For some reason it strikes me as odd that there are more or less 35,000 registered lobbyists in Washington.
In the last 50 or so years about 120,000 of our boys and girls have died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, and the count continues.
Am I trying to make a connection between the two?
I don't know or even have a clue.
I wrote something a few days ago that was meant to be critical of a pro war article carried in the Wall Street Journal, (where else?) by a PhD named Arthur Herman.
While it was my intention to ridicule Dr. Arthur Herman, as I often regrettably do, I became sidetracked inside my own hostility to "non-operating" PhDs, and annoyed many holding this advanced degree, and I am sorry about that. I continue to believe that business and life are not about the intellectualism of it, but rather the experience of it.
Forgive the metaphor, but it is like spending all of your time researching and studying about sex and sexuality and then writing about it, or instead learning about sex by engaging in it, and after doing "it" writing about it.
A friend, a retired Marine Colonel, wrote to me at my request to tell me a little about his service in Vietnam. After all, what would he know about this stuff? He did "Marine duty" in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam and Dr. Herman "read about it."
He was an "I have my feet on the ground and my ass on the line Marine." Dr. Herman is a promoter of "winning" in Iraq and is ready to blame the left wing media if we don't, this "blame the messenger stuff" is just wrong. I expect that you certainly do not need to be a soldier to comment on WAR, but I expect that it helps. (This is only a kittle more churlishness on my behalf.)
My friend's words are not just some "year's later intellectualization. A Marine Colonel can safely say what matters to so many like me: "Been there, done that."
His words give much insight into our present situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is still alive after all of his service, yet so many are not. Here are his words.
"When I got to Viet Nam in 1969, I soon realized that --although our troops had all but destroyed the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive-- it was clear that our forces would continue to die indefinitely in a small-bore civil war.
Initially, while putting my gear together, and meeting with my superiors across the river, I was billeted at the Combat Information Center in Danang. The correspondents of the major newsmagazines and newspapers and networks hung around the bar there much of the time, exchanging opinions about a war they knew only from the fringes, and the comparative safety of Danang. Unlike the other wars I knew, in the Pacific and Korea, these newsmen were not latter-day Ernie Pyles eager to take part in platoon and company combat missions; and their view of the war tended to deal in politics, in ideology, and not in tactics and strategy. Most picked up the division's military handouts every day, and later crossed the river, perhaps to interview someone at Division Headquarters, or to trek over to Marble Mountain as the photographers took pictures of the body bags being loaded for return to the US.
My duty assignment sent me NORTH, close by the North Vietnam border. There, down at the level of CAPS (Combined Action Platoons), the view was totally different from what the correspondents were talking about in Danang. A thousand villages were protected by these CAPS, made up of half Marines, half South Vietnamese soldiers, and commanded by a Marine Platoon Sergeant. Not one of those villages ever went over to the Viet Cong. And there was a reason for it.
These men lived and worked and ate and slept and fought and died together. They shared everything. And they helped the Vietnamese in their villages in remarkable ways. One example: In a village, where the people had little or no protein in their diets, the Marines tackled the problem. One of them had read an article about how the Israelis put fingerlings in their irrigation ditches, and raised a crop of fish. So, with aid from the Seabees, the Combined Action Platoon dumped fingerlings into the holding areas where the water was pumped (by foot power) out of the rice paddies. When that water was returned to the paddies, there was a great crop of fish; and since there was no power to refrigerate them, the Marines showed the villagers had to build smokehouses. By the time I reached that village, the Vietnamese there were in business, "capitalists" selling smoked fish to other villages.
Of a thousand villages protected by such CAPS, places where our men helped the people build schools and inoculate livestock and get access to water and protect the fields, not one ever went over to the enemy. I can still remember village women standing beside a trail, offering glasses of tea when our units returned from patrol or from setting up an ambush. The South Vietnamese people I met in those villages were eager to show their admiration and appreciation of our troops working with theirs.
When I returned to Danang, and talked to correspondents about the truly amazing relationship of Americans and South Vietnamese, about the great improvement in living standards and security that the CAPS had brought to the villages, when I asked them to accompany me to see for themselves, the unanimous reply I got back was "We don't belong here, Colonel. And I'm not going to be part of anything that'll prolong this war.
"I'm one Marine who thought, and still thinks, we should never have gone into Viet Nam. The "Domino Theory" was pure and unadulterated crap. However, there's no doubt in my mind that The Press played a major role in circulating the perception of a disastrous American defeat."
It has always been incredible to me how we listen to the inexperienced but well-educated rather then those who have "been there, and done that." Is there a good reason that this war has been conducted in "secret?" From time to time some stuff about the war "slips out" on CNN, but for the most part it is "hush hush, we do not want to upset the populace with what they might not want to hear on their way to Disneyland.
I, therefore, remain hostile to the Broadcast Networks that maintain a "lets pretend that we are in fact working journalists;" yet do little or no real reporting about what has gone on in Iraq for five years. Five years. Five years. Five years. YES Five years.
WHY?
I blame General Electric, Viacom/CBS, Walt Disney, and News Corp.
My Marine friend went on to say concerning our conversations:
"Norman, I'm not sure if you know much about Eric Hoffer. He was a remarkable man, a longshoreman-philosopher who wrote brilliantly. He didn't trust intellectuals, either. He felt it was fine to give them recognition, but would have rebelled at the idea of giving them power.
"Intellectuals," he said, "cannot operate at room temperature."
Here are some quotes ABOUT HIM:
He believed that "hype, moral melodrama, and sweeping visions were the way that intellectuals approached the problems of the world. --But that was not the way progress was usually achieved in America. "Nothing so offends the doctrinaire intellectual as our ability to achieve the momentous in a matter-of-fact way, unblessed by words.
Since the American economy and society advanced with little or no role for the intelligentsia, it is hardly surprising that anti-Americanism flourishes among intellectuals.
Nowhere at present," he said, "is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America,
Some of the outrageous comments from intellectuals and academics, that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were somehow our own fault, bore out what Hoffer had said many years earlier.
Eric Hoffer never bought the claims of intellectuals to be for the common man."A ruling intelligentsia," he said, "whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed and wasted at will.
One of the many conceits of contemporary intellectuals that Hoffer deflated was their nature cult. "Almost all the books I read spoke worshipfully of nature," he said, recalling his own personal experience as a migrant farm worker that was full of painful encounters with nature, which urban intellectuals worshipped from afar.
Hoffer saw in this exaltation of nature another aspect of intellectuals' elitist 'distaste for man.' Implicit in much that they say and do is 'the assumption that education readies a person for the task of reforming and reshaping humanity -- that is equips him to act as an engineer of souls and manufacturer of desirable human attributes.
Eric Hoffer called it "soul raping" -- an apt term for what goes on in too many schools today, where half-educated teachers treat the classroom as a place for them to shape children's attitudes and beliefs in a politically correct direction.
This is creating the next generation of "true believers," indoctrinated with ideologies that provide "fact-proof screens from reality" in Hoffer's words. It is the antithesis of education.
Eric Hoffer was ahead of his time. It is a literary treat to read him in order to catch up with our own times."
Another friend, observing from a different angle, wrote the following to me about Herman's article:
"I have long since given up on trying to convince Right Wingers (or Left Wingers, for that matter) of anything they don't already believe. The quotations from Herman's book are such preposterous claptrap that I cannot believe anyone takes them seriously; yet I know that there are many who feel exactly the way he does.
The idea that we could avoid sustaining continuing losses in Viet Nam is nonsense. "Peace with honor" was a euphemism that enabled the same politicians who got us into the war to get us out with an appearance of dignity. We had to get out or endure continuing losses, plain and simple. No one who was there could possibly believe otherwise. We will also lose in Iraq."
And now I will once again do what I do almost all of the time which is to find someone or some group of people to blame, and those who know me know who it will be.
The American Broadcast Networks have a "duty" to inform their viewers as to the truth as they know it about ALL WARS, and not hide behind the facade of "our prime responsibility is to our shareholders."
How sad is it that they do that!
Norman Horowitz
I served in the United States Air Force from January 1952 until November 1955. I never fired a weapon until two weeks before my discharge and no one ever fired one at me.