The year was around 1971, and my Vietnamese girlfriend Hanh and I were talking in my hooch on the U.S. Army base at Plantation near Long Binh, Vietnam. A hooch maid, she was beautiful, maybe 18, and I was 22. Our relationship was just getting started, but something real was there and we both felt it.
Then came this explosion somewhere in the distance. A bomb? We kept talking. No big deal. Then came another, this one closer, and finally a third explosion, this time closer still and loud and scary. Hanh looked at me, eyes full of experience way beyond 18 years.
“War is a bad thing,” she said in her broken English. I nodded as we got up and joined everyone else outside their hooches to see what was going on.
No more explosions came, thankfully, and no Army alerts were issued, so everyone went back to their lives, even if a little rattled. In a few months, my tour was up and I’d leave Hanh with tears in her eyes and my heart heavy and no longer sure I was ready to go back to the “world” even though that’s what every soldier dreamed about day and night.
“We’ll see each other again,” I told her. “No,” she said, again much wiser than me, “we never see each other again.” She was right.
War has been on my mind a lot lately. It should be on everyone’s mind with wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, and all the saber-rattling from our own political and military leaders toward Russia, China, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, or any other nation that might want to join the newly reconstructed “axis of evil”.
War was the topic of my recent discussion with host Nima Rostami Alkhorshid on his international podcast Dialogue Works. It was my fourth appearance on his show, and war has dominated every discussion.
Even as we spoke, Israel continued its brutal bombing of the Gaza Strip, an ethnic cleansing launched after Hamas’ bloody October 7 terrorist attack in Israel. Israel’s war on Gaza has killed tens of thousands, including thousands of children, injured more than 60,000, and displaced nearly two million, with more than 60 percent of Gaza homes destroyed or damaged, and it has sowed the seeds of hatred and revenge for generations to come.
President Joe Biden, the number one beneficiary in Washington, D.C., of the largesse of the Israeli lobby over his long career—some $4.3 million in the past three decades, early on pledged total support to Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloody campaign.
In a presidential election year with polls showing a dramatic loss of support among Arab-Moslem voters and the crucial youth vote, the president has since urged Israel to ease up on civilian bombing—pretty please!—but his administration continues to send Israel weapons and has blocked UN efforts to demand a cease-fire. Now the military conflagration has spread to the Red Sea with the Houthi rebel group attacking cargo and other ships doing business with Israel, and the U.S. responding with bombing attacks on suspected Houthi bases in Yemen. Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon has spilled across that border as Israeli settlers continue violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
An attack this week on a U.S. base in Jordan killing three U.S. soldier and wounding dozens of others has ratcheted up the danger of a major regional war that brings in the U.S. and that perennial enemy of the neoconservative hawks in Biden’s administration, Iran. Recent Iranian attacks on suspected terrorist bases in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan were a signal to the U.S., according to writer M.K. Bhadrakumar, that it will not tolerate the CIA’s efforts to help terrorist groups surround and attack Iran.
Of course, the war in Ukraine rages on despite the clear fact that Russia has won and Ukraine has lost. The recent discovery of a $40 billion corruption case dealing with military weapons in Ukraine is just another event souring public support for the Ukrainian cause.
Then there’s all this unrest in Europe with massive protests by farmers in Germany and France against the deteriorating economy that the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline heralded. Energy costs are up an estimated 18 percent in Europe, putting the pinch not only on farmers but other major industries as well. Green Party ideologues in Germany and their fellow travelers in France want farmers—and, well, everyone—to get off coal, gas, oil, and nuclear dependency, and get those wind turbines turning! Suffer today in order to save the world tomorrow!
My key points to Nima on Dialogue Works this past week were several:
- Politicians, not the military, are really running these wars in Ukraine and in Gaza. Netanyahu’s approval ratings in Israel are even lower than Biden’s in the United States. Both fear not only loss of power but also the future possibility of jail. U.S. House impeachment proceedings against Biden are proceeding, and Netanyahu has long faced a day of reckoning over corruption allegations. Biden can’t allow a defeat in Ukraine before election day in November. So Ukrainians have to keep dying until then.
- Unhinged capitalism is destroying the United States with the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about now determining nearly all of U.S. foreign policy. Biden has signed off on $886 billion in defense spending for 2024. That’s “b” as in billion, or, in other words, nearly a trillion!
- The eastward expansion of NATO began under the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, continuing the long history of broken U.S. promises that date back at least as far as all those broken treaties with American Indians in the 1800s. Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary essentially destroyed the modern-day Democratic Party, making it as war-like and Wall Street-ruled as the Republican Party. No longer is it the party that helped champion the rise of the American Labor Movement in the 1930s and support the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
- Why do we still listen to neocons and other warmongers after the utter failures they created in Vietnam, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, wars that left ruin and devastation in their paths and served no purpose other than to further enrich corporate giants like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BlackRock? How are wars with Russia, Iran, and/or China going to end any differently? I’ll answer that last one—those wars, if they happen, will end in the nuclear destruction of us all.
All these years later, I still think occasionally about Hanh and wonder how she fared after all the Americans left and the Communists took over. Did working on a U.S. Army base result in her going to one of those re-education camps, or worse? I want to think of her in Vietnam today living a good life with family and friends. Even so, I’ll bet she would still say as she did so many years ago, “War is a bad thing.”
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