Veterans Day 2014. Being in a War of Aggression (Vietnam War)
is nothing to celebrate.
Being a veteran who turns against war is something to be thankful for.
Today - yesterday 11 November 2014 was Veterans Day in America.
It is a holiday I do not celebrate since I realized that I
was on the
wrong side in a war of aggression.
When people say "Thank you for your
service" as they do in America,
I cringe. I tell them that them that I did not serve the interests of the
American people, or the world's people. Nor did I serve in anything
noble. I was part of an occupation army that kept the Vietnamese people
under the heel of the US Imperialist...the banksters and
military
industrial complex - the war machine. Those who really rule America.
What is there to celebrate when you were in the war where
your
country used Napalm to burn people to a crisp?
This is the iconic photo that shocked the people of American and
the whole world. Children are running from their village which was
hit with napalm. Notice the terror in their eyes and faces. Water boils
at 212F, but napalm burns closer to 2,000F
Nick Ut's infamous picture of children fleeing an American napalm
attack in
Vietnam, taken in 1972, won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot
News Photography
The photo above showed the barbarity and immorality of the war.
This one below is of the young girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc OOnt
shown in the photo in 1972, and then in 1995 with her child,
What is there to
celebrate when you were in the war where your
country used dioxin (called Agent Orange in Vietnam), and is one
of the most toxic substances on the face of Planet Earth?
"Agent Orange is fifty
times more concentrated than normal
agricultural herbicides...The Vietnam Red Cross recorded over
4.8 million deaths and
400,000 children born with birth defects
due to exposure to Agent Orange"
See: 'Napalm & Agent Orange http://tinyurl.com/lkvgc4z
These are photos from the Vietnam War so there is no doubt
about the immorality and criminality of that war
Vietnamese woman with a gun to her head, Vietnam War, 1969.
What is there to celebrate when you were in a war where great
massacres and atrocities took place? Like the My Lai massacre
on March 16, 1968 where over 500 Vietnamese woman, children,
babies and elderly men and women were butchered.
What I count as something to be thankful for this day is that
somehow despite the barbarity, brutality inhumanity and terror
of war I somehow came back from the war with more humanity.
I later joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War
