knobmaker's Journal: The Goodness of Silly Actions

So I lost my head and made a fairly off-topic post. In a discussion on the evilness of Palladium, I was detoured into ranting about my past experience with evil military ventures. I'm sorry. I was responding to a guy who found the anti-war protestors distasteful, silly, and counter-productive.

In retrospect, I guess I was too hard on the guy. He's probably just a well-intentioned young man who's never seen blood spilled for evil and/or futile reasons. I think I have, and it's had an effect on me.

Anyway, I found his post offensive. It seemed such a shallow criticism of people who, despite their atrocious fashion sense, believed in something enough to go out into the streets in the bad weather and make their feelings known. Even if I disagreed with them, I'd have found that admirable. It was as if Jesus were being criticized for having a bad haircut, so I wrote this:

The poster said: I'm not pro-war. But I'm 100% anti-peaceniks.

Then I guess it's not completely evil for me to hope that, by some strange science fiction manifestation of karma, you find yourself fleeing across the desert, dodging angry Iraqui bullets.

Here's my story. See if you can figure out why I find it annoying that people who have never sacrificed anything for their "beliefs" can judge the motivations of others in so shallow a manner.

When I was a young man, the "peaceniks" tried to talk me out of going to Vietnam. I went anyway. A year in that sunny clime convinced me that while some wars might be morally justified, that one sure as hell wasn't. With less than a year to go on my hitch, I was ordered back to SE Asia with my squadron. I refused to go. There was great puzzlement among my squadron officers, since I had been ordered to Bangkok, Thailand, which at that time was the land of milk and honeys, the favored destination for GIs leaving Vietnam for R&R. There didn't appear to be any explanation for my bizarre behavior, other than a genuine belief that dropping bombs on the Vietnamese was immoral. However, as was their duty, my officers busted me out with a bad discharge, I lost my various GI entitlements, and here I am, just a few years short of my retirement move to a cardboard box.

Now, strangely enough, I'm not bitter. I knew what I was doing and what I would lose, and I know I was lucky not to spend time in Leavenworth for my beliefs. But it does piss me off to hear shallow real-politik arguments bereft of any moral component used against people who are doing what they think is right. Hey, maybe if I hadn't refused to go hang bombs on F-111s in Bangkok, maybe we'd have "won" the war in Vietnam. You think? Naw, probably not. It was late 1972, the war was lost, and the F-111s were broke most of time they were over there. I think it's a shame that I and the other "peaceniks" didn't quit fighting a few years earlier. Might have saved a few hundred thousand lives, American and Vietnamese.

The point is that the "peaceniks" are making a moral choice. Even if you don't agree with their choice, they deserve more admiration and consideration than a gaggle of grasping pinhead politicians who are making the decision for purely utilitarian purposes.

Finally, a little quote from a speech last fall by Sen. Byrd: "Representative Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William H. Herndon, stated: 'Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.'"

Don't answer me. Answer Abraham.

I don't want to leave anyone the impression that I'm a standard Vietnam veteran, complete with Post Traumatic Syndrome and a mighty conviction that the world owes me a better deal just because I was stupid enough to go over there when the state told me to. I was in the Air Force, so my stay in Vietnam was a lot like a really bad, really long vacation, except we worked 12 hour days and the VC liked to throw a few rockets at us now and then.

But just because we weren't out there burning villages and shooting civilians, we weren't without guilt. I spent my first few months incountry at an airbase called Phan Rang, loading bombs on F-100s. I stuck many a canister of napalm under the wings, lots of bombs, lots of 20 millimeter cannon rounds in the belt boxes. Later on I fixed F-4 bomb racks in the Da Nang weapons shop. So I killed innocent people as surely as if I'd put a gun to their heads. I participated in a great evil, and so did everyone who sneered at the peaceniks who were trying to stop that war.

I have a prediction: Those who've put their faith in the dunce who presently occupies the White House will one day have reason to suspect that they have also trafficked with evil. To me, the idea of making war on a country because of what it might do is as strange an idea as, say, shooting your neighbor because you fear he's the kind of person who'd poison your dog. In both cases, we're talking insanity. No one wants to see their dog poisoned, but becoming a murderous lunatic is probably an overreaction.

I think the world is growing less tolerant of insane nations, even when they're giants. Or maybe especially when they're giants.

Anyway, I think I was too hard on the guy. He said in a later post that he tried to sign up for Gulf War I, but there was that asthma thing. I don't know exactly why he was so gung-ho to fight and die for the pocketbooks of the Kuwaiti First Family, but I think he was saying that he'd tried to put his money where his mouth was.

I don't know why he can't see that the "peaceniks" he despises are doing the very same thing. They didn't get out there and trudge through the delightful slushy winter weather because it was a party. They genuinely feel, most of them, that the U.S. is about to do a very bad thing.

Okay. Enough.