Another Death in Vietnam (revisited)

The following post was published on this blog 20 months ago, less than 70 days after Trump inauguration. It was striking to me how so little has changed since then that I felt compelled to re-publish it:

My brother Bobby was killed in Vietnam. We didn’t know it at the time, for that matter neither did he. It took 43 years for the herbicide that entered his body at age 21 to end his life. The Agent Orange causing the particular lymphoma that killed him was just as reliable as the bullets, bombs, accidents, and illnesses that took the lives of the 58,220 Americans that were recorded as dead “in-country” during that military engagement.

There’s undoubtedly no accounting of what the real number of Americans lost was, any more than the incomprehensible number of non-Americans who died with them and since. There’s also no telling when it will end.

Lately I am weighted with pangs of responsibility in realizing I am of the last generation of Americans to remember firsthand what we as a nation were experiencing at that time, roughly between the years 1965-1972. What should I be sharing…what should I just forget?

The historical experience of World War II was quite different, as I was taught by my father’s generation and in countless stories and films.  There was near total engagement by the American population. Even with carnage that pales all military conflicts that have followed; the unification toward a common goal resulted in a remembrance that is mostly Romantic. The somewhat unique American post-war euphoria that resulted from that Romance is the “Great” in Donald Trump’s “Great Again”.

Vietnam was essentially its antithesis.  It was ill-conceived, non-transparent, over-weighted in politics, ultimately divisive, and too easy to discount and disregard.  If it weren’t for the existence of a draft carried over from WWII and Korea, the whole conflict might have been relegated to second page news and its opposition might have more resembled our recent fiasco in Iraq.

Thankfully the lessons it left are not clouded in Romance and their relevance has never been more important than they are today in Trump’s America.

What I remember from the Vietnam War era and how it relates to 21^st century America is not the foolish ideological tools that were used by equally foolish leaders to begin and sustain the conflict. What I’m recalling is how the nation reacted to that foolishness daily and why. Such was the national response to the War that lunacy became lucid and, therefore, insulated from reason.

The presentation of the Vietnam War to the American people was insidious.  It started slowly, utilizing the undercurrent of manufactured fear of Communism to justify deaths and injuries.  Long before the devastation of the Conflict reached its height, the bullshit of falling dominos to the “Red Peril” vanished. It simply became a “them vs. us”.

News reporting on the War basically folded into the routine of people’s lives.  There was little to report daily other than the number of dead and wounded, and where in that little country it occurred. In 1968, an average of 46 US soldiers were killed every day, with 6 to 8 times that many wounded or injured…every day. The Pentagon and the White House released whatever they could to make it sound acceptable. The most common was to list North Vietnamese (and Vietcong) killed and wounded in numbers so large the accounting was not believable. But few expressed skepticism and it was hardly questioned.

You see, as a Nation, we got used to it. Protesting was considered unpatriotic and didn’t really take hold among ordinary Americans until the 5^th year of the War. Nixon was elected in 1968 by the “silent majority”.  Like Iraq, if people didn’t have someone in the conflict the news of the War was just and only that. The current day's news made yesterday's vanish into desert air.

Donald Trump has not (yet) drawn us into an extended military conflict, thankfully. His “playful” attitude regarding nuclear weapons gives pause, but for now the lesson of Vietnam doesn’t actually relate to how we are reacting militarily.  It relates to how we as a nation are reacting to the fundamental functioning of government.

If Donald Trump feels he has a mandate it is based on an irrational concept that he was elected to dismantle whatever he can and by whatever means he is able.  He has no more ideological basis for his attack on the existing US Government than Johnson or Nixon had in perpetuating the Vietnam War.  He is freewheeling and his disabling narcissism has resulted in him being surrounded only by his family and those who were loyal when anyone with a half a brain viewed him as scary clown.

The truly serious problem is that the Nation and the media have gotten used to it. His and his administration’s bizarre actions have become habitual and routine. There have been so many instances of disinformation, distasteful antics, subversive behavior, incompetence, nepotism, pandering, lying, and psychosis over the course of the election and the first few weeks of Trump’s term no one is keeping count anymore. And those are just the public ones.

Nearly any one would have torpedoed a prior administration.

Just like another death in Vietnam, the next Trump shoe to drop hardly moves the meter, and even then only briefly.

The danger is that complacency to incompetence, indecency, corruption, and (most of all) dishonesty may take many years to undo. In nations that find difficultly in thriving, these factors seem often insurmountable, especially where public division is encouraged.

We should be raging against legislators who think they can personally benefit by supporting this dangerous new “normal” and to media moguls who are devoted first to ratings.  To want and expect something better from government we need a better government, not its elimination in favor of some kind of chaotic oligarchy.

Reject any legislator who supports Trump, restore the Fairness Doctrine (ended in 1987), and seek with an open mind to understand why overall health care in the United States (and ONLY in the United States throughout the developed world) is an abject fiscal failure.

We don’t want another Vietnam lingering around for another four decades or longer.