Deadly Sand Trap Wars

So we’re at war, no surprise. Lot’s a reasons: The coup staged by the Dulles brothers (to save British Petroleum), the hostage crisis that Jimmy Carter screwed up, the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us of. But mostly war is big money, alla way ‘round. Like Little Orphan Annie’s benefactor, Daddy Warbucks; where’d he get his bucks from?

Bush VP Dick Cheney’s old company Halliburton been feeding at the federal trough (defense contracts) since Pharoh. Little buddy (and Betsy DeVos brother) Eric Prince parlayed his tiny Blackwater company into a global empire. All thanks to Bushie’s Iraq War. But it only cost American citizens the equivalent of goofy ideas like Bernie’s free college or Liz’s free health care. So which would you rather have - wars or college or health? Idk...anyone could have a boat, but you don’t know what’s in the box.

That’s bad enough, enough to make you sick (w/o healthcare) but what pushes you over the edge is going to the clinic during that war; and my little granddaughter staring/pointing at the photo the receptionist has on her desk. So I ask the lady about it (a pleasant older woman). “Oh” she says to my little girl “you must be in daycare with my granddaughter.” So to be polite, I ask her about the others in the photo. Turns out the man is her son. He’s in Minneapolis now; was wounded in Iraq. No, it was a head injury, he’s never coming home, never going to recover.

So what the hell have we been fighting for? Later that year I see in the newspaper: local youth visited by President in Army hospital. I ask my daughter if she knew him. Yeah, they were in the same classes since grade school. They were both 19, but now he’s dead. That’s a big difference. So I wrote a book about that, and I guess it didn’t matter cuz nobody read it.

But right now we have 13,000 US troops in Kuwait, guarding...oil, I guess. Well somebody has to do it. About 70% of Kuwait’s population is foreigners working there on...oil, I guess. So while folks in Iran burn our flag and shout death to America, we starve their people with crippling economic sanctions and shout death to the Iriquois!

Cuz...face it, we don’t know much about history or geography. To us, Soleimani was a terrorist. Which never includes Americans cuz as Fox puts it: we’re the good guys. Orwell couldn’t have said it better. But to the Brits, Benny Arnold was a hero; to the Ruskies, the Rosenberg’s were. It all kinda depends on your point of view. How hard is that to understand?

In ‘64 Lydon Stupid Johnson was on tv saying “my fellow ‘Murricans, nasty rotten commie bastards attacked our boats in Tonkin Gulf.” At the time, no one knew he was lying, but my grandmother started to cry. She’d lived through through three wars, and had several grandsons who were draft age. Not me, but I remember serving funeral mass when a boy came home in a box.

And no surprise here - we’re at war with ourselves. Democrats cussin Republicans cussin back. But imagine all my school friends whose grampa’s fought the Huns in WWI. In our little German-American town in north Nebraska, most a them boys still spoke Deutscher at home in 1917. Even taught it in my high school, so I learned it better’n some of my friends who were Hochsteins and Kleinschmidts and Koenigs, with older brothers coming back from the Nam.

One of my favorite movies: Jeffrey Hunter in Hell to Eternity - an orphaned kid adopted by Japanese Americans gets to go kill Japs in Saipan in WWII. Even knows what they’re saying cuz he grew up talkin the talk with the people who took him in. Lotta stories like that from lotta wars.

On my tv stand there’s a beautiful gift from the lovely girl who used to run the Chinese restaurant down the street. She’d give me little gifts every Christmas when I delivered packages. One summer she and her husband got to go home for a visit, after months of planning and applications. So she brought me back a little porcelain temple from Saigon. But that sweet happy girl died young, and that’s very sad.

I coulda been in Vietnam in ‘72, if I’d wanted to. Coulda killed gooks, if I’d wanted to. Coulda maybe killed that girl who gave me that present. But goddamn… I never wanted to.