Letter to a retired foreign service officer and college classmate, followed by a letter from the president of the Vietnam Veterans of America:
Ah, Sharon, I can still remember you taking your lunch break at the State Department to walk me through Capitol Hill and point me in the direction of the Wall. I had to walk around the perimeter three times (by coincidence, a propitious number in Christianity and Buddhism) before I could work up the courage to walk on down and seek out the names of fallen neighbors and high school classmates whose names appeared there and which haunt me and fellow classmates to this day.
And yet, as tragic as the loss of almost 60,000 American lives might have been, the loss of three million Asian lives haunts me more, because no one in the US seems to care.
Ironically, after bearing witness from 1970-71 to the death and destruction wrought by the 8th Tactical Fighter all over Southeast Asia, especially over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in supposedly neutral Laos, I became a pacifist. Yet now, watching the Russian buildup around Ukraine for months and watching the Biden administration act like pip-squeak Neville Chamberlains, I have become a pragmatist. If the might of the USAF we deployed in Southeast Asia (ten tactical fighter wings plus SAC B-52 wings in Guam and Utapao, Thailand) were deployed to Eastern NATO and Ukraine, Russia never would have set a boot outside their borders. Denying Ukraine 30 MiG-29s from Poland? Obscene.
Don’t get me started about Ukraine LOL–except I keep turning on CNN for five minutes and seeing another child or volunteer soldier or UASAID worker killed in this senseless war. And watching the Western World tremble when Biden truthfully says that Putin has to go.
In any case, thanks for pointing me towards the Wall forty some years ago. I never want to forget the lost cause the US fought in SEA a generation earlier, and I find comfort knowing the entire nation has a fitting reminder.
With warm regards–
Terry
—– Forwarded Message —–
From: Vietnam Veterans of America <admin@vva.org>
To: Terence Harkin <taharkin@taharkin
Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2022, 12:53:29 PM GMT+7
Subject: 40th Anniversary of The Wall
| Visit vva.org today. “Anyone who has had the opportunity to visit The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., appreciates the range of powerful emotions evoked by The Wall. Reflection. Awe. Respect. A sense of sadness, grief, and mourning at the sight of nearly 60,000 names etched into the polished black granite. 60,000 names. Each one a son or a daughter; a brother or sister; an American who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. Public memorials hold an important place in the hearts of my generation of veterans, along with all others who have served. Memorials offer a chance for reflection, and, perhaps more importantly, they honor a shared commitment: To treat all those who have been sent to war with respect and dignity when they come home. Each year, on March 29, our country observes National Vietnam War Veterans Day—commemorating the day the last U.S. combat troops departed Vietnam—and, this year, we are also observing the 40th Anniversary of The Wall.” –Jack McManus VVA National President Watch the Ceremony PS: Like many of you, I’m profoundly aware that VVA has built a legacy of veterans working for veterans who honor and memorialize their service. Learn how to create your Lasting Legacy with a bequest to VVA. Thank You VVA relies on the generosity of Americans like you—caring, compassionate people who believe in helping those who sacrifice so much—to serve the needs of countless veterans. www.vva.org Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another. FOLLOW US |
Joe! The MiG-29s from Poland are planes Ukrainian pilots can fly RIGHT NOW!
They are a symbol of national pride, of being able to stand up to Russia toe to toe.
We are at war, and RIGHT NOW counts! Russia is advancing on Kiev, the capital RIGHT NOW!
Russia is advancing into the south of Ukraine RIGHT NOW!
Russia is indiscriminately bombing schools and hospitals, killing women, children, grandparents, and a respected American journalist, Brent Renaud , RIGHT NOW!
Your Secretary of State, Press Secretary, and Pentagon spokesmen say we are already sending Ukraine effective weapons for air defence. But that is all defensive. Send Ukraine MiG-29s and start training their pilots on American aircraft so they can go on the offensive RIGHT NOW!
My dad, an Irish immigrant’s son who by dint of hard work and good luck became a seaplane instructor from Stamford, Connecticut, could take a crowded train down to Arcada, Florida, and teach British farmboys how to fly on Stearman biplanes, incredible planes that are still flying. After learning how to take off and land in one piece, the British cadets quickly graduated to aerobatics fifty feet off the deck. The ones who survived were well-prepared to move on to Spitfires, the planes they used to drive back the mighty Luftwaffe. To this day, British families of pilots who died at Arcada gather once a year to honor them.
President Biden! In the time we’re wasting nitpicking how to get Russian MiG 29s from Poland to Ukraine, we could be picking up Ukrainian pilots at the border and having our Top Guns train them on American fighters that the Ukrainian pilots can fly back to their homeland. It would be like delivering big Javelins, which we are already doing.
They don’t call me the Idea Man for nothing!
WW II1/2 might be a good thing. As with Hitler and Hirohito, we could put Putin out of business and allow Russia to have truly free elections and a market economy where all can play, not just a few oligarchs/Friends of Putin…
It would need to be a stealthy blitzkrieg from all NATO countries bordering Russia. But from what the world has seen so far in Ukraine, this is a typical Communist military machine–large and clumsy and over-managed from the top. Back in the days I spent with the 601st Photo Flight, F-4s from Ubon, Udorn, and Korat, Thailand, could easily chase the Russian MiGs that were sent up over Hanoi because they barely had enough fuel to do more than take off and land.
The Pentagon and NATO fear nuclear war if they engage with Russian troops, in the air or on the ground. But Russia already occupies Chernobyl and the largest nuclear power plant in Europe in the south of Ukraine. Putin already declares himself ready to use his nuclear arsenal and has already aided Bashar in Syria to use nerve gas on his own civilians. Putin has no end game, no way out other than escalation. The US and NATO need to take the initiative, declare war on Putin and take him out with surgical precision. Russian media needs to be reopened free of Putin’s obscene censorship so all Russian citizens can know the truth.
The world paid a horrendous price for WW II, but WW II 1/2 can be limited to Ukraine, western Russia, and Moscow. The brush fire in the Ukraine can be stomped out quickly with US and NATO aid, with Ukrainian Air Force MiG 29s controlling the skies over its homeland, but with NATO attacking Russian air defence across the border. That means war–yes. Putin has already declared merely supplying the Ukraine an act of war. Likewise the worldwide sanctions on Russian banking and trade. Putin is already at war, but once the US and other NATO nations declare war on Russia, Putin’s days days are numbered.
Russian jails are already filled with thousands of protestors who no longer fear him. Russian troops in the Ukraine are abandoning their heavy weapons and surrendering. Why not recruit them to lead a March on Moscow that will lead to Putin’s arrest for war crimes? If little old ladies and students can stand up to Putin, why can’t the NATO nations, led by the US with the most powerful military in the history of the world?
March 1, 2022
To the Editor:
As an author of serious historical military fiction, I must ask why the US has not fast-tracked Ukraine into NATO? 150,000+ Russian troops surrounding it and the US pulls out its embassy staff and military trainers? I once had great hope for President Biden’s leadership, but he is not showing it.
It mystifies me why Finland and Sweden are not already members, sharing as they do the values of the founding members of NATO. As shaky a member as Turkey might be, NATO should be actively surrounding Western Russia right now, even without Finland.
With 150,000+ Russian troops already making incursions into Eastern Ukraine, this is no time to be deploying a few thousand US troops here and a few thousand there. It’s time for US aircraft to be flying eyeball to eyeball with the Russian air force.
Has anybody in Washington studied Russia’s history? This is the country that starved out Napoleon’s army in Moscow and Hitler’s army at Stalingrad, despite enduring horrendous losses. How can Biden and Secretary of State Blinken expect an embargo to stop Putin?
Terence A. Harkin, author
The Big Buddha Bicycle Race
In the Year of the Rabbit
taharkin.net
Of course it’s best not to start a cooking fire in the first place, but if it happens, do we stand around until the whole house is engulfed in flame or do we use the fire extinguisher hanging in the pantry?
Same deal with preventing forest fires. Better to cook over a stone fire pit and completely cover up the embers when we’ve finished. But if a spark does get caught in the wind and lands in a patch of dry grass, don’t we try to stomp it out and call 911, or do we wait until it turns into a conflagration?
So why are we waiting for the kitchen fire in Ukraine to turn into a raging fire that engulfs Europe before the US and NATO stop sitting on their hands?
Today Russia bombed a maternity and children’s hospital. President Biden–this is a war crime! It’s time to give Ukraine all the air power it asks for–and time to send in US air support if Ukraine asks for it. We started the Vietnam War over a so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident that President Johnson presented to Congress and the American people as an unprovoked attack on an American vessel. In reality poorly trained young Navy gunners most likely were shooting at high waves.
There is no ambiguity what Russia is doing in Ukraine, putting two nuclear reactors at risk now and bombing apartments and hospitals. It’s time to give President Zelensky everything he asks for!
The Pentagon nixed Poland’s plan to ship Ukraine their MiG fighters by way of Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Once again, US leadership dithers over technicalities while children die in Kiev and grandmothers flee for Poland. Gary Kasparov gets it–the West is more worried about upsetting Putin than the lives of Ukrainians who courageously stand as the bulwark of Western democratic ideals.
Are American college radicals right after all? Is oil at the heart of the matter? Russia has it. Ukraine doesn’t.
“Again?! Is this a joke? Ukrainian civilians are being massacred and NATO is still wondering how to keep the man massacring them happy. Sorry, but NATO is going to have to do things Putin doesn’t like. They delayed so long risk is required now.”
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) March 9, 2022
So Joe, wake up! Get those MiGs to Ukraine by hook or by crook. YOU are the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world. It’s time you act like it!
Once again, it’s time for you–my Irish cousins–to take action!
The president of the United States and NATO are afraid to confront Russia–to cross one of Putin’s many so-called “red lines.” And yet wasn’t the very reason NATO was created was to repulse a Russian attack on free Europe?
It was you, the fishermen of Killybegs, who confronted the Russian Navy and forced them to leave your fishing grounds alone in the North Atlantic. Now is the time to expand your fishing ground to the Black Sea. The mighty navies of NATO and the USA are afraid of igniting war with Russia. And yet, as Ukrainian President Zelensky continues to remind the world from his enclave in Kiev, the war with democratic Europe already began when Putin attacked democratic Ukraine utterly without justification.
And so I exhort you, the fishermen of Killybegs! Ukraine needs you to join them to stand up to Putin and spare his Russian soldiers and seamen from more senseless killing and dying!
As former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told CNN’s Jim Acosta today, the fact that American- and NATO-supplied missiles are being used to shoot down Russian aircraft means we are ALREADY at war with Russia!
To know that the US has an entire wing of AC-130 Spectre gunships, including the legendary 16th Special Operations Squadron (the 16th SOS), sitting on the tarmac at Hurlburt Field in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, drives me to the height of frustration. I worked with the 601st Photo Flight documenting the success of the 16th SOS as they destroyed tens of thousands of trucks traveling in convoys down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the later years of the Vietnam War. The 40-mile Russian convoy lurking outside Kiev would be no problem–16th SOS Spectre gunships would take out the lead and trailing trucks with pinpoint precision, then use their sensors to locate fuel and ammunition trucks and take them out. The convoy would be trapped in place.
Joe! Russia is the country that starved out Napoléon in Moscow, chasing his army back to France in disgrace in the 19th Century. In the Twentieth Century, the Russian people held off the mighty German army at Stalingrad, undeterred by freezing weather and scant supplies. Taking away a few oligarchs’ yachts will not stop a madman like Putin. He is killing Ukrainian woman and children with impunity.
Joe! We are already at war! Why to you let heroic but outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers fight off Russian invaders alone?
What is the point the US having the mightiest military in the history of world and deploying it since Vietnam in the wrong places, propping up corrupt governments or trying to install our puppets–Laos, Panama, Grenada, Cuba, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan?
Why are you leaving Ukraine to fight alone against a Russian invasion? The war has begun–don’t be another well-intentioned but weak-kneed Neville Chamberlain!
Curmudgeon in the Land of Smiles 