I'm glad for all the support that I've been receiving from many people
who I haven't met yet for my attempts to clarify some issues there
seems to be a lot of confusion about.
There are still some points of confusion that I'd like to make an
effort to clear up.
Within the Christian belief system, Christ sacrificed his life for the
salvation of mankind. People who took up his cause did so voluntarily,
The story goes that the majority of his most ardent followers were
martyred in similar fashion.
However in none of their cases did they die as a result of invading
other countries as part of a military force; their use of napalm on
children is not recorded in the Bible. I missed the part where St.
Paul raped and killed the women of Thessalonia as part of a "hearts
and minds" campaign goes unreported.
Peter's direction of mass assassination programs to achieve rural
pacification has escaped my admittedly desultory reading of the Bible.
Perhaps one of the few of the people on this distribution who have
some disagreement with what I have said can point me to the scripture
that discusses this.
There are plenty of examples in the old testament with the great hairy
thunderer in the sky ordered his chosen people to commit genocide
against competing tribes. My opinion is that his chosen people were
mistaken about his desires. The majority opinion is that God wised
up. In any event, the benign message of the new testament was pretty
much put aside when the Christian Church was Romanized. Generally,
people think it went the other way around, but in fact, the Church
came to serve the goals of empire, rather than the empire serving the
goals of the Church.
I don't believe there is any scriptural support for the idea that
Hairy Thunderer changed his mind yet again, and said "I guess it was a
mistake for me to loosen up. Forget all that 'Jesus died for your
sins' claptrap, I don't know what I was thinking. Give me some more
genocidal wars to cheer me up. Give me some good old fashioned race
based hate. Draw and quarter me up some people that give the wrong
answer to the question 'how many angels can dance on the head of a
pin.'"
Still, this is how the members of some of these group "think" and it's
a terrible tragedy that so many are stuck not only in
pre-enlightenment times, but pre-Resurrection times as well.
Presumably Mary understood why her son died, having been exposed to
the message he delivered for 33 years. Cindy Sheehan understood that
her son died for entirely different reasons, and her unwillingness to
think there was anything Christlike about his death has earned her the
intense hatred of many, many uninformed people. As Shakespeare said,
"He jests at scars, who never felt a wound." The same is true of Pat
Tilman's family. They have fallen from the pedestal because they too
have a clear understanding of why their son died.
Here is some more information on what US servicemen die for.
August 24, 2007
Eyes Closed to History
Bush, Vietnam and Iraq
By WILLIAM SCHRODER
In his speech at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign
Wars, the President said the American pullout from Vietnam caused the
deaths of millions in Cambodia and Vietnam. Thus spoken, Mr. Bush
would have us believe invasion and bloody occupation of sovereign
nations is not problematic. Instead, stopping the fighting and leaving
the indigenous citizens to their own affairs is the greater evil.
The facts, however, are at variance with Mr. Bush's statements
concerning the suffering of Southeast Asians. Millions of Cambodians
died on the "killing fields" because secret American carpet bombing
destroyed their nation and created an environment in which armed thugs
led by Pol Pot took over unchallenged. In 1969, President Nixon
ordered every available American plane into Cambodia to "crack the
hell out of them." He wanted them to "hit everything." Secretary of
State, Henry Kissinger, subsequently transmitted the order to his top
aide, Alexander Haig, this way: "Anything that flies or anything that
moves." When Cambodia collapsed under the weight of the American Air
Force, Prince Sihanouk fled to China, and the bad guys took over.
Cambodian life under the bloody rule of the Khmer Rouge is well
documented.
But what of the Vietnamese people and their other neighbors? In his
speech, Mr. Bush spoke of "boat people" and "re-education camps,"
certainly a chaotic, frightful time for millions of innocent peasants,
but Mr. Bush failed to mention that was not the extent of their
suffering. The tragic aftermath of the American invasion of Southeast
Asia kills and cripples to this day. More than thirty years after the
Vietnam War, the misery index rises even though the shooting has long
stopped. Historians, scholars, political scientists and high-level
government officials have written volumes about America's experience
in Vietnam, and careful examination of a representative sample of this
material reveals a wealth of understanding. Estimates range as high as
3,000,000 Vietnamese men, women and children and an additional
1,000,000 Cambodian/Lao were killed or wounded during the fighting,
but that's only the beginning.
Today, vast expanses of once productive Southeast Asian land threaten
the native population. Death, disease and disfigurement are embedded
in the very soil under their feet. Records show between 1961 and 1971,
the U.S. sprayed approximately 76,000,000 liters of herbicide (Agents
Orange, Green, Pink, Purple and White), 8,800 tons over an area of
6,000,000 square acres, 14% of Vietnam's land mass. Dioxins, the
active family of chemicals in Agent Orange, are known health risks to
humans. Sampling studies undertaken in the 1990's revealed dangerously
high levels of contaminant in Vietnamese forests, soil, fishpond
sediment, fish and fowl tissue and human blood. Agent Orange Dioxin in
human blood samples taken from Vietnamese men and women ranging from
twelve to twenty-five years old clearly show the contaminant chemicals
have moved up through the food chain into humans.
Science has only begun to catalogue the long-term effects of Agent
Orange on the Vietnamese, but the statistics are frightening. As early
as 1970, Saigon's leading maternity hospital reported a monthly
average of 140 miscarriages and 150 premature births in 2800
pregnancies. As compared to others in the region, children living in
areas sprayed with Agent Orange were found to suffer three times as
many cleft palates, three times as much mental retardation, were three
times as likely to have extra fingers or toes and eight times as
likely to experience massive abdominal and inguinal hernias. In
addition, Vietnamese children living in sprayed areas suffered
dwarfism, impaired vision, Down syndrome, heart disorders, enlarged
heads and other deformities. Studies show severely affected children
rarely lived beyond age twenty.
More is known about the effects of Agent Orange from treating American
servicemen, perhaps exposed while flying aircraft that disseminated
the contaminant or ground troops caught in the fallout. Doctors
treating veterans years even decades after exposure have recorded
a procession of life-threatening and life-diminishing symptoms.
American Vietnam veterans are far more likely to suffer immune system
disorders, soft tissue sarcomas, non-Hodgkin'
cancers, liver disorders and even lower sperm counts. Children born to
Vietnam veterans are more prone to birth defects relating to the
nervous system, kidneys and oral clefts. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
is 400% more likely to occur in infants born to the men and women who
served in Vietnam. Anecdotally, friends and family of Vietnam veterans
tell stories of their loved one aging decades, seemingly overnight.
The veteran's hair falls out in clumps and what remains turns white.
Families report their veteran fathers, mothers, sons and brothers
suffer from undiagnosed nerve disorders, irritability, weight loss,
palsies and sometimes, sudden, unexplained death.
The Vietnam War misery index can be further expanded to include the
estimated 100,000 Southeast Asian men, women and children subsequently
killed, maimed or mutilated by unexploded landmines, artillery, bombs,
grenades and a variety of other ordnance that lay concealed but still
lethal in the forests and rice paddies throughout Vietnam, Cambodia
and Laos. After the cessation of hostilities, 3,500,000 landmines
remained armed and buried in Vietnam. Short on funds and
organizational support, in 2004, the Vietnamese government claimed to
have cleared 100,000 mines in recent years, but United Nations
estimates are closer to 59,000. According to UN officials, landmines
in Vietnam are a primary obstacle to its social and economic
development. In addition to killing or mutilating thousands of people
each year, many of whom are children, their very presence in the
countryside impedes the healthy development of millions of others.
In March 1964, five months before the first American bombing raid on
North Vietnam, the United States organized a secret bombing campaign
in Laos. Using unmarked planes, pilots initially attacked the Ho Chi
Minh Trail, the increasingly important Communist supply route from
North to South Vietnam. However, as the months passed, the air war
intensified, and targets included Laotian villages, which drove a
million peasants from their homes. For nine years, Laos was the most
bombed country in the world. In 2004, Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D
Minnesota's 4th District) testified on the floor of the United
States House of Representatives, "From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. flew
580,000 bombing runs over Laos one every nine minutes for ten years.
More than two million tons of ordnance was dropped on Laos, double the
amount dropped in the European theater during the entirety of World
War II. As many as 30% of the bombs dropped on Laos did not explode,
leaving up to 20 million unexploded submunitions, also known as
'bombies' littered throughout the country.
"These American 'bombies' may be thirty years old, but they continue
to kill and maim children as well as farmers clearing land for
planting. In the first five months of 2004, 39 people died and 74 have
been maimed by unexploded ordnance. In the thirty years since the end
of the Vietnam War, an estimated 10,000 Lao people, including
thousands of children, have died. And while Lao families struggle for
food and survival, tens of thousands of acres of land cannot be put
into agricultural production because the earth has been contaminated
with this deadly cluster ordnance."
The negative effects of the American invasion of Southeast Asia ripple
across the generations, and similar damage may already be done in
Iraq. Researchers have yet to calculate the long term effects of
depleted uranium (DU) munitions. Consider this testimony from Dr.
Jawad Al-Ali, director of the Oncology Center at the largest hospital
in Basra, Iraq at a 2003 conference in Japan: "Two strange phenomena
have come about in Basra, which I have never seen before. The first is
double and triple cancers in one patient. For example, leukemia and
cancer of the stomach. We had one patient with two cancers - one in
his stomach and kidney. Months later, primary cancer developed in his
other kidney. He had three different cancer types. The second is the
clustering of cancer in families. We have 58 families here with more
than one person affected by cancer. Dr Yasin, a general Surgeon here,
has two uncles, a sister and cousin affected with cancer. Dr Mazen,
another specialist, has six family members suffering from cancer. My
wife has nine members of her family with cancer.
"Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning. They have a
much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used to build and
nourish their bones, and they have a lot of soft tissues. Bone cancer
and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most, however,
cancer of the lymph system which can develop anywhere on the body, and
has rarely been seen before the age of 12, is now also common."
Sadly, thirty years from now, another generation of researchers will
examine the aftermath of America's misadventure in Iraq. We can only
hope the politicians of that era will not ignore the facts when making
policy.
William Schroder is a Vietnam veteran and with Dr. Ron Dawe, co-author
of Soldier's Heart: Close-up Today with PTSD in Vietnam Veterans.
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