Dreams of Frustration

Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!
My spirit not awakening, till the beam
Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.
Yes! tho' that long dream were of hopeless sorrow 
--Dreams, Edgar Allen Poe 

You will be required to do wrong
no matter where you go.
It is the basic condition of life,
to be required to violate your own identity
 --Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
 Philip K. Dick  

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool 
--The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot
 ___________________

Ranger's dreams are filled with feelings of inadequacy and ineffectualness which run counter to the actuality of his lived experience; though a life is personal, it is lived in context and not isolation.  The frustration which cannot be cured may be the result of striving to do right in a not right situation.  To explain:

In the dreams, an inadequate Ranger-to-be is tossed out of his ROTC training due to some unperceived inadequacy despite the reality of his being a Distinguished Military Graduate who chose Infantry as his guaranteed first choice.  There are weapons failures and incorrect ammunition, events which never occurred in his reality.

Then there are the "inability" dreams in which he cannot perform his required duties.  Despite being Airborne, a Ranger and fully branch-qualified, the dreams reek of frustrated ineffectiveness.  Often, he awakes whimpering ... what is this about?

Though in the dreams he second-guesses his abilities, his nation behaved as though it never did.  Do his dreams of impotence mirror his frustration about functioning well within an ineffectual situation?   Is Ranger serving as proxy for the government manque he served? Do his dreams attempt restitution or atonement for an irredeemable situation?

What if in fact the Army is the ineffective agent, and Ranger's being swallowed by quicksand is his subconscious recognition of this?  The title effective cannot be bestowed upon a war that killed 58,000 and wounded more than 300,000 to absolutely no benefit for anyone or anything, to include the lizards (we joked that even a dead lizard accounted for a "kill", and kill ratios meant success, right?)

By his reckoning, the war was predicated upon an NVA PT boat attack upon a U.S. Destroyer, an event which may or may not have happened; our generation's "Remember the Maine".  Imagine the absurdity of a country that went to war after a massive attack on its naval fleet launching a war two decades later over a PT boat incident that did not produce even one casualty on either side.

The field of Ranger's dreams was a war that was not just, proportional or rational, in any event. Ranger's dreams were born of this frustrated event.  The dreams indict a generation of faulty institutional thought and strategic assumptions.

He is certain the dreams will endure until taps are played, such is the harvest of a misbegotten seed in the mind of a young soldier. 

Leaving Las Vegas

Sometimes you're the windshield
Sometimes you're the bug
Sometimes it all comes together baby
Sometimes you're just a fool in love
--The Bug, Mary Chapin Carpenter

I move around a lot,
not because I'm looking for anything really,
but 'cause I'm getting away from things
that get bad if I stay

--Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Everybody knows
this is nowhere.
Everybody, everybody knows
Everybody knows
--(Everybody Knows) This is Nowhere,
Neil Young
________________

This is about a movie and an entry from my life. It was called The Vietnam War, and our exit from Iraq has been gut-wrenching for me.

The Vietnam War could have been subtitled, "How to Lose a War in Ten Easy Years". Change the Republic of Vietnam to Iraq and my movie is the same as the one that just played out in Baghdad. Try as I may, there is no way to make sense of it, either then or now. And we now have a sequel in which only the name of the country is different.

On March 2, 1971, the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) left RVN and became one of the first major units to exit the war. We left that war much as we started it -- gradually. It was an inexorable build up followed by the inexorable denouement.

The 5th re-deployment was the first time that an entire Special Forces group redeployed from a war zone. This must have been a practice movement foreshadowing the Baghdad embarrassment. The U.S. left Saigon under enemy pressure, the last visuals being U.S. helicopters beating a hasty exit from the North Vietnamese conquerors. The last photo was of a U.S. employee punching a small Vietnamese dude in the face to get a seat out.

Nice way to end a war. 58,000 of us died and 300,000+ were wounded, and the last image is one of our citizens punching a local in the face; what a cosmic joke! December 18, 2011, the U.S. left behind a Trillion+ dollar war, and this time we got the punch (Last U.S. Troops Leave Iraq). As one trooper wryly observed, they'll be having one hell of a yard sale over our left behind materiel.

For this and more we would like to tell Mr. Bush et. al -- Heckuva job, Georgie! How can we retain as nation any dignity following episodes like this?

It is a sad day when one is embarrassed to call himself an American.

Anti American Extremist Seeds

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
--Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night,
Dylan Thomas
________________

Reading Mangold's and Penycate's "The Tunnels of Cu Chi" (1985) is like deju vu all over again.

The parallels to today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unmistakable and illustrative of a military organization lacking institutional memory and operational adaptability.

The following quotes on actions 40+ years old could just as readily be applied to the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) today:

"The Americans' concern for their dead and wounded remained a source of bewilderment and relief to the Communist soldiers. Anything that delayed the battle inevitably favored the weaker side and allowed reloading, regrouping and rethinking."

"The Americans came, as they always seemed to, shortly after eight in the morning."

"In fact, the explosions destroyed only some seventy feet of the tunnel complex, and the system was usable again within a few weeks."

"Everything he had learned about fighting seemed to have no relevance to what he had been doing today. . . . [W]hat did any of this have to do with an enemy you never saw alive, who existed in holes in the ground, and against whom only a man's brute strength and luck seemed to prevail?"

"Aircraft, bombs, artillery, and chemicals obliged the Viet Cong to live and fight underground."

"The tunnels evolved as the natural response of a poorly equipped and mainly local guerrilla army to mid-twentieth-century technological warfare.

"Professional soldiers, including the legendary Foreign Legion, had been defeated by an Asian guerrilla army -- a lesson for the future that few Americans heeded."

"However, the peasants did not in the main have to be terrorized into acquiescence by such tactics. The Viet Cong were themselves villagers, or their sons an daughters, and operated most of the time with the consent and assistance of the people among whom they lived."

"Guerrillas hold the military initiative; the Viet Cong could choose the time and place of battle." "For a guerrilla army, stalemate -- pinning down a larger force in its huge bases -- is equivalent to winning."

"But for the guerrillas there were often blood-debts to settle -- home villages bombed, relative killed, or arrested and tortured, by a government funded and armed by the U.S."

"Not only were they [the U.S.] easy targets for our snipers, but I realized the best way to kill them was with more booby traps."

"Throughout the war,booby traps were responsible for 11 % of all American deaths, and 17% of all wounds."

"The war occurred wherever opposing forces made contact."

"Large parts of South Vietnam could not be, and never were, secured."

"The Hamlet Evaluation System [HES] relied on suspect intelligence supplied by often corrupt ARVN local officials, who tended to portray the running of their areas of responsibility in the most flattering light."

"Twenty years earlier. Ho Chi Minh himself had warned the French, 'You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.'"

"Most of the Cu Chi district was under ARVN or American control by day, but the Viet Cong dominated it by night."

"Westmoreland remembered the advice given him in 1964 by [MacArthur]" To defeat the guerrilla, "you may have to resort to a scorched-earth policy."

"As usual in Vietnam, the brightest possible picture was painted in the after-action reports." "[T]he army's sweeping through an area for a short time, only to allow the Viet Cong to move back in and resume their activities [was futile]."

"Even before the ground war in Vietnam had begun to settle down into one of grinding attrition -- a strategy that is proof of a lack of strategy -- the Americans had already begun to rely heavily on their overwhelming superiority in weapons technology."

Soda Jerks

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!
--America the Beautiful, Bates/Ward

Heard it all before
All of ya lies, all of ya sweet talk
But your lies ain't working now
See I had to shut you down
--Heard It all Before, Sunshine Anderson
_______________

Ranger is a POW, and neither habeas corpus nor military commissions will remedy this fact.

Although he was a legal combatant, his mind never strays far from his war, the Vietnam War. His body is free but the mind doesn't release the memories of the ignominy that passes for freedom fighting.

The story goes that U.S. policy in the Republic of Vietnam was freedom and democracy, elections and all that good stuff. The peasants in the thatched huts with dirt floors were going to embrace and love our way of life. They would do this in the voting booth, where they would rubber stamp the U.S.-backed leader du jour.

These leaders were as varied as ice creams on a Baskin-Robbins menu, the only constant being that these Mandarins were Franco-fied and Westernized and fully corrupt before our arrival. U.S. involvement only amplified and validated their behavior. The proof is the sumptuous lifestyles in which these leaders lived, both in country and in exile.

So 35 years have passed, and countless Vietnam vets have died from complications of their exposure to Agent Orange (many, friends) and 58,000 soldiers are still dead -- to what end?

Hindsight is 50/50: North and South Vietnam would have united or separated without U.S. interference. The country has prospered since foreign forces were ejected from their homeland. The supreme irony perhaps is that the Vietnamese have become a major supplier of goods to a floundering U.S. market.

Ranger's meta-analysis : The war was not about freedom, democracy and all that jazz, but rather about whether Communists or Capitalists would profit off of the labors of the Vietnamese people. War is always about money and exploitation. One giant porno film.

If the foreign Capitalists had won, the only difference in the outcome would be the profits of their labors would accrue to the U.S. corporations. Even with elections, how is that freedom?

It does not matter in the whole scheme of things whether Vietnam was split or unified, nor does it matter if Capitalism & Democracy or Communism was triumphant. The only thing that mattered was who would benefit from the exploitation of the Vietnamese people.

Releasing violence upon a nation is unjustifiable, even if done for freedom, or for the national security of America.

"National security" and "freedom" become lies when used to justify bloody mayhem.