When a war is wrong!

What is the most awful matter about a war that is wrong? It is asking warriors to kill people who do not deserve to be killed! It is those who kill who must live with the action and not the unfeeling government that sent them into war.
by Charlie Leck

“A nation that sends its young into war has an absolute responsibility to care completely for them when they return from such horror – a responsibility to heal up their physical, psychological and spiritual wounds and to never, ever abandon them – no matter the cost!”

I was among the protesters of the war in Vietnam. I took my stand in 1965. I was impressed with the arguments presented by Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.. I also had hours of discussion with an ethics professor in the graduate school I attended. I did not lightly take to the streets to protest this outrageous war.

The basic and underlying premise that was used to justify the war was wrong. The hawks, who promoted war against North Vietnam, claimed that the Asian nations would fall like dominoes into the hands communism if the war was lost by “democracy.”

History is on the side of the protesters. There are not any of us who do not believe that we were fighting against the war in order to stop the shipment of young lives into battles that severely endangered them. We did not oppose the service men and women. We supported them and protested for them. We were anxious for the day that they could be proudly brought home. We were willing, if necessary, to be criticized, beaten and even arrested. Often called cowards by unthinking people, my fellow protesters were among the bravest young men and women I have ever encountered.

The matter of war is the most serious decision a nation and its government ever makes. It was in the Korean War that administrations began avoiding their constitutional requirement to leave matters of declaring war to the Congress. We began to give our military actions other names – like “police actions!” Nonsense! They were wars!

A nation that sends its young into war has an absolute responsibility to care completely for them when they return from such horror – a responsibility to heal up their physical, psychological and spiritual wounds and to never, ever abandon them no matter the cost!

This morning I read a remarkable short editorial in the Christian Science Monitor (a publication that is regular reading for my wife and she pointed out this piece of wisdom). It concluded in this manner…

“Some happy day, war itself will be a fading memory. Until then, let’s never forget that the decision to go to war is a decision to put men and women into peril. At a minimum, we must keep faith with them afterward. And we can do better than the minimum. We can think long and hard – and longer and harder still – the next time we ask them to fight.”

History has shown that we should not have asked Americans to spill their blood and lose their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. To say so is not unpatriotic. To recognize the truth and to save the loss of American lives is the height of patriotism.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it,send me an email if you’d like.

Rilke, Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn and Other Men’s Wars

I’m a sensitive guy. Some people who know me wouldn’t agree with that. I am, however. When I praise a book and then have a friend tell me he thought it was not a very good read, I cringe and wonder about myself. I recoil and wonder if I need to rethink things.

by Charlie Leck

In my Rilke readings (A Year with Rilke), I just finished reading the Spanish Trilogy (III) that comes from Uncollected Poems. I was so moved by them. I recall that a friend, and reader of my blog wrote, saying he did not like Rilke at all. When I finished reading these three wonderful works, beautiful even in their translation, I wondered how it is possible not to like his gentle poems. The third of the trilogy is printed below.

When I re-enter, alone, the city’s crush
and its chaos of noise
and the fury of traffic surrounds me,
may I, above that hammering confusion,
remember sky and the mountain slopes
where the herds are still descending homeward.

May my courage be like those rocks
and the shepherd’s daylong work seem possible to me –
the way he drifts and darkens, and with a well-aimed stone
hems in his flock where it unravels.
With slow and steady strides, his posture is pensive
and, as he stands there, noble. Even now a god might
secretly slip into this form and not be diminished.

In turn, he lingers and moves on like the day itself,
and cloud shadows pass through him, as though all of space
were thinking slow thoughts for him.

I shouldn’t be so disturbed that a good friend doesn’t like something I find so remarkable, but here I am this morning, asking how anyone could not like something so beautiful.

The same friend questioned my taste in reading because I so liked Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Again, I wonder how, when there is such meaning in beautiful writing like this (for which, by the way, the author won numerous literary awards and was a finalist for the National Book Award), that this friend cannot avidly applaud its author, Ben Fountain. The following excerpt quotation comes after Billy Lynn and his fellow hero-soldiers, all of whom have become quite famous, are shown on the big video-tron screen at a Dallas Cowboy NFL football game.

“No one spits, no one calls him baby-killer. On the contrary, people could not be more supportive or kindlier disposed, yet Billy finds these encounters weird and frightening all the same. There’s something harsh in his fellow Americans, avid, ecstatic, a burning that comes of the deepest need. That’s his sense of it, they all need something from him, this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms, and corporate VPs, they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year. For these adult, affluent people he is mere petty cash in their personal accounting, yet they lose it when they enter his personal space. They tremble. They breathe in fitful, stinky huffs. Their eyes skitz and quiver with the force of the moment, because here, finally, up close and personal, is the war made flesh, an actual point of contact after all the months and years of reading about the war, watching the war on TV, hearing the war flogged and flacked on talk radio. It’s been hard times in America – how did we get this way? So scared all the time, and so shamed at being scared through the long dark nights of worry and dread, days of rumor and doubt, years of drift and slowly ossifying angst. You listened and read and watched and it was just, so obvious, what had to be done, a mental tic of a mantra that became second nature the war dragged on. Why don’t they just … Send in more troops. Make the troops fight harder. Pile on the armor and go in blazing, full-frontal smackdown and no prisoners. And by the way, shouldn’t the Iraqis be thanking us? Somebody needs to tell them that, would you tell them that, please? Or maybe they’d like their dictator back. Failing that, drop bombs. More and bigger bombs. Show these persons the wrath of God and pound them into compliance, and if that doesn’t work then bring out the nukes and take it all the way down, wipe it clean, reload with fresh hearts and minds, a nuclear slum clearance of the country’s soul”

I remember when I first read that long paragraph. I had to stop and lower the book into my lap and tremble just a mite and give thanks that I'd never had to go to war. Coward! Draft-dodging bastard! Commie shit!

“…a slum clearance of the country’s soul.”

Oh, my! Had I ever heard it spoken or written so well? Did the readers of the book understand? Who fights – really fights, I mean – America’s wars?

“…a slum clearance of the country’s soul.”

“No man (or woman),” I thought aloud, talking to myself, “should be sent to war unless we, as a nation, are absolutely certain there is no possible alternative. The motives for war, in my adult lifetime, have all been too unclear and fragile to support such actions.”

It isn’t the only time I shuddered while reading this book. It isn’t the only time I paused and thought long and hard. The men of Bravo are Fountain’s way of describing the massive innocence of boys at war – boys called to sacrifice themselves because the grown men who make the decisions of war don’t need to.

How do I rate Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, the book? A strong A and nearly an A+ -- and a book that America needs to read and digest (but won’t of course).

Not everyone has to like the book. I know that! For some, it is more than one wants to read. I remember having the same feeling – asking myself why I was reading this – when I devoured Tim O’Brien’s extraordinary books, In the Lake of the Woods, and his tour de force, The Things They Carried.

I shouldn’t be so sensitive about criticism. It’s a new resolution as my time winds down. Word came today that a dear friend and classmate, from high school days, has died. A bit of criticism about my reading tastes is not so vital. I hope you are resting among the stars, Mike.

Read, if you dare, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk [Harper Collins, New York, 2012].

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Shock and Awe was Wrong!

Ten years ago I was dragged into some kind of reluctant support for the war in Iraq by a pack of lies foisted on us by the George W. Bush administration.
by Charlie Leck

Ten years ago, on the night that the terrible war in Iraq began, I was in a very nice hotel room in Manhattan. It was a marvelous night. I could look out over Central Park and take in the wonder of life in America. I was struggling to get myself into white-tail for an evening dinner and meeting at the Knickerbocker Club, just up the road on Fifth Avenue. The television was on and I watched the CNN live coverage of the beginning of the frightening American attack on Bagdad. It is a horrible memory that will not go away. I supported our invasion that evening because of what Secretary of State Colin Powell had said a few days prior at the United Nations. He convinced me, as President Bush could not, that Iraq really did have a significant number of dangerous “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD).

It turned out to be a lie. Not a mistake, mind you, but an out-and-out lie. The lie made that evening’s attack one of the most disastrous events in the history of the United States. It ended up costing us trillions of dollars and thousands of human lives.

And, it was a lesson for me. I would not be led easily into such things again. I would be a doubter forever when it came to things the government told me. I would forever demand significant evidence and irrefutable proof.

The War in Iraq was a mistake and it was wrong. It was a huge blemish on the reputation and character of our nation. It was as wrong as that war in Vietnam, from which I thought we had learned a significant lesson about believing the government. Iraq was clear testimony that we had not.

As the awful war in Iraq dragged on and the truth began to seep out, there was no way for the administration to explain or defend its actions there. Support melted away quickly

George Bush was never able to make a convincing argument that satisfied the American public. After we realized that WMD was a myth, the President and his administration lacked motive and reason. It became an empty war without goals and purpose. America was thrashing around and could not find direction.

At our gathering that evening, I sat at the dinner table very near John Seabrook, one of the wisest and most successful men I’ve ever known. We were all somber, chatting about what we had seen on television as the war began.

“I’m very afraid,” Mr. Seabrook said, “that we have started something we may not be able to finish. I think this will all work out to be something like a Greek tragedy.”

The moment I got back to the hotel, I wrote those words down in a journal that traveled with me. Only quite by accident, I came upon the journal a couple of days ago when I was searching my file draws for something totally unrelated to the historic event whose 10^th anniversary we observe this week.

Year after year, mistake piled on top of mistake in Vietnam. We had gotten involved in an unnecessary war and it cost us terrible losses of lives and fortunes. So many of us thought that we had, at the very least, certainly learned a valuable lesson from that debacle. Now we realize that we had not.

Someone, perhaps the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, said: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Indeed!

It is, I am certain, why President Obama refused to take the lead and put “boots of the ground” in Libya and why he is so reluctant to get involved in the current problems in Syria. Who can blame him?

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Hey! Hey! LBJ…

President Lyndon Baines Johnson had grown accustomed to success in office. He was rather a giant in a number of ways. But the anti-war protesters of ’68, of which I was one, brought him down. He took his great wealth and stole away to his estate in Texas.
by Charlie Leck

I’ve begun the five volume (four of them, so far, published) biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson by Robert Caro It’s brilliant stuff that is remarkably well written. Though it’s accurate and historical and carefully documented, it reads in a very suspenseful and tantalizing way. In other words, it’s a page-turner. It’s gripping and deeply interesting. Though there are four or five thousand pages to read, I just keep plugging along, turning page after page in great anticipation and with total interest. My dear wife gave me these volumes for Christmas and I cannot thank her enough. Wow! These are incredible books. Caro is a brilliant writer.

We think of LBJ as one of our most successful presidents because of his ability to move Congress into action; however, LBJ’s great failure was Vietnam. He made terrible and foolish mistakes there even after the time he became aware there was no possibility of victory. The following comes from the introduction to Volume II of his biography (Means of Ascent):

“When Lyndon Johnson became President, the number of American troops – advisers, not combatants – in Vietnam was 16,000… And during his campaign, in 1964, for election to the presidency in his own right, Lyndon Johnson had pledged not to widen the war… Not a month after he took the oath of office following that campaign, the bombers were going north – in a program, “operation Rolling Thunder,” that would be enlarged and enlarged, and enlarged again, with Johnson personally selecting many of the bombing targets. And in April, 1965, the President sent American boys – 40,000 of them – ten thousand miles away, into a land war in the jungles of Asia.

“…By July, 1965, there were 175,000 men in Vietnam; by August, 219,000; by December, 1966, 385,000. By the time Lyndon Johnson left the presidency, 549,000 American troops were mired in a hopeless jungle war. By the end of 1966, more Americans had died in Vietnam than had been in Vietnam when Johnson became President…

When he returned to Texas after his presidency, Lyndon Johnson simply didn’t know how it had happened and how it had happened so quickly. Many of his friends and Congressional colleagues recalling him tell them that the war was impossible to win; yet he kept sending young men there to die.

In retirement, Johnson found it difficult to escape the memories or flee from the sounds of the protesters in every part of America – protestors who had shouted to him while he was in office: “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”

This president, who had accomplished so much for civil rights – who had launched the War on Poverty – had lost all his credibility and standing over his foolish decisions regarding the unwinnable and unnecessary war in Vietnam.

I’ll keep you posted on this immense biography as I work my way through it.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Bill Ayers is Just a Guy

The guy they called the “domestic terrorist” turns out to be a nice guy who took a fork in the road he wishes he hadn’t!
by Charlie Leck

They were difficult times back then. It was tough trying to decide what to do. The question we struggled with was loyalty to country and what it meant. There were a lot of simpletons around who chanted: “My country right or wrong!” Those red-necks and faux-patriots simply did not understand the depth of the mistakes their nation was making.

The Vietnam War days were tough ones indeed! Many of you weren’t around and you’ll never understand, but the nation was more divided than it had been since the Civil War. By the fall of 1966 I had learned enough about the history of the Vietnam situation, and the manner in which the U.S. entered that war and conducted itself during it, that I totally opposed our nation’s involvement in it.

Naturally, that drew scorn from many corners, along with jeers and catcalls. Many called me unpatriotic. In fact, my loyalty to country never wavered. What did waver was my loyalty to certain politicians, like President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and my faith in them.

I marched in my first demonstration in the summer of ’67, through the streets of downtown Minneapolis to the U.S. Federal Building. I was surprised how many of us were ordinary people from ordinary jobs, wearing carefully pressed, neat clothes.

The Republicans were already talking about the communist organizers who were putting the demonstrations together. As far as I could tell, the organizer was a middle-aged housewife from southwest Minneapolis.

“Don’t want to go to war no more, no more!” That was my favorite chant. I remember shouting it hundreds and hundreds of times. Of course, I wouldn’t go to war. I was classified 4F and didn’t need to worry about it. Some of the young guys who did worry were also considering a slide into Canada.

The American Legion and the VFW called them cowards. How quickly they forgot the lessons of the World War II criminal prosecutions. Does one participate in an unjust war?

Martin Luther King began to recognize that the civil rights movement was inextricably tied to the anti-war protests. He moved his organization against the war. The FBI claimed it was communists who convinced King to begin fighting on a second front. The crazy-right was seeing Boogiemen everywhere.

We had heroes back then. Gene McCarthy would become one! We jumped on his bandwagon. Bobby Kennedy would pull us off that one and on to his! Hubert Humphrey became a poor, but only substitute for a hero after Bobby was killed.

When thousands of peaceful protests against the war showed no evidence of impact on anyone or any institution, a less peaceful, and sometime violent, element began to take seed. The CIA and the FBI and the right-wing claimed it was organized by international communists. That was laughable. Even those protests were organized by ordinary, frustrated people who wanted to awaken a sense of justice in the American government and people.

Ted Ayers, who has been made famous again by the McCain/Obama presidential campaign, was a part of the movement that moved beyond peaceful demonstration.

Contrary to the misstatements in the campaign, no one was killed as a result of Ayer’s work. Ayers was a draft-resister during the middle and late 60s. There were thousands of them. The right-wing called them cowards. We, over on the left, called them heroes. Their resistance had purpose. It got the attention of the press and, then, the attention of the people.

Ayers was an organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. The righties called that a communist organization. We laughed at the thought. It was our organization. It was designed to lead us into more powerful demonstrations against the war that was wrong. Thousands of people were being slaughtered in Vietnam and many of them were our own soldiers. It was just damned wrong. It was a stupid war without purpose and without just cause.

In 1970, the Weather Underground (WU) was formed. Bill Ayers was one of its founders. The righties really began to scream about communists. Those involved thought of themselves as more like the protestors at the Boston Tea Party (a rather violent, disruptive affair). WU did plant some explosives in a number of empty offices, including at the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon.

Though WU had gone further than I was willing to go, I understood the movement. There’s strong disagreement about just how effective the organization was. It certainly got people’s attention.

With great anger in her voice, Sarah Palin called Ted Ayers a “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” I wanted to scream at her and tell her to lighten up.

Ted Ayers was a young guy who loved his country and saw that it had involved itself in a war that was both unjust and immoral. The peaceful demonstrations didn’t get the message across. WU crossed that murky, sometimes indiscernible line between legality and illegality, and between right and wrong, in order to awaken the nation. One man’s terrorist is another’s hero.

And, as Ayers recently wrote, it is difficult to call it terrorism:

“Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and inure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.”

As any real man would, Ayers owns up to the mistakes of his approach. As you read his admissions, just be aware that there were dozens of organizations like WU and some were much more violent in their approach, and many of the organizers from those movements have never admitted to error. It was an intense and incredible time. You had to be there. Though there is some revisionism going on now, history proved the war to be a terrible mistake and the motives for our involvement in it very questionable.

Ayers goes on:

“I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course – including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.

“The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.”

Bill Ayers is just a guy. He’s one of thousands of us who were fiercely angry about the immoral war in Vietnam. Our extraordinary troops were being asked to die for a stupid, unnecessary cause. And, we were killing people in that nation who should not have died.

Making Ayers the bad guy deflects again from the truth of the matter. The bad guys were those who were making war unnecessarily. I don’t believe it is a concept that Sarah Palin is capable of understanding. She is in the camp that believes “my country right or wrong.” They are dangerous people – more dangerous than the gentle, peaceful Bill Ayers.