"Being John Wayne, Or Not..."
"Being John Wayne, Or Not..."
by CoyotePrime
Being a dumbass kid whose mind was full of delusional “John Wayne” hero nonsense, I enlisted (with the required parental consent) in the Marine Corps at 17. It was late 1968, the VietNam war was raging, and the military had a tremendous need for fresh bodies. (The first draft wouldn't happen until July, 1969. Incredibly, my birthdate was picked number 1! So my sorry self was going anyway.) I went through bootcamp at Parris Island, then Advanced Infantry Training at Camp Geiger, N.C. Those of us now officially MOS 0311’s, Infantry Rifleman, were assigned to the 2nd Marine Division base at Camp LeJeune.
The day after our arrival at Camp LeJeune the sergeant entered the squad bay and shouted, “Who wants to go to ‘Nam?” En masse we rushed forward to volunteer, eager to defend democracy and k**l those nasty c****es. Within a week, all who volunteered were given new orders sending them to VietNam- except for me, and 4 other guys, who were still only 17. See, you had to be 18 to die for your country, and we’d have to wait our turn, which eventually came, sadly. My best buddy, a guy named Jim Hart, with whom I’d gone through both bootcamp and AIT together, was one of the “lucky” ones. As he prepared to leave, we tore a dollar bill in half, promising to buy a beer with the re-connected pieces when we saw each other again. We never drank that beer.
I and the other 17’ers were sent on a “Med Cruise”, as part of the landing battalion aboard the Navy’s 6th Fleet ships patrolling the Mediterranean. We soon began receiving mail from our buddies in the ‘Nam. Things weren’t going so well, guys were getting k**led, and where was John Wayne when we needed him? Eventually a letter came to another guy, telling of the slaughter of most of our friends. The VietCong, clever as they were, had dug up a misfired 155 mm artillery round and made a booby trap of it. In their new unit our buddies came boppin' down the trail, and someone stepped on it, k*****g 11 of them, including my friend Hart, all ripped to pieces by the tremendous explosion. My most terrifying thought was that if I’d been a few months older, I’d have been either in front or behind him at that moment, and k**led with the rest.
This was another life changing moment. This was for REAL! People were really getting k**led! And I had to know why. Not just the bulls**t, f**g-waving, “bringing freedom and democracy” crap- does that sound familiar right now?- but what were the real forces that made wars happen, and why did so many people die in these tribalistic mass murders. Tragically, the answer is economic: we are in competition with other nations for control of resources of every kind like oil, rubber, metals, natural gas, and food, and all the other necessities we need to sustain our current way of life. And, of course, the money and power that comes along during the process, to a privileged few. They won’t ask you to die for Exxon/Mobil, and you’d tell them to go to hell if they did, but they’ll volunteer to die defending Mom, apple pie, and the good old “American way of life”. We'll die for an ideal like "patriotism", but not for the t***h. And that’s how they’ve worked this deal, since the dawn of man. War is a very, very bad thing...
https://youtu.be/XU9k5S8NXEw"War In A Nutshell"
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_oUc6WpOAwto/THGXahb1jwI/AAAAAAAAaB4/cNKsVYPcYzA/s1600/From+Clipboard.jpg"War In A Nutshell"
by Eugene Debs
"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles (whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine) concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.
The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives.
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasize the fact- and it cannot be repeated too often- that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace."
Happy Veterans Day 2017
We thank you and honor your service.
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