45 years ago today, June 22nd, 1968 I entered Marine Corps Boot Camp

 45 years ago today, June 22nd, 1968 I entered Marine Corps Boot Camp

I had been prepared and told what to expect, but nothing
can really prepare you. My biggest asset was the knowledge
that I could and would take what ever abuse and humiliation
the DIs (drill Instructors) could dish out.

My father and Catholic school (nuns) prepared me for that.
Marine Corps boot camp is all about S&M. The Drill Instructors
are sadist, and have a blank check to smack the hell out of
someone.

the worst thing that happened to me was the day I had eight
teeth pulled out by the dentist. When I got back to the barracks
one DI didn't know I had been to the dentist and smacked me
square in the mouth.

But, I survived the nine weeks, and went on to advanced infantry
training, Staging Battalion in California and then Vietnam. I was
there just over two months by days when medevaced to the states;
dysentary and I had a seizure.

I went back to Vietnam because as odd as it seems I felt more
at home in a combat zone, than back in the US.

Below are some photos of the war; they are not my photos.

http://tinyurl.com/p6ovw8w

Dirty, exhausted looking US Marine on patrol with his squad near the DMZ during the Vietnam War.









 

 Wounded and shocked civilian survivors of Dong Xoai crawl out of a fort bunker on June 6, 1965, where they survived murderous ground fighting and air bombardments of the previous two days. (Horst Faas/AP)


 http://tinyurl.com/nn9ca2f
 
 Women and children crouch in a muddy canal as they take cover from intense Viet Cong fire at Bao Trai, about 20 miles west of Saigon, on January 1, 1966. Paratroopers, background, of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade escorted the South Vietnamese civilians through a series of firefights during the U.S. assault on a Viet Cong stronghold. (Horst Faas/AP)

 http://tinyurl.com/p8q95g5
































Shell shocked wounded Marine being bandaged in muddy jungle during OP Prairie US mil. sweep just s. of DMZ, S. Vietnam.





 http://tinyurl.com/p2hdrph
 

 A South Vietnamese Marine, severely wounded in a Viet Cong ambush, is comforted by a comrade in a sugar-cane field at Duc Hoa, about 12 miles from Saigon, ..



 http://tinyurl.com/qx9dzgc

 
 Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk torched himself on 11 June 1963
in Saigon to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government led by Ngô Đình Diệm. Diem was installed by the US government, and was notoriously corrupt and authoritarian. Wiki source

http://tinyurl.com/pfdz2c9

  
vietnam war rally girl with naphalm burns classic shot


 http://tinyurl.com/pelhdt7
 
 Military police, reinforced by Army troops, throw back anti-war demonstrators as they tried to storm a mall entrance doorway at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 1967. (AP)


 http://tinyurl.com/pnxka2e
 
 Fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio screams over the body of 20-year-old Kent State student Jeffrey Miller after he was shot by the Ohio National Guard during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War on May 4, 1970. (John Paul Filo/Library of Congress)



 http://tinyurl.com/ou7xkgt



 
Don McCullin Shell Shocked US Marine, Vietnam, Hue 1968, printed 2013 © Don

The effects of combat…human emotions and caring for animals

The effects of combat…human emotions and caring for animals


I am writing this so friends and people may understand a bit about me
in relation to caring for animals, as I receive posts about animal cruelty.

I ignore watching almost all posts about animal cruelty; it's depressing,
and from what I survived in Vietnam I came home numb. Emotionally
numb. Therefore, I try to protect myself from watching animals being
brutalized.

I watch more videos about people being harmed by police, or in Palestine
I'll watch the brutality meted out to Palestinians and their supporters.
And, I limit that, but not as much. I limit the bad because I believe it's
not good to watch too much. I know what can happen.

I also believe that spending too much time watching such videos can
lead to a sense of powerlessness. But, mostly, what happens to humans
bothers me much, much more.

I wasn't in Vietnam a month when another platoon member took me to
see a show, as it were. There was a huge pit, conical shaped that went
down about 30 feet or so that was used to burn/blow up trash. But, this
day other marines were spread out around the rim of the hole (a guess is
about 20 feet across.

There was an air of excitement amongst those already there. A marine was
at the base of the pit with a monkey, and he was teaching the monkey how
to pull the pin of a hand grenade. Once he felt the monkey got the idea he
ran up the sides of the hill and over the top. A few men had rifles trained
on the monkey in case he tried running up the hill.

There would be just one outcome, and soon enough we saw the explosion,
and as the speed of sound is slower than the speed of light, we then heard
the explosion. I may have felt a tiny bit bad, but to survive combat, or just
being in a war zone as a grunt (rifleman) I had to 'not feel,' or not have
feelings about such things. It's self protectection.

In war there are times when the choice is to do right, or wrong in relation to
people, their animals, possessions, home etc. That is doing the right thing
ethically, although I never thought of it that way, and was never confronted
with an order to burn down a family home. Thank God.

But, at other times there is a choice, that to me, was not about ethics, but
a choice between living and dying. In February, 1969, on a jungle ridge in
the A Shau valley at Fire Support Base (FSB) Cunningham my team leader
and I had to put our combat knives to the throats of marines in panic on our
first night.

They began crying, and saying "We're all gonna die they (North Vietnamese
Army NVA sappers - suicide bombers) get in the wire every night."

The third night two men came running towards our bunker in the dark, and
they were screaming "There all around us; we're gonna die..." Once again we
put knives to their throats to shut them up, and sent them back to their bunker.
We then had to listen to them scream as a sapper got into their bunker, and
began knifing them until his six second charge wound down and exploded
killing all three.

In the morning I had to wipe the bunker clean of human remains so the new
guys coming in by chopter wouldn't know. The hardest part for me was not
crying because I didn't want another marine knowing I had cried, so I stuffed
it way down deep. But, it is always with me, and will be till I die.

When I got out of the marines I shot a cat one night, and regretted it
immediately. But, there is a part of me that has insulated myself from feelings
because there is enough pain in me. I survived seeing and carrying the dead, or
being with a friend when his hand blew open, and more. But, what was essential
to surviving was not to let feelings interfere with keeping my senses intact. I'm
not the only one.

There is a buffer within that keeps pain from overwhelming me and rendering
me useless in a sense.

So, if I have a bit of milk with coffee I don't feel bad, but I am moving away
from it. I can use rice milk if necessary.

I love good quality fish and chips, but it is less than once a month. I'm
moving away from fish, not out of ethical concerns, but because I don't
trust eating fish because the oceans are polluted with radioactivity, and more.

You see, war left me damaged, but also with the ability to survive, and
an ability to balance what's bad to others with far worse that I've seen, and
a way to size up which is worse. Eating a chicken, or an egg. To me, eating
a chicken is worse.  But, I don't eat meat, and I try to live and let live.

I lived in Vermont for ten years; a hunter's paradise, but I never hunted
animals because there is nothing heroic about shooting a deer, bear, moose,
or anything with a high powered rifle with a scope.

From Counterpunch:'US Hypocrisy Over Ukraine and Saudi Arabia' by BRIAN CLOUGHLEY Weekend Edition May 1-3, 2015

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/01/us-hypocrisy-over-ukraine-and-saudi-arabia/

Weekend Edition May 1-3, 2015

Silent on the Kiev Dead

US Hypocrisy Over Ukraine and Saudi Arabia

by BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

Boris Nemtsov was a Russian politician who was shot dead in Moscow on January 27, 2015.  He was opposed to Russia’s government and its leader and therefore, according to Western dogma of these times, his murder must have been ordered by President Putin.

Police began investigating the crime promptly but there was no pause for deliberation on the part of some western leaders and much of their media : they reacted immediately and leapt to censure the Russian government and especially President Putin in terms that were not only abusive, insolent and confrontational but confirmation of the fact that there is no intention on their part to ever consider diplomacy in their dealings with Moscow.

French President Hollande described Nemtsov as a “defender of democracy” and called the death an assassination.  Britain’s prime minister Cameron declared that “Boris Nemtsov is dead. But the values he stood for will never die,” and demanded that the death be “fully, rapidly and transparently investigated.” President Obama  announced that “we call upon the Russian government to conduct a prompt, impartial, and transparent investigation into the circumstances of his murder.”

These Western heads of government knew well that their public pronouncements and peremptory demands were condemnatory insinuations against the democratically elected administration of Russia, but their intention is to cripple the country and topple President Putin and they seize any opportunity to disparage and insult him. Their line of attack is that if something unpleasant happens in Russia it is without doubt the fault of President Putin who must at once be subjected to vilification in terms that imply his personal responsibility for whatever crime has taken place.

There would have been sanctimonious uproar in the west if Putin ever commented in such a fashion about, for example, the killing by police of unarmed black people in America, but spiteful pronouncements on Russia’s domestic affairs by western leaders are considered praiseworthy by most western mainstream news outlets which have been very quiet about some strange happenings in Ukraine where, as The Economist observes, “Dodgy economic policy, distaste for reform and endemic corruption have brought the country to its knees.”

In the three months after the killing of Nemtsov there were at least eleven mysterious deaths in Ukraine, most in the capital, Kiev:

January 29:  politician Aleksey Kolesnik, dead by hanging.

February 24 : politician Stanislav Melnik shot dead.
February 25 : mayor of Melitopol Sergey Valter dead by hanging.
February 26 : deputy chief of Melitopol police, Aleksandr Bordyuga, found dead.
February 28 : politician Mikhail Chechetov, dead by fall from apartment window.
March 9 :  politician Stanislav Melnik shot dead.
March 12 :  politician Oleksandr Peklushenko shot dead.
March 22 :  former prosecutor Serhiy Melnychuk dead by fall from apartment window.
April 13:  journalist Sergei Sukhobok shot dead .
April 15 : politician Oleg Kalashnikov shot dead.
April 16 : journalist Oles Buzyna shot dead.

By coincidence most of the dead had been critical of the Ukraine government, supportive of Russia, or possessed information that might have been embarrassing for the Ukraine’s  billionaire President Petro Poroshenko, owner of a mammoth confectionary corporation, car plants, a shipyard, and a major television station, who delivered an address to a joint session of the US Congress and continues to receive unquestioning western support for his increasingly erratic statements and behavior.
Although most western media and all western political leaders ignored these deaths, the redoubtable Newsweek scented a story and began to investigate.  It recorded  that:

In reply to a legal request by Newsweek for information on investigations into the deaths of seven other former officials, all tied to [former President] Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, the General Prosecutor’s Office responded that all the information about all the deaths was a state secret — a staggering claim to make about a series of apparently unrelated civilian deaths they told the press were suicides.

If the equivalent office in Moscow had given such a response to a western media inquiry there would have been scathing headlines in the New York Times, the British Telegraph and all the other determinedly anti-Russian media machines of the west.  Newsweek’s informative observations on obvious corruption in official legal circles in Ukraine elicited no follow-up of any kind in the west’s media — but had there been similar revelations about Russia there would have been a blitz of self-righteous condemnation.

The end of Newsweek’s piece is especially noteworthy:

Watching the [Ukraine's] top prosecutors leaving the General Prosecutor’s Office in sharp suits and stepping into gleaming Porsches, BMWs and Land Rovers, it’s clear that the average state prosecutor’s wage, equivalent to 400 euros [USD 430]  per month, isn’t their only source of income. Within the same building, officials are representing an array of different interests. With such great wealth at stake, the truth about these deaths is unlikely to emerge any time soon. Back in Odessa, three prosecutors laugh as they dismiss allegations that their office tried to cover up Sergei Melnychuk’s murder. They have good reason to be happy. They’re off to the Rugby World Cup in London later this year, an event where one ticket . . .  sells for the equivalent of 400 euros.

Just the sort of people you would trust to conduct legal action concerning mysterious deaths of anti-government figures.

The leader of the west’s anti-Russian campaign is President Obama who told the media on March 2 that “freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of information, basic civil rights and civil liberties inside of Russia are in much worse shape now than they were four or five, ten years ago.”  If this is so, then he was right to point it out.

But Obama’s condemnation of countries that are guilty of denying “civil liberties” is intriguingly selective. There is one particularly rich country that escapes the net of his disapproval.

The US State Department records that in Saudi Arabia its “citizens lack the right and legal means to change their government” while there are “pervasive restrictions on universal rights such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and freedom of assembly, association, movement and religion; and a lack of equal rights for women . . .”  Saudi Arabia, a valued ally of the United States, indulges in “torture and other abuses [and] arbitrary arrest and detention,” while “freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law.”  It might be imagined that the President of the United States might feel it proper to indicate his righteous disapproval of the fact that in Saudi Arabia “civil law does not protect human rights, including freedom of the speech and of the press.”

But no.

President Obama pronounced on January 15, 2015 that “promoting religious freedom has always been a key objective of my Administration’s foreign policy” — but he seems to be selective about achieving that admirable goal.

Later in January Obama visited India in order to bond with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and promote US commercial ventures and military interests.  Modi had been forbidden entry to the United States for nine years, on the grounds that he violated a US law denying a visa to those who had committed “severe violations of religious freedom,” but this was resolved by ignoring the problem.

While Obama was hugging the person who was no longer deemed as having committed severe violations of religious freedom there came the death of the King of Saudi Arabia,  unelected ruler of the country that was noted by the US State Department as refusing to recognize or protect freedom of religion.

So the President of the United States of America cut short his visit to India and flew to Saudi Arabia to join other world leaders paying respects and offering condolences for the death of King Abdullah, in whose fiefdom “citizens lack the right and legal means to change their government.”  According to Obama, King Abdullah had “in his own fashion presented some modest reform efforts within the kingdom;” but Obama obviously forgot that last year, during the reign of the modestly reforming Abdullah, the writer and commentator Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam through electronic channels” and “going beyond the realm of obedience.”

Badawi suffered his first 50 lashes in front of a mosque on January 9 — six days before Obama enthusiastically declared support for religious freedom and three weeks before he offered “condolences on behalf of the American people” concerning the death of the monarch under whose authority the flogging was ordered.

On January 26 President Obama was asked if his discussions with Saudi Arabia’s new ruler, King Salman, would include mention of the kingdom’s policy concerning human rights and replied that  “Sometimes we need to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns we have in terms of counter-terrorism or dealing with regional stability.”  These were weasel words intended to deflect attention from the fact that he intended to do nothing whatever about Saudi Arabia’s violations of human dignity, and one result of his complacent inaction was the king’s sacking of Nora al-Fayez, the country’s first and only female minister “whose attempt to shift the boundaries of women’s education attracted the hostility of religious conservatives.”

The government of the United States considers that Ukraine and Saudi Arabia can do no wrong and that their rulers must be supported unconditionally.  Support for Ukraine is based solely on its opposition to Russia which the US wishes to humiliate and destroy economically.  Unqualified endorsement of the repressive Saudi regime, with its contempt for human liberty and freedom of religion, stems from motives of regional power and direct financial advantage.  But whatever the purposes of Washington’s policies, the world is presented with the unedifying spectacle of the President of the world’s greatest nation indulging in grubby hypocrisy.  It’s not a pretty sight.

Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.

Dominicans Ask US to Apologize for 1965 Invasion :

Dominicans Ask US to Apologize for 1965 Invasion :

The signatories also asked for apologies "for the more than 8,000 deaths caused by the 42,000 marines that the U.S. Armed Forces sent to our country on April 28, 1965 to prevent the Dominican armed people from reestablishing the constitutional order interrupted by Trujillistas military, the Catholic Church and part of the business elite in 1963."

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Dominicans-Ask-US-to-Apologize-for-1965-Invasion-20150429-0015.html

The Origins of ISIS. Created by "Direct" Action of the United States Government

The Origins of ISIS.

Created by "Direct" Action of the United States Government

 

By Ben Swann

 

Swann takes on the central issue of whether or not ISIS was created by "inaction" by the United States government or by "direct" action.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41691.htm