A few weeks later, I called my old employer, a company that serviced Telephone Company vehicles based in Santa Fe Springs, California, for which I had worked on a part-time basis before going into the Army. They reluctantly hired me again. They assigned me to a facility that I had never seen before. They gave me no duties and no one talked to me. At the end of the first week, someone came by to give me my first check. He handed me the envelope without so much as one word. As I opened it I saw the word "termination." I left without saying a word to anybody. I did not complain or ask for an explanation. The writing was on the wall.
I just finished reading Ron Kovic's new book, "Hurricane Street" about his very public protest of the abominable treatment by the Veterans Administration hospital he was confined to, the Long Beach Veterans Hospital in Long Beach, California. Kovic has been a disabled paraplegic since his 1968 wound in combat in Vietnam. The book details what a group of disabled, wheel chair bound veterans, did to get attention of the politicians. His story is a compelling tale of pure betrayal by the political world. Here are men who were sent on a mission far, far, from home, for a purpose that no one could explain properly or defend. They were critically wounded to a point where they could not take care of themselves and were abandoned in a veterans hospital like a homeless person.
The book is a tale of the human cost of war. Young men who could no longer function in society due to their injuries. But, the tale also shows all the unintended consequences of war. Kovic mentions that the Washington Post had printed a story about the fact that an average of 22 veterans commit suicide each day in America today. Hurricane Street tells the other story of what happened to these injured veterans. How one got into drugs, ended up in prison and died of an overdose; one took a shotgun and blew his brains out one day. Another died from an infection due to a bed sore that would not heal. These are stories the public rarely hears or, for that matter, cares about, but this is one of the the human toll of war.
In my last post, "How the Vietnam War was hijacked by the Press," I review a book about how the Vietnam War started and all the bone-headed decisions made by politicians in the Kennedy Administration who acted as if they were playing a video game. Elections have consequences, is a familiar saying in politics today, it usually refers to appointing judges. Elections certainly do have consequences, but most people don't have the slightest idea; they know nothing about a candidate's positions and his world view. Elections are akin to beauty contests, like the Miss America contest. It's who talked the best or slickest, not who has experience or fortitude.
The Vietnam War was a war like no other in our history. It was a war that could not be won. Imagine, if you will, that Los Angeles County had declared independence from California. You design a war in which you must only fight inside Los Angeles County. You cannot go out of the county to engage your enemy. The enemy, on the other hand, has all the liberty to attack you from every corner of land and sea. How likely are you to win such a war? This was the Vietnam war. A war that was designed by clueless politicians who played it like a game. The blog post I mentioned earlier details all the events that led to this was and the madness of the war architects. Check out the cost in deaths for the Vietnam War; click here.
The Vietnam War was a war like no other in our history. It was a war that could not be won. Imagine, if you will, that Los Angeles County had declared independence from California. You design a war in which you must only fight inside Los Angeles County. You cannot go out of the county to engage your enemy. The enemy, on the other hand, has all the liberty to attack you from every corner of land and sea. How likely are you to win such a war? This was the Vietnam war. A war that was designed by clueless politicians who played it like a game. The blog post I mentioned earlier details all the events that led to this was and the madness of the war architects. Check out the cost in deaths for the Vietnam War; click here.
