Wanderer, if you come to Sparta, tell them that you saw us lying here, just as the law had ordered it.
Simonides of Cheos (556 – 468 BC)
Whenever I read these lines, my throat constricts and I have to swallow hard. Seen out of context, it’s just a few words without any meaning. But once its significance becomes clear, it is a piece of poetry so great and timeless that I have difficulties to find anything equal in the literature of the next two millennia. Because what it expresses so calmly yet heartbreakingly, is on one hand the eternal crime of human ambition and aggression, and on the other an instance of perhaps the noblest sentiment this planet has on offer. Namely that of those men who have vowed to defend their country and are prepared to pay the highest possible price while doing so: their lives…
Simonides’ famous epitaph commemorates the battle of Thermopylae, a narrow pass on the east coast of central Greece some eighty miles north of Athens. During August 480 BC the Persians under Xerxes, in an attempt to overwhelm the country of Homer and Phidias, invaded with a vastly superior force by land and sea. The Greeks, taken by surprise, refrained for once from cutting each others’ throats and forged an alliance, but in doing so lost precious time. While frantically collecting their scattered forces, a paramount strategic essential presented itself, namely to impede the Persian advance at all cost until everyone was ready. This task fell to the Spartans, the most warrior-like clan and generally well-prepared, who sent immediately an expeditionary force to Thermophylae under their King Leonidas. With his army, pitifully small compared to the might of the enemy, but favoured by a difficult terrain, he managed to engage the Persians for three long days and nights, enough time in any case for the Greeks to rally and to offer battle. Which led, through a combination of fierce soldiery, Pericles’ brilliant naval strategies and sheer good luck, to a complete rout of the enemy. Whereas King Leonidas and his small band of defenders fell to the last man.
This is what Simonides had to say about it:
Times, as you will agree, when soldiers were still deemed persons of some consequence in the world.
Myself, I was never a military man. I got fleetingly involved with some vaguely related contingencies, but they are beside the point. Though I might mention a cousin of mine who made it to the rank of tank commander, but got into trouble when he and his crew zoomed downhill one day, fired by a few crates of beer and a bottle of Korn, and came to a halt in the ground floor of a recently renovated thirteenth-century house near Hamelen. On pulling the tank out, the house collapsed with everything in it, including a canary bird they had forgotten all about, and which caused a stink for a few days until someone slapped a Top Secret over it.
Around the same time I received summons as well to join our brand-new army, a mouse-grey and rather timid lot compared to Hitler’s mighty Wehrmacht. Which has by now, I am told, developed into a fine fighting force and is doing a rather decent job in that hellhole called Afghanistan. As for myself, I had just turned twenty and, after scraping through exams only just, prepared for my obligatory Grand Tour. Meaning to hitchhike down south into the Greece of my dreams and beyond. Thus the summons came at a most inconvenient moment. While I was still pondering the situation, my mother said: I’ve lost my husband in the last war, I refuse to lose my son in the next. Off you go! And that was that. The same evening I had a rather intense splash with a few classmates to celebrate my abrupt departure, whereby one of the buggers conceived the idea to clean his backside with the summons and send them to where they had come from. Which enraged the receivers considerably, because a few days later they turned up with a platoon of policemen, blue lights flashing and sirens howling, handcuffs at the ready, to teach me a lesson in democracy. But all to naught, because the night before I had slipped across the border and into safety, never to return except for occasional visits.
As a result, my esteem in those years for matters military was wary if not downright hostile. This changed rather abruptly about a decade later, namely during the early seventies and after I had settled for a while in Amsterdam. Which sounds paradoxical, because this was the epoch of peace-and-love, flower power, long hair, colourful outfits and enough dope to stun an elephant. Finding my Christian upbringing easily and happily compatible with The Beatles’ Love is all you need, I delved with much enthusiasm into the predilections on hand, like dancing my head off in the Milky Way, or considering some dubious and strictly mercenary wisdom of the latest Guru in town, or just hanging out in the central park with everybody else and getting stoned on Black Nepal or Red Lebanon or cheap Kif from Morocco while fondling my flimsily dressed fairy queen to her heart’s content.
Under the recurrent illusion to stay perhaps forever, I had bought one of those typical Amsterdam houses next to a canal, seven floors high but extremely narrow, with suicidal staircases and, in winter, no heating except a portable gas stove that added its stink to the tobacco and cannabis saturated air. In accordance with my generally benign intentions I opened its gates to passing travellers, and soon the place became a sort of caravanserai with no strings attached. Enjoying my popularity, I began to devise ever more daring systems of compassionate thought which I divulged to my assorted guests. Who, depending on the type of intoxication, either laughed tears or fell asleep.
It was a beautiful time, ignorant and innocent, so full of hope and love.
Until one day someone brought a chap along who didn’t really fit into the general melee. In his mid-twenties, tall, with grey eyes and auburn hair, clearly well bred, an American from the Midwest, name of Kelly. Like the actress. I never found out his first name. He had a slight limp and a problem with his right arm. What struck me immediately, and disturbingly, was his emotional distance, the implacable remoteness, the inward gaze that seemed to consider the world only marginally, as if from a corner of the eyes. The fellow who had him in tow muttered apologetically: Ex-marine, you know. Vietnam veteran! Just returned. A bit nuts, but cool. Needs a roof over the head for a few days. And if it was a problem. I said something silly like: As long as he keeps his guns to himself… and bade him welcome.
Thus Kelly entered my life. And made me a man.
I told him to feel comfortable and keep an eye on his small rucksack, and if he had a mind to contribute a token guilder for the daily big dinner and the assorted joints that made the round afterwards. He’d love to, he said in his calm and courteous way, but couldn’t since he was broke. Though only till next week, he added, because he was supposed to get a job as dishwasher in one of the macrobiotic restaurants, and meanwhile could give the house a dust-down as a sort of compensation.
Now dust-down sounded distinctly unfamiliar with regard to the house and its guests. My flame of those days, a ravishing flower-power beauty and absolute corker in bed, was markedly less enthusiastic when it came to the qualities of a caring housewife. So were the other ladies on hand. Which meant that the place didn’t look exactly like a dustbin, but not much less either.
I said OK and forgot all about it, and the next morning went my ways. Which consisted of a few trifling enterprises by the side. Like publishing a small guide that ran some general news about the latest in rock and pop, which lead singer screwed which groupie, who got caught at the airport with coke in the heels of his crocodile leather boots, who had died of an overdose, who had said this or that piece of utter nonsense. Plus local information, prices for shit and where to buy it and where not, or important counsel of how to get gratis treatment for clap and syphilis since the much touted free love had also its drawbacks. Another mini-racket were fake student cards, items much in demand and used to trick the over-priced airlines out of twenty percent and more, be it for a ticket to the States, Goa or Katmandu. All this against a fistful of pennies and, if you didn’t have them, for free.
When I came home the same evening, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Same for guests, most of whom had been in town for a walk and a coffee. The house looked spotless! Clean kitchen, clean dishes, clean toilet, clean windows, clean everything. Floor gleaming. Plus a few towels and bed sheets washed and drying in the attic. To shorten a long tale, on that day I must have realized, subconsciously as it were, the untidiness I had been living in, my general carelessness and irresponsibility, the disregard for my health and sanity, the improbability if not utter folly of my assorted solutions for a better world, and that it was time to move on. It happened gradually, but relentlessly.
I told Kelly that I was delighted, and that he could stay as long as he liked. To round it off, I offered him a tiny room in the attic, which he accepted gladly and usually retired to before the evening soiree got into full swing. One day I mentioned somewhat en passant that I hoped he didn’t see himself as our servant, to which he replied calmly: I’m not a servant, but know how to serve. A remark that only deepened the mystery that Kelly had become for me.
Because I knew, and knew it every day more, that up there in that attic lived not only a new friend, but lurked also something too monstrous to have a name.
Of course I tried to pump him about his background, and as time went by, he divulged a few bits and pieces. Born in Virginia. His parents divorced, his father long since decamped, his mother remarried with an insurance agent he hardly knew. Military career, Second Lieutenant, rushed off to Vietnam immediately after receiving his badges. Sent into combat without having time for a cup of tea. Thirty to forty men under his command, depending on enemy action. When I pressed on for more, he looked at me with his distant eyes and asked if we could leave it there. To which I humbly agreed.
I had taken to visit him now and then, but we never talked much, and mostly I watched him looking out of the window at the canal below, and the water that passed by with such infinite slowness. Or he read me a verse from his old Bible, and wanted to know what I thought of it. But under his courtesy, he gave me the impression that whatever I had to say was utterly irrelevant.
One evening in late autumn I went up there again, and when he bade me to come in and looked at me, his face was as remote as always, his eyes seemed as distant as ever, with the one difference that tears were running slowly down his cheeks. Now I’m not exactly a ninny, and can get as tough as a rusty nail if sufficiently provoked. But there is one item that beats me, now and always, and that is tears. You might be Messalina herself, poison me and the cook and the Chihuahua, but I’d forgive you if you were to behold me on my deathbed and cry a tear of remorse. So I sat down and blurted something like me being his friend, having given him shelter and trust, and that he owed me. Which made him finally talk.
© Don McCullin
War in our times. The constant fear of walking into a booby trap whenever you were on the move. The actual skirmishes that began with a jolt of your heart when you heard the bullets swishing around your ears, and only a fraction of a second later the actual report of guns. When you entered a village and never knew if they’d lob a hand grenade at your men after having offered you a bowl of rice. The mutilated corpses of women and children, heaps of them. The nights when you lay awake in your flimsy shelter, listening to the boom of distant mortar or a rustle in the grass that might have been a poisonous snake or the enemy himself. The absolute otherness of the people whose freedom you had come from so far away to defend. The constant need to keep your own men under control, to be an example of manly resolve in a situation of utter madness. To prevent them from going berserk after having witnessed one atrocity too many, to cock their guns and fire indiscriminately at anything that moved. The understanding that the war had been honourable at the outset, but turned dirty and corrupt as it wormed its way through the years. The growing knowledge that you were serving in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong motives.
And finally the last straw. A village the Vietcong had descended on and whose elder refused under torture to divulge, or probably never knew, important intelligence as to the movements of the enemy. And whose daughter, a girl of about five years old, they elected to work over in the hope to make him talk, employing whatever means came to their mind, though just not enough to kill her outright.
When Kelly and his men entered the village, the girl had died, but was still lying on a makeshift stretcher made from bamboo. As they looked down at the shattered little face and body, it seemed as if an unspoken message passed between them. Kelly bribed a villager, and after three days they made contact late one evening. The Vietcong unit was about fifty strong, but careless enough to place one watch only. Kelly attacked at first light, suffered two causalities, and after that didn’t care anymore what his men did to those who’d been taken prisoners.
Love forever denied, an end to all reason, a return to full-scale barbarity, an irreversible descent into madness and utter despair.
Thereafter the situation intensified, because the Vietcong gained ground and fighting got fiercer by the day. Not caring anymore, Kelly developed a habit of walking straight into enemy fire, spewing fire himself, and for a while it looked as if it needed the proverbial golden bullet to fell him. But then he caught two slugs, one in the leg and one into a collar bone, and that was that.
Back in the States he had himself stitched up on the double, recovered in some squalid barracks, was inundated with red tape as to his pay and whatnot, and made the dubious acquaintance of a military headshrink who had never seen action but left him tranquillisers which he washed down the toilet. One day a slick captain from a propaganda unit came by and asked him to participate in a kind of presentation that was supposed to counteract the growing discontent among folks as to the war and those who fought it. Kelly put on his battle fatigues and decorations, some exalted, and stood on a podium next to a senator or congressman who tried to say something. A hopeless undertaking though, because the crowd, large and young and mostly long-haired, was shouting him down without a moment’s respite. When Kelly prepared to leave, a girl, fair and beautiful as those he had imagined while lying awake and listening to the distant guns or a rustle in the grass, walked up to him and called him a murderer. A sentiment gaining ground as it were, pushed by a media that would do anything for better profits, or politicians that would do anything for more votes. Finally a civilian turned up and told him with a crooked grin that it looked as if he had walked a wee-bit too carelessly into his bullets, and that it might affect the final settlement of his pay, and if he’d be kind enough to fill in a bit more red tape. Whereupon Kelly told him to stuff it, once and for all, and packed his bag and left for Europe. With the general idea to move on to South Africa, a place already restless, and where the father of an old comrade owned a rambling farm in the Transvaal and would gladly welcome a cool hand.
He looked out of the window while saying it, and it sounded as if South Africa were a distant memory, and not a real place.
The night had grown old when I finally went back to my room. There I lay still for a long time, and only found some sleep when the world began to wake up again. Kelly did his stint as a dishwasher for a month, and one day told me that he had decided to leave. I got him one of my student cards for a reduced ticket to Capetown and drove him to the airport. He thanked me and told me we’d meet again, though we both knew somehow that this was unlikely. I watched him limping across the tarmac, climb into the plane and fly off.
And it was only then when I realized for the first time fully that his brave and great heart had been damaged beyond repair.
Facing the Future as a Minority
Speechless …
Wonderfully written, doc.
Can’t wait for the following part…
Thank you Doc Mac for your heroic work.
Again, this is the heroic work of Michael Colhaze. Kevin M
I mistakenly posted Michael Colhaze’s article in my name (which is the default). Very sorry about that. I do not pretend to have Mr. Colhaze’s sense of the aesthetic and his remarkable gift with the English language –amazing because he a native German. Kevin M
“Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden,
inen bess`ren find’st Du nicht.”
“Whenever I read these lines, my throat constricts and I have to swallow hard.”
Same. Thermopylae represents something very deep-rooted.
Wow. Extremely touching.
I pray that the poor man, the subject of the article, found some peace and meaning in his life.
No more Brother Wars.
No more slaughter and horror for the benefit of the Jew
Editor,
M. Colhaze is the best guest writer here. Another contribution coming your way.
Fighting, suffering and dying for Jewish ends on the notion that blind obedience and subservience are the holiest virtues, is the way of slavish peasants. It is not heroism and it is not admirable.
If this dreck is what puts a lump in our people’s throats and a tear in our people’s eyes (like the crucifixion seems to do), then perhaps we naturally are cattle in the hands of wiser and cynical alien masters.
“Do your duty!” they snicker from behind their desks, rubbing their diamond-ring-encrusted hands together. “Let’s you and him fight!”
And our people’s response? “We shall answer the holy call.” With lumps in our throat, tears in our eyes.
Number of World War I deaths (military and civilian), mostly WHITE PEOPLE:
16,543,185. Source:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2dws47t
Number of World War II deaths (military and civilian), the majority of them WHITE PEOPLE:
62,396,670 to 79,298,170. Source:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/266btk9
Total butcher’s bill of these two Brother Wars alone: about 80 – 100 million.
Listen not to the siren song. Keep the lump out of your throat.
Mr. SG probably does not know that he is playing the game of his masters. They hate Christ even more than he does, but he might be ignorant on this matter. The Great War was a holocaust of the Catholic Monarchies.
“Fighting, suffering and dying for Jewish ends on the notion that blind obedience and subservience are the holiest virtues, is the way of slavish peasants. It is not heroism and it is not admirable.”
Very well put SG. I really don’t like to see this con-servative right wing “support the troops” nonsense. Please keep in mind folks, if there is ever a “White uprising” so to speak, in this country, those troops will be turning their guns on any White insurgents.
Peace and blessings
Halted against the shade of a last hill,
They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease
And, finding comfortable chests and knees
Carelessly slept. But many there stood still
To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,
Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.
Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,
For though the summer oozed into their veins
Like the injected drug for their bones’ pains,
Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,
Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.
Hour after hour they ponder the warm field —
And the far valley behind, where the buttercups
Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up,
Where even the little brambles would not yield,
But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands;
They breathe like trees unstirred.
Till like a cold gust thrilled the little word
At which each body and its soul begird
And tighten them for battle. No alarms
Of bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste —
Only a lift and flare of eyes that faced
The sun, like a friend with whom their love is done.
O larger shone that smile against the sun, —
Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned.
So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned
With fury against them; and soft sudden cups
Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes
Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space.
Of them who running on that last high place
Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up
On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,
Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,
Some say God caught them even before they fell.
But what say such as from existence’ brink
Ventured but drave too swift to sink.
The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames —
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder —
Why speak they not of comrades that went under?
Like Kelly, I am a Vietnam vet. Unlike him, however, I was a GI (and a draftee), not a Marine. As with the Spartans, so it was and may still be with the Marines: in institutionalizing the warrior’s pride, they made it less an ideal than a fetish. In Vietnam the fetish made itself manifest in the proud Marine custom of going into combat without air support and often even without artillery support. At the battle of Dak To (summer 1967), a Marine brigade went up one side of a certain hill—I can no longer recall its number, thank the Lord—and a brigade of the army’s Fourth Division went up another. Thanks to the presence of army artillery and air support, the Fourth’s kill ratio was 11–1; the unsupported Marine unit’s was 3–1. I hope I needn’t add that the different ratio shouldn’t be taken to suggest that the Marines killed far fewer NVA.
To say that most of us thought the Marines were nuts goes without saying. It would also be accurate to say that a great many of us thought they were a little bit dangerous, too. Some (of whom I was one) would certainly have dispensed with the “little bit” part.
In the fullness of time, I met a few spiritually maimed ex-Marines who could easily have been Herr Colhaze’s Kelly save that their names were different. I came to understand that these guys and certain other Marines—not all by any means—had been drugged by U.S. government propaganda and swayed by peer pressure and a misdirected sense of late-adolescent masculine pride, a pride that our cryptocrats deceitfully persuaded them was placed there by God or Darwin or whomsoever you please, to don the uniform of the Few and the Proud and redden it with the blood of dirty Krauts, Russkies, Japs, gooks, or whoever was dirty this time. If it came to pass that you reddened it with your own blood . . . well, “dulce et decorum est pro cryptocratia mori, and we’ll make damn sure that Mom gets your allotment check and your dog tags!”
Thank you, Herr Colhaze. Like other commenters, I look forward to part 2. Thanks, too, to dc for treating us all to Wilfred Owen’s “Spring Offensive.” Mirabile dictu, Owen was one of three brilliant English antiwar poets that World War I produced, the others being Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. Of course, Graves alone survived his youth.
Klassikality, We are not at a stage where American troops will turn their guns on the American people. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen someday in the future, but now. And all of the good troops are White to begin with. Also, regardless of the mission, there is nothing wrong with expressions of support for the US military. There is no reason for us to get crossways with the US military, especially when there are so many people inside the military that are implicitly sympathetic to us. Of course, I don’t mean the politicized leadership, but the real core and power of the military.
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Jewish VA Chief Tried To Hide Rising Veteran Suicide Rate:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f32_1208974675
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Good piece Michael.
I wonder how Leonidas would be handled by Hague Tribunal today? Probably depicted as a racist, or a white supremacist .
Jeee. The piece brings back cool memories and also some cold turkey ones. Hague is not that far from Vondel Park in Amsterdam. Where did all these folks, fighting the Vietcong evaporate? From ecstasy to sorrow,.. in the twinkling of an eye.
Thanks a lot, Tom. And to everyone who was so very kind with a compliment. For the rest I identify strongly with those Greeks. Nothing is lost yet. We only need to regroup, forge alliances. It will take a moment.
Very beautyful story. It brought tears to my eyes.
Thank you for this beautifully written account, Mr. Colhaze. I look forward to reading the following parts.
Well, I do enjoy Coalhaze’s work…but allow me to point out an interesting fact. The Jews were all for galvanizing the campuses against the Vietnam war to further the communist plan for Southeast Asian hegemony. After all, South Vietnam was French Catholic who cares? But now there isn’t a peep from any campus or university against the murderous Amerikan occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. This is because the necons and the Jews want Israeli hegemony for the Mideast. No Kent States, Berkleys etc. What a pack of craven supplicants Americans have become.
I thought I saw quite a bit of protests against the Iraq war – certainly before Obama was elected. I can remember posters showing American caskets put up near a university here in protest. MSNBC had lots of anti-war commentary. I remember Leftists of many variety protesting loudly.
As for me, I distance myself from comments like “murderous Amerikan occupation …”.
The entire white race is now facing what the Greeks did then. Only now it’s by flooding EVERY white country and ONLY white countries with non-whites and insisting on assimilation for whites . Along with rape and murder outright of course. We whites need to speak up and tell each other that anti-racism is nothing but ANTI-WHITE. Come together,as those ancient Greeks did.
I don’t believe I have ever read anything quite as beautiful as Mr. Colhaze’s writing. It is poetry. A poet sees life, its beauty and ugliness, its cruelty and injustice – and sees the noble spirit within Cultural Man.
Brovo Michael!
@ Pierre de Craon have you read Ezra Pound?
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
pro domo, in any case . . .
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce” non “et decor” . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
He’s my favor :-)
Thanks, Helvena. This Pound poem—powerful stuff it is, too—is new to me. Or at least, I think it’s new to me since I haven’t read any of his verse for a good twenty-five years at least. Mea culpa.
Ori Brafman at Fort Monroe, April 2010
http://vimeo.com/11837294
Ori Brafman, co-author of “The Starfish and the Spider”, visited Fort Monroe to talk about the Army Starfish Program, which takes mid-level leaders and teaches them about decentralization and organizational management. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, TRADOC commander, provided opening remarks and Brafman was joined by Steve Rotkoff (Red Team University), Maj. Chip Colbert (TRADOC commander’s planning group), Lt. Col. Phillip Cuccio (Strategic Studies Institute), and Capt. Dave Elkridge (ARCIC) who all participated in the pilot Army Starfish Program.
A lot of young men have died for “old men’s lies” *but* they believed they were dying so other’s wouldn’t and that is a noble thing.
That would be Themistocles being the Athenian leader at the time of the naval battle of Salamis, not Pericles.
It was, by Zeus! Forgive me.
cry me a river of CROCK tears
How about the 3 million plus civilians slaughtered or at least that little girl’s parents aftermath?
Every politician and all USA troops should have been killed–Then the commies are coming and today the muslims are going to get you.
QUEStion BIG BOYS–those FKERS who lied about (MEDIA, Politicians) Tomken affair–why are they still alive?
9?II attacks were also BIG lie–Israel Firsters did it and blamed it on Arabs. When is the bullsh!t going to FKN stop and poor GIs feelings about the wars–the @sshole all he had to do is–frag the sonofabitch LBJ
Jeff, as for me, I’m sure Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and especially Iranians, would appreciate the “distancing” of U.S. troops from their soil. Don’t you think?
Tom Brown, anti-Americanism is not the answer to promoting White Culture. You don’t need to take the side of two-bit dictatorships against the US in order to prove some point.
Those nations have no rule of law, no elections that matter, no civil society to speak of, and they have had brutality that dwarfs anything we have done. And no, you cannot compare our “tyranny” to that of ever single god forsaken dictatorship in the Middle East. Are you an American? Why do you want to slander our own military and side with dictators that shot their way to power? I can understand not liking our policies in the Middle East, but referring to our troops as “murderous” is beyond the pale. You simply want to spew vile anti-American hate.
You are like a handful of others, I doubt you even care about White Advocacy.
This from Brad Mitchell: Speaking of war, did everyone forget that we invaded Iraq and killed civilians under false pretenses? There never were any so-called “WMDs” to justify going in there. Yet we did, and our military killed their citizens, and we completely destroyed a sovereign country even though we had absolutely no reason to. Where were the war protesters on this one? Actually, I did see a few protests on weekends, in certain cities. Well organized, permitted protests, sometimes with a few thousand people, following the marching path they got approval for from the city.
Again let’s look at the actions of the previous generation. How about the millions of people that marched in the Vietnam Moratorium? Millions of people all over the US stopped going to work and took a stand. Protests and marches were held in every city, all over the entire country, and attended by everyone from student activists, to the 9-5 corporate ladder climber. In Washington DC alone 500,000 showed up without a permit, didn’t follow the designated protest route, and surrounded the capital. They had the government trembling, as they knew they could no longer contain the will of the people. Another example of people who got together, fought for what they wanted, and despite violent and sometime deadly opposition from the government, they succeeded. (smoke that Jeff!!)
Those nations have no rule of law
They have laws.
America has laws.
Maybe the laws aren’t always enforced justly in Pakistan, Iran, etc.
But if you think they’re being enforced justly in America, you’re a madman.
America is being looted by bankers, looted by people infinitely more greedy and unethical than the rulers of Iran and Pakistan, and in spite of the fact that they’re breaking numerous laws by doing this they’re never punished.
Our very Government is a in a constant, 24 four hours a day, process of breaking the Constitution.
Every moment since you’ve been born the Government has been spitting on the Constitution and everything it stands for.
Probably 99% of what the Federal Government does now is law breaking, and yet the Federal Government is never brought to justice in this “nation with the rule of law”.
In Iran their civilized enough that they actually have meaningful debates in their parliament about whether this or that ruler is going against the Iranian constitution.
But no such thing ever happens in America, where the only politico who brings up the American constitution (Ron Paul) is ignored by all other politicians.
no elections that matter
Iran has elections which matter.
Whereas in America the choices are limited to those acceptable to Liberal Jewish Pornographers, in Iran the choices are limited to those acceptable to Conservative Iranian Mullahs.
Heaven forefend!
and they have had brutality that dwarfs anything we have done.
The US invasion and occupation of Iraq caused an estimated 655,000 excess deaths, according to a study published in The Lancet.
Most of the fatalities were civilians.
When was the last time a Middle Eastern society caused anything like that number of American deaths?
It certainly takes chutspah for you to claim Pakistanis, Afghanis, and Iranians have a brutality that “dwarfs anything we have done.”
It’s laughable.
Middle Eastern countries have caused each other many more deaths than American actions in the area have. The Iran/Iraq war probably caused a million deaths alone. Stop being so blinded by your hatred of the US that you start repeating the propaganda of dictatorships.
As others before me have noted, this is indeed the writings of a natural poet. And how fortunate we are to behold his experiences through the written word.
Thank you, Mr. Colhaze.
Awsome
@Pierre de Craon
Like Kelly, I am a Vietnam vet. Unlike him, however, I was a GI (and a draftee), not a Marine. As with the Spartans, so it was and may still be with the Marines: in institutionalizing the warrior’s pride, they made it less an ideal than a fetish. In Vietnam the fetish made itself manifest in the proud Marine custom of going into combat without air support and often even without artillery support. At the battle of Dak To (summer 1967), a Marine brigade went up one side of a certain hill—I can no longer recall its number, thank the Lord—and a brigade of the army’s Fourth Division went up another. Thanks to the presence of army artillery and air support, the Fourth’s kill ratio was 11–1; the unsupported Marine unit’s was 3–1. I hope I needn’t add that the different ratio shouldn’t be taken to suggest that the Marines killed far fewer NVA.
The Marines were never near Dak To, hill 875 I believe, in 1967. The 173rd Airborne, an army unit, takes most of the credit for the fighting there. The marines were in I Corps almost 100 miles away.
I realize this does not mean much to most of the posters, but it does to me.
I wouldn’t bet a dollar against your being right, Gibbon. Thank you for the comment. One heck of a lot of water has passed under my particular bridge since my year there (I was a medic with the 4th Division), and if I have unwittingly conflated two separate events, it won’t have been the first time and probably won’t be the last.
I am sure, however, about the kill ratios and the no-air-support scenario. An ex-Marine bird colonel of my age (and infinitely greater combat experience) was among the first who confirmed it to me some years after I got home. It isn’t the kind of thing even a muddled old fart tends to forget.
That literal translation of Simonides is jarring in its prosaic dullness. I prefer the more poetic and hence truer version:
“Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by
that here, obedient to their law, we lie.”
@Pierre – Army body counts in Vietnam were a a joke then and a joke now. And I just thank God that I was with a Marine rifle company and not with a bunch of bow-wow barking draftees.
Rudel: You were with a marine rifle company because you enlisted with the specific object of killing foreigners—or for that matter, killing anyone your masters told you to kill. What a noble calling! Like most of my fellow “bow-wow barking draftees,” I was in the army because the government placed a pistol to my head.
As for thanking God, I thank Him daily for preserving me from the temptation of ever wanting to be a marine. Furthermore, I thank Him for the fact that I got through a year in Vietnam without killing or injuring anyone or suffering injury myself. I thank Him, too, for my good fortune in having been a medic, an occupation that, whatever its dangers, allowed me a measure of moral dignity and has spared me the agony of forty-plus years of regret-filled nightmares.
If you think we are going to achieve any meaningful headway in advancing white identity, interests, and culture without killing anyone then you are sadly deluded.
BTW, Navy corpsmen know how to shoot! Hahahaha!