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  • 15 September 2020
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Dispatches From Dystopia

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Dispatches From Dystopia

Category Archives: Vietnam

Funeral At The Villages

06 Saturday Apr 2019

Posted by David in The Villages, Vietnam

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The Villages

I wore a suit for most of the day. I hadn’t done that in years. To tell the truth, I liked the experience. I wore a tropical wool tan suit, with a black patterned tie,white dress shirt, cordovan shoes. I looked good. I thought I would be inappropriately dressed, not wearing a dark suit. No worries. There were three of us in jackets & ties. This is a Florida retirement community. I could have worn my white sneakers and not been out of place.

The funeral was low key. The reception after was well-attended by Dan’s gardening colleagues. The Villages community has very nice residents, thoughtful and caring. The golf, golf carts, and pickleball (whatever that is) fade into the background.

Tonight we went out to dinner. The local Corvette Club had its members’ cars on display at Lake Sumter Landing. So we got to see these geriatric teenagers show off their rides.

The Villages has a reputation for sexual promiscuity, The Birth Control Culture grew up and old, but is still looking for cock or a piece of tail. That didn’t show up in my take on The Villages. Just kind of a place where old men try to pick up where they left off, before they shipped out to ‘Nam. I can’t much blame them. Our niece, aged 42, and daughter of the deceased, has a similar take on The Villages as I do: Disneyland Without The Rides.

My verdict in The Villages, It’s OK, I suppose.

Spiraling Down

29 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by David in Family, Vietnam

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# ALS

Hey Hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?

My brother-in-law is dying from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Slowly, inexorably, he is losing muscular function. He is in a hospice in Florida, near Mount Dora. His illness is the result of chemical exposure in Vietnam, during his combat service in 1969, most likely Agent Orange. The VA recognizes the disease as service-related, but won’t definitively attribute it to Agent Orange exposure. There isn’t much difference and he’s dying no matter what caused the disease.

I haven’t felt very motivated lately, bronchitis and allergies. Just discouraged. I don’t feel like exercising or watching what I eat.

We are leaving for Florida in the morning. J wants to see her brother one more time. The drive will be excruciating, both going down and coming back.

Damn Lyndon Johnson, Ho Chi Minh, John McCone, Gen. Giap. The whole fuckin’ bunch.

The War That Never Ends

29 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by David in Vietnam

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# ALS

Vietnam.

It was a war filled with folly, brutality, courage, sacrifice, dubious goals, and moral ambiguity. Pretty much like all wars.

This war for my family still rages. My brother-in-law served in Vietnam near fifty years ago. He came home alive, in one piece. He resumed his civilian life, started and raised a family. He has two children and six grandchildren.

Of course, he remembers his brothers-in-arms who didn’t make it back to have the life he has had. The jungle he thought he left behind had one more treacherous pitfall he could not evade. We all have heard about the dioxin-contaminated defoliant Agent Orange taking its toll on both jungle canopy and humans unlucky enough to be caught in its cloud. My brother-in-law is one more victim. At age 72, he is suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). The VA doesn’t even contest that his case and others like his are service-related. Maybe from Agent Orange, maybe something else.

My brother-in-law’s war isn’t over. Yet. Every phone call from him is about what he can no longer do. He can no longer tend his gardens or play golf, except for putting. Right now he walks with canes. The wheelchair awaits. His voice is halting, as he struggles to simply speak. His respirations are about one-third of what they should be. The disease is slowly paralyzing the muscles.

He is another casualty of “friendly fire”.

St Cecelia, Ngo Dinh Diem, JFK

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by David in American History, Classical Music, Politics, Vietnam

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JFK, Ngo Dinh Diem, St Cecelia

I would be remiss if I let 22 November pass unnoticed.  It is St Cecelia’s Day. Cecelia was a young woman martyred in Second Century Rome, who sang while her executioners went about their business.  She is now the patron saint of musicians.  Given the importance of music in the Catholic tradition, it is a special day.   Starting in the Sixteenth Century, the Protestants, beset with the graven image hang-up, allowed church music to flourish. We have Buxtehude, Bach, Handel, Mendelsohn from their side of the Christian house to enrich us.  My sister, a church organist, would take my cousin Annette to the Cathedral for the St Cecelia’s Day Concert.  It was Annette’s only predictable foray inside the walls of a church, an illustration of the maxim quality over quantity.

Jumping over the centuries, we come to November, 1963. On 2 November, 1963, President Ngo Dinh Diem was taken from the Cathedral in Saigon where he was attending the All Souls Day Mass and murdered in a coup d’etat.  The coup, we were to learn, was staged with the approval of the U. S. Department of State.  It seems the pezzo novante (big shots) at State didn’t care for how Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the lawful leaders of the South Vietnamese government, were conducting the war. They proceeded to fabricate allegations of corruption against them and found men willing to depose and murder them.  The success of the war against the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas did not improve after the coup. The war “escalated”, to use a contemporary term.  After the deaths of millions of Vietnamese, Laotions, and Cambodians and thousands of Americans, we have the state of affairs that exists today. In a well-documented book The Lost Mandate Of Heaven (Ignatius Press, 2015), Geoffrey Shaw, PhD,  tells the story of Diem’s murder.  The U.S. government does not come off too well. Suffice it to say fundamental cultural insensitivity toward statecraft from the Confucian context of Diem prompted the coup.

Finally, one cloudy cold Friday in November, my Seventh Grade P.E. Class was playing soccer on the athletic field at Westhampton Junior High School, when Mrs. Aron, the Girls’ P.E. teacher,  came charging out. We learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. I remember it as if it were yesterday.  Some kids cheered.  Patriotism and respect for authority were not the default settings, even then.  The next few days brought a great period of  mourning for the world.  I remember the pictures of President de Gaulle of France at the funeral.  Even the Russians were respectful; the Cold War forgotten for a few days at least.

The future of the country was changed by the killings of Diem and Kennedy. Kennedy’s death was viewed as a martyrdom for Civil Rights for Blacks.   President Johnson used his incomparable political expertise to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. He had overwhelming Republican support for the Bill, true bipartisanship.  1964 brought the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which spawned the Congressional Resolution establishing the President’s right to expand the war in South Vietnam and all of Indochina. The Democratic landslide in the 1964 Presidential Election gave President Johnson the Congressional power and popular mandate he wanted to wage his War on Poverty and usher in his Great Society agenda.  For good or ill we live with the legacy today.

In my life, the first outcome was school integration.  Black children now attended a school close to where they lived rather than try to get to the nearest segregated school for blacks.  The public accommodations section almost overnight changed Southern life. No more Jim Crow bathrooms, denial of access to restaurants and hotels for blacks. Today, when I go into Cracker Barrel and the patrons are split almost equally black and white, I wonder what the controversy was about in the first place.  I could have told you even in 1964 both communities like the same food.

My life from 1969 through 1973 was dictated by the Vietnam War  I turned 18 the day Nixon was inaugurated because January 20 fell on a Sunday that year.  I registered for the draft and received a student deferment.  The draft lottery system was introduced subsequently. My number was 129 and that was high enough to keep me from being drafted. We never questioned what might have been, had the 1963 coup never been attempted.

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