporting. Aoso, thanks to my new Dallas hippie friends, I’d also read Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam During the Kennedy Era and his second piece of “fiction, One Very Hot Day and my opinion of that war and my country’s values were shifted left for life. Don had to leave first and Ms. Day remembers the two of us playing basketball at an outdoor court somewhere before he headed off to basic training. Ed and I played at the Rubaiyat.with a jug band assortment of freaks and players before he also left for basic.

I tried to stay in touch with both of them from my “safe” life in Texas, but Ed was quickly offended by my anti-war attitude and cut off communications emphatically not long after he landed in Germany for the duration of his “service.” Don and I wrote often and I wish I’d saved his letters, but almost nothing from my pre-1983 life survived the move from Nebraska to California. Don went from being, like me, a Kansas yokel to a deadly assassin to the most courageous war protester I will ever know. After several “missions” of dubious morality he, somehow, managed a transfer from Vietnam to Germany in the laughable Criminal Investigation Division (CID). Don’s description of the several-floors-underground, ex-Nazi SS basement secret quarters, CID offices was surrealistic, at best, and indicative of the US military’s decent into decadence, at worst. By then, Don was convinced the entire US military and government needed a criminal investigation. My memory of 50-year-old events is sketchy, but I hope I always remember some of Don’s description of his deciding to take a blanket to an Army warehouse, in the dead of a German winter, strip off his uniform, and refuse to leave or obey orders until he was given his release from the Army.

As a result of his protest, Don received a “general discharge” and returned to Kansas where I ran into him, again, when Ms. Day and I attempted to escape Texas in 1969 for Oregon or Washington, but our ‘63 Ford Ranchero full of meager belongings and a cat and us died in northern Oklahoma and barely delivered us to Dodge City. Don was taking an electronics course at the sad excuse for a local tech school and suggested that I might also want to try that route. I found a job as a welder at a local manufacturer, enrolled in the tech school program, and six months later had to drop out and “get a real job” because Ms. Day was pregnant. During that six months, Don and I formed another band and played regularly as a 3-piece power rock band with another guy who fumbled along as our bass player.

Ms. Day’s pregnancy (and another one two years later) forced my career decisions for the next decade and I’ve written a good bit about those years. I mostly lost touch with Don, Ed, and my past life as a wannabe-rock-star. In late September, 1970, Don was convicted of marijuana possession and “intent to sell” and got a 6 month jail sentence for that ridiculous “crime.” That pretty much put a nail in his future and, according to Ed and other sources, Don had quite a few problems with drugs and the law afterwards.

In 1974, after the “praise the lord” telephone announcement, I spent a few hours with Don and his family in Salina (as I remember it). He was some kind of fundamentalist, unordained by anything other than his belief in his god, self-proclaimed “minister” and I was still the savage atheist I’d be my whole life. He made a living as a carpenter and his home was a beautiful demonstration of those skills. I don’t remember much about that visit, but Don was clearly struggling to find himself and it was the last time I would see him. Three years later, Don would be divorced and living in an even more dilapidated Kansas town. The stories I heard about him from the 80s until the early 2000s had him in and out of legal trouble and dying somewhere between those years.

When I sat down this morning to write this Google surprised me with the fact that Don died in 2021. His obituary indicates that he’d found some kind of peace and regained a good bit of who he was. I can not reconcile this picture of a ZZ Top-looking guy with the tall, blond, athletic boy-and-man I knew, but I love the fact that he, at last, seems happy with his life. I feel like I missed years of opportunity to reconnect with my old friend because I’d believed he died at least 20 years earlier.

What Am I Missing Here?

Religion and country music have always baffled me and there are a lot of similarities. Both are mostly full of pointless nonsense and both rely on irritating faux-Southern accents to fake sincerity. Religion, apparently, gives the hopeless hope or some such thing. The idea, apparently, is that while this world sucks the next one will be a reward for getting through this one? That seems to me to be a good and useful excuse to do nothing to improve this world. Country music gives the illiterate cornpones something to relate to that isn’t complicated or creatively demanding. There was a long period of my youth where I believed that if I could figure out why people liked country music I’d have the keys to easy fortune. I probably figured it out, but it wasn’t worth the sacrifices I’d have to make to tolerate my victims.

Christianity and assorted cults and superstitions have infested my part of the country so thoroughly that admitting to being a non-believer may be the worst moral failure one can commit. According to several surveys of US citizens, being an atheist makes a person less reliable, less moral, less intelligent, and more unlikeable than practically every other awful thing a human can be. Based on the regular criminal activities, improprieties, and general despicable-ness of Black Collar criminals,it’s hard to figure where religion gets any sort of claim to morality. It’s enough to make me want to migrate northeast to Maine or Vermont where 69% of the population “never attend church or religious services, or go less than once a year,” which is not the same as being atheists but is as rational as the US gets. The top five rational US states are Maine, Vermont (69%), Oregon (65 %), New Hampshire (64%), and Washington state (63%). The closest thing to a “shithole country” in the US, Mississippi, is the most superstitious state at 18%. I was pretty fond of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Washington before reading that data. Now, I’m practically packing to escape Minnesota’s embarrassing 29%.

What has always baffled me about the end goal of almost all religions is the desperate hope for a life-after-death. My father was a less-than-convinced Christian his whole life, but when his final days arrived he was desperate and terrified, the exact opposite of what I’d assumed was the goal in being a Christian. If, after a life of trying to conform to the rules of his religion, he had no confidence in where he was going after death, what was the point? The ONLY thing I can see that religion might provide is that kind of comfort and assurance. If it fails at that, the religion and “faith” has failed entirely.

And that is the point of it all that I am missing. I find absolutely nothing about dying and fading into non-existence to be scary. Life is hard, often cruel, more often disappointing, painful, and, at the end, often incredibly sad. After death, all of that is over and done. I believe, as I have for the overwhelming majority of my days, that I am my brain and the electro-chemical impulses that happen in that small space and large assortment of cells. That’s it. Hit me on the head, hard enough and in the right place, and I might become someone else. That being a known and well-established fact should be enough to blast any delusions or misconceptions about the existence of “soul” outside of rhythmic music appreciation. When my brain dies, the person you and I know as “me” is dead and gone from the universe. Yeah, I know you can’t “destroy” energy, but that electro-chemical energy in my head will become something considerably less organized (“Inconceivable! I know.) and most of it will dissipate as heat. I find absolutely nothing about all of that to be afraid of. I’m a little nervous about the possibility that those last few seconds of my brain shutting down might involve a shitload of pain, but that will last no more than a minute if it happens at all. For me, all of that is a comfort not something I worry about.

Compare that to the obvious fear religious people have of not having been good enough, not having converted enough of the rest of us to their sect, and all of the other fear-inducing concepts behind practically every religion humans have devised. If form follows function, as it always wants to be doing, the function of religion is clearly to provide money, power, and status to the shamans and priests. Good for them, but useless to the rest of us. The forms are the rituals, the rules, and the mind-control tactics, but if they don’t provide comfort when it counts, they are worse than useless. Those forms definitely do not seem to restrict or improve behavior. Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions have never demonstrated any sort of improved behavior and are more often used to justify wars, prejudice, inequity, theft and deception, and hate. So, again, I do not see what I am missing by abstaining from magical thinking.

“Democrats have done nothing for . . . “

A friend recently claimed that “Democrats have done nothing for young people” and I began to question that person’s math skills. “Nothing” means zero, nada, no benefit whatsoever. It pains me to know that someone who should know better is as clueless about the meaning of zero as 3rd Century Mesopotamians. The Biden White House has published a web page explaining all of the things they have done for young people: “Fact Sheet: President Biden and Vice President Harris Are Delivering For Young Americans.” The list is impressive, but the media (right and left) also appears to be unable to decipher numbers. I’m not going to repeat that data and I’m going to take the wild chance that my readers are curious enough to follow the damn link, but “$117 billion in targeted relief for 3.4 million student loan borrowers, including borrowers with total and permanent disabilities, those cheated by their colleges, those in public service, and more” is a LOT more than “nothing.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this kind of nonsense. A union welder acquaintance recent claimed “Democrats have done nothing for working people.” To be clear, this man was solely concerned that pipelines wouldn’t be built and he wouldn’t be raking in the usual “$36 and $52 an hour” building those infamous pollution systems. However, there are plenty of jobs for welders in infrastructure work and that doesn’t require decimating the nation’s fresh water supplies or contributing to the inhospitality of the planet to current lifeforms. Biden’s “Build Back Framework” could “add an average 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years.”

If not mismanaging the pandemic so badly that US cities were stacking up bodies in refrigerated trailers isn’t doing something for young and old, skilled and unskilled labor, and all of the rest of us, we’re in a pretty weird state of decline. This kind of faulty and deceptive hyperbola is not adding value to the national dialog. If supposedly educated people are unclear on what “nothing means,” we’re in big trouble; and, of course, we’re in big trouble. 

Lastly, but most importantly, the current Democratic Party offers something no other entity in the country can provide: a slight chance that the "great experiment" that the United States of America represents might, somehow, become a democracy.  There are no Republicans in office in the federal government who represent any of the ideals of democracy. From the despicable oligarchs hiding in the Federalist Society to the obvious spokesperson for Republicans, Donald Trump, and the deplorable rabble of voters and seditionists, Republicans are the worst of this nation's terrible worst and they represent the nation's decent into fascism and chaos. I challenge you to name a single Republican currently in office who is not in favor of demolishing the democratic structure of this country. There are no counterparts in the Republican Party for Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman, and at least 15 other progressive and liberal Senators who are fighting for all of us, apparently, without much appreciation. In the US House of Representatives, there are a few dozen progressive and liberal Democratic members, apparently, going equally unappreciated. Again, there are no Republican comparables with any sort of claim to democratic values. The choice has not been this clear since the 1860s, you are either working to elect the most democratic Democrats or you are voting fascist. If that isn't "something," fuck you.