Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Listening to Veterans FEATURED ARTICLES - Fritz Hollings statement on the House Floor, Nov 3, 2003 - Listening to Veterans QUOTE OF THE DAY "We will soon be welcoming home the first of another generation of emotionally damaged veterans. Many will have trouble relating to people who have not seen what they've seen. How shall we honor them without endorsing the inhumanity that all war - including this war - embodies? They will need deep understanding. If you know returning veterans, don't press them with probing questions, but give them room to talk." - - Ted Sexauer (From today's RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE) KNOW YOUR HISTORY - NOVEMBER 19th 1969 -- In an effort to undercut opposition to the Vietnam War, the U.S. Congress passes random selection of military draftees through a lottery & permits the 1st calling of 19-year-olds & expired college deferments. RHINO HERE: The American toll of the shrub gang's wars will not only be measured by the number of dead American G.I.'s plus the number of those physically wounded. It will also be measured by the number of veterans who return home mentally and spiritually wounded. Those who because of what they saw in battle, will never be able to love life as they had done before. Those who because of what they did, will never have the self respect they once had. Those who because of the lack of competent V.A. psychological counseling, will never be the calming, loving, providing father, husband, brother or son that they had been destined to be, before being sent off to conquer Iraq for the neo-robber barons. Today's RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE is by Ted Sexauer, a former U.S. helicopter medic in Nam and more recently, a member of the Iraq Peace Team who visited Baghdad just one month before the start of the war. This is one of a very very few articles being written about the psychological costs of the warmongering decisions being made by the Beltway Chicken-Hawks. But first, an excerpt from a moving statement made on the floor of the U.S. Senate, November 3rd, by elder statesman Senator Fritz Hollings in which he declares having had his, "Cambodian Moment." The War in Iraq, Its Parallels to Vietnam and Congress' Unwillingness to Pay for It by Senator Fritz Hollings, Senate Floor Remarks, November 3, 2003 Mr. President, I come to acknowledge my "Cambodian moment" in the Iraq war. I refer to the Cambodian moment that Senator Mansfield experienced after years and years of opposing the war in Vietnam. He had a practice of taking written memoranda time and again to both Presidents Johnson and Nixon, supporting the President openly on the floor of the Senate, but finally at the time Cambodia was invaded under President Nixon, he could not take it any longer and spoke out. He went on national TV and said: This war was a mistake from the get go. The next day, he got a letter from an admirer who had just lost her son. She said: I just buried my son and came home and watched you on this program. You said it was a mistake from the get go. Why didn't you speak out sooner? She said: My regret is that you did not speak out sooner or loudly enough for me to hear. It is time we speak out, because unless we put in 100,000 or 150,000 more United States troops and get law and order in Iraq, in Baghdad, we are going to have operation meat grinder continue, and it is our meat. In conscience, I cannot stand silent any longer. What happens if we had invaded the city of Atlanta, let's say. We had landed at Hartsfield Airport, and then we had gone on to an aircraft carrier and said: Whoopee, mission accomplished; when the truth of the matter is, two divisions of Republican Guards have blended into the environs of Atlanta with all kind of ammunition dumps, and all they do day in and day out is raid the dumps, set traps, blow us up, kill more Americans, and we talk about schools opening and hospitals working, and that we have a water system. This cannot go on. It has to stop... IT'S ALL AT: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1107-02.htm 7:45:52 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - Listening to Veterans, Ted Sexauer Listening to Veterans By Ted Sexauer, AlterNet  ( http://www.alternet.org/ ), November 11, 2003 As a Vietnam veteran who opposes the Iraq invasion, I am faced with the difficult question of how to appropriately honor our military men and women without glorifying war. In 1969 and 1970, I served as a medic in a helicopter ambulance unit out of Phu Bai, followed by a much more dangerous six months with an infantry company in the coastal farmlands of Binh Dinh Province. I opposed the war, but I had made a commitment to save the lives of as many people as I could, both Americans and Vietnamese. That decision was the product of a romantic vision, combined with a desire to be tested, to see what I was made of. War can work effectively to that purpose - but at what cost? I was a month shy of 23 when I went. By the time I left, every solid friend I'd made was dead or severely wounded, and I'd long since stopped making friends. I had seen almost everything that can go wrong in a war zone: gunshot wounds, fragmentation wounds, napalm burns, a GI's legs crushed by a tank, a child's toes sheared off by a water buffalo's misstep. What got to me most was the constant loss of friends. That, combined with having to be continually on guard against random hidden dangers (booby-traps, snipers, and hit-and-run ambushes, not to mention friendly fire) has left its mark on me. When I got home, nobody gave me a bad time. But I found that any conversation would stop cold at the word, "Vietnam." As I think of the alienation of that war and its aftermath, and consider the present, I alternate between deep anger and deep sorrow. My heart breaks when I see, on TV and in newspapers, images of aggressive young GIs manhandling ordinary Iraqi people, treating them as less than human. The same thing happened to us in Vietnam. We all lost our humanity... MORE: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17149 "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 6:44:59 AM    comment

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