VIETNAM

THE SAKER—Of course, no matter what kind of mental gymnastics are needed to obfuscate the true nature of what the veterans really did (and still are doing), the truth seeps under this ideological concertina wire, especially when veterans blow their brains out, suffer from PTSD, drown in drugs and booze and end up homeless in immense numbers. 

So Veteran’s Day is not about veterans at all, it is about self-absolution; about just for one day pretending to care about veterans and their “service”.  But crucially, this day of shame is about whitewashing murder.

The unaccounted for would now publicly be described as “POW/MIA,” implying that any serviceperson missing in Vietnam could also be a prisoner of war. This transformed the war from a political issue into a humanitarian one, trading public support for sympathy. It didn’t matter why we were there in the first place: Our boys were there, and by God were we going to do anything to get them home.

JAY JANSON—How many veterans committed suicide out of shame for what they did in Vietnam? More U.S. veterans have committed suicide between 2008 and 2017 than the number of U.S. soldiers that died during the entire Vietnam War. According to the defense news site Military.com, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) shared these alarming rates in a September 2019 report. The U.S. suffered around 58,000 fatalities over the course of the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. This number has now been eclipsed by the more than 60,000 U.S. veteran suicides in a recent span of just 10 years. More than 6,000 veterans committed suicide every year during that timeframe. Many were veterans of horror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Dominican Republic, Panama or Somalia, but a lot of suicides were by Vietnam vets.[8]

In ‘Shame, Guilt, Self-Hatred and Remorse in the Psychotherapy of Vietnam Combat Veterans Who Committed Atrocities’ author Mel Singer, L.C.S.W. describes the plight of a subgroup of Vietnam veterans suffering from combat-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), who committed atrocities while serving in Vietnam. Years after their service in Vietnam ended, certain veterans continue to exhibit shame, guilt, self-hatred and a sense of being interminably unforgivable, all feelings related to the atrocities they committed.

VIETNAM CHRONICLES—According to these experienced drug abusers, ‘flying girls’ have been around in Ho Chi Minh City since the beginning of this century. They were seen at bars and discotheques at first. Later on, some foreigners and overseas Vietnamese helped popularize these substances among karaoke bars and restaurants and service girls had their share, too. Business owners quickly caught the trend and illegally opened their private ‘flying rooms’ to service playboys and drug abusers. Ever since, drugs and money have turned a lot of service girls into ‘flying girls.’ 

ED CURTIN—He tells us he didn’t wake up until he was nearly thirty-years-old – in 1976.

Ever since he has devoted his life to the art of waking up his fellow Americans through writing and filmmaking, which he had the great good fortune to learn at NYU film school from that other passionate New York filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, who was his professor.  Scorsese shone a light on Oliver after he had made a short film without dialogue called Last Year in Vietnam.  It was shown to the class, a tough group of critics, but before anyone had spoken, Scorsese said, “Well – this is a filmmaker.”  It was an epiphany that Stone says he will never forget. A pure gift that set him on his way to eventually make his great films. But the journey was hard and took years to complete.