It leaves one punch-drunk to contemplate how over 51 years after the Fall of Saigon, there are still Americans, combat veterans no less, who believe that the Bill of Rights was somehow at stake in the jungles and villages of Vietnam. Perhaps, it is a coping mechanism for Chavez, along with the many Vietnam Vets who I see walking around grocery stores in sweatshirts and baseball caps advertising their service, to believe that their “buddies were killed” and that they themselves killed people to preserve the American “way of life” against an existential threat; to protect the right of a young man, five decades later, to sit or stand during the National Anthem. My father doesn’t believe that absurdity nor do most of the veterans, like Tim O’Brien, Robert Kovic, Larry Heinemann, and Lynda Van Devanter, who wrote the great literature of the war. But it is sufficiently widespread that every Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day, and Fourth of July includes celebrations of those fought not only in Vietnam, but also Afghanistan and Iraq, whether it was the Gulf War or the post-9/11 “weapons of mass destruction” monstrosity, as defenders of “American freedom.”
Rare is acknowledgement of the three million Vietnamese <https://www.npr.org/2013/01/28/169076259/anything-that-moves-civilians-and-the-vietnam-war> who the US annihilated or the millions who remained to suffer the defects and diseases that result from agent orange poisoning. It is uncommon to hear discussion of the American soldiers, like my father, who have had a lifetime of health issues related to exposure to the same chemical weaponry. There is hardly a passing thought for the Afghans and Iraqis, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, who died in American wars. Like their medical cousins in Vietnam, thousands of civilians <https://www.salon.com/2016/09/18/stack-the-bodies-outside-the-door-pollution-contamination-and-the-toxic-legacy-of-the-iraq-war-on-the-iraqis-themselves/> in those countries also deal with an assortment of maladies, some of them life-threatening, from the environmental toxicity that lingers after days and days and days of bullets, bombs, military pollution, and burn pits. *https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/31/all-risefor-what-baseball-conformity-and-violence-in-the-usa/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/31/all-risefor-what-baseball-conformity-and-violence-in-the-usa/>* -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42723): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42723 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120556643/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
