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Robert McNamara (secretary of defense) reflecting on the decisions of the spring and early summer of 1965 (decisions that sent us into war in Vietnam) recalled that "we were sinking into quicksand." It was, however, a quicksand of his and the president's making - a quicksand of lies.
-- Page 243, "Dereliction of Duty," by H.R. McMaster, Harper Collins
In August last year, I was asked to speak to a freshman class at UCLA about our war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The talk, based on a book I had written titled "Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq," was to describe the national and personal costs of both wars, but specifically the astonishing numbers of severely wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who would have simply died in the jungles of Vietnam. Some 400 students, all science majors, pre-med or pre-law, the freshman elite of UCLA, filed into Schoenberg Hall for what had been listed as a mandatory 10 o'clock lecture.
The students didn't even begin to listen. I might as well have been talking about the First World War or the Battle of the Bulge. They sat there - listening to iPods, reading the newspaper, talking on cell phones, text messaging someone or simply leaning back in their seats and looking at the clock on the wall, finishing their midmorning lattes - as I explained about the 17- and 18-year-old medics in Vietnam carrying MMs to give to soldiers too severely wounded even for morphine, whispering that the candies were for the pain while they waited for the choppers. They were equally uninterested that U.S. casualties evacuated from Iraq and the war in Afghanistan required amputations in numbers not seen since the Civil War, and that after three years of war there was no answer to increasing numbers of devastating and irreversible brain injuries resulting from the shock waves of exploding roadside bombs.
Ten minutes into the talk, even those who had feigned interest had given up, sinking the whole of the auditorium into a stupor of self-absorbed indifference. Yet the week I gave my talk, the numbers of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan had passed 2,500 and the number of wounded had pushed past some 40,000.
I mentioned that early in the war the administration had used the relatively small number of deaths not only as an example of our troops' success, but also as an indication of the lack of risk they faced. But the death toll in this war was never the true indication of the severity of the fighting, nor of the risks involved. Unlike Vietnam, where the number of casualties to deaths was 2.4-to-1, in this war the ratio is 16-to-1. Because of better body armor and improvements in battlefield medicine, soldiers survive today who would have been dead in Vietnam. It is not the graveyard that is legacy of this war, but the neurosurgical unit and the orthopedic ward.
It was more than amnesia that had sent these 400 students into their reveries. It was a complete lack of communal or personal interest in those our government had sent, in their name, to run the most dangerous roads in the world. No one cared.
I would have liked to remind the students that National Guard and Reserve Units make up 40 percent of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. At any one time, there are more than 15,000 National Guard troops on the ground in Iraq who are over 55 years of age. The 40 percent of those doing the fighting and being killed and wounded are these students' neighbors. You'd think they'd be concerned or at least interested.
I had thought that it might have been useful to present the Pentagon's own statistics indicating that as many as a third of all troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan suffer traumatic brain injuries from the enormous blast waves generated by roadside bombs. Government data have put the numbers of those who do or will suffer from PTSD at over 20 percent of those deployed. Yet this administration has cut back on research for traumatic brain injuries, citing lack of funds, while routinely refusing to increase appropriations to the VA system to increase the numbers of treatment facilities while improving PTSD diagnosis.
For those of us who were part of Vietnam, the confusion, the growing exhaustion of the troops, the suffering, shifting about of priorities and objectives, the pronouncements of success that ignored the reality on the ground, the increasing numbers of casualties had begun to merge the jungles of Vietnam with the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan.
While still trying to continue with my talk, I remembered something that David Halberstam had said to his own group of university students: "The one success of Vietnam was that when we left it did not affect our country. It will not be the same with Iraq."
It was then that I stopped reading from my text and decided to scare these kids with the realities of being the right age in a nation that had sent virtually all of its volunteer army as well as the majority of its reserve troops into a war that, despite the pronouncements of "mission accomplished" and "the insurgency is in its last throes," was clearly not going well and getting worse.
I told this newest generation of 17- and 18-year-olds that our army, stretched too thin, was wearing down, and that to keep troops in Iraq - or for that matter to send more troops anywhere in the world - we would need a draft. That caught their attention.
What I was talking about was this administration's decision to make Iraq part of its war on terrorism, but what I was thinking about was Vietnam. It was not because of nostalgia or political partisanship (after all, it was liberal Democrats who got us into the war in Southeast Asia and neocon Republicans who sent us into the hornet's nest of Iraq) that I thought about and mentioned Vietnam, but because it was the same kind of dangerous spin that had given us Vietnam and dragged us into Iraq ... and because the only way to have gotten it right 40 years ago and to get it right now is to admit who got it wrong and why, what mistakes were made and then, if possible, set it right. It was not unpatriotic to try to tell truth in Vietnam and it is not unpatriotic to tell the truth now.
Scared by the possibility that they might actually become part of the war, the students did begin to listen. Some dozen of these freshman, concerned and finally troubled by the facts, stayed on after the talk to ask questions. One young man asked why there weren't books or articles linking Vietnam to Iraq and why that issue had not been brought up on the Sunday talk shows or on CNN.
That one was easy to answer. It was politics - hard-nosed, bitter, take-no-prisoner politics. Losing wars have political consequences. And those consequences can be catastrophic when those who lose the war had been warned.
Everyone makes mistakes. You can hide if a blunder is the result of doing your best and simply having guessed wrong. You can explain away the missing weapons of mass destruction by blaming the CIA or the international intelligence community, and dismiss a growing insurrection by pointing to the support of nearby nations. But there is no place to hide if you were told that things were sure to go badly and then, ignoring the warnings, you still go out and drag the country over that same cliff.
At the very beginning of the Iraq war, Gen. Eric Shinseki, the chief of the Army, a Vietnam veteran and commander of our troops occupying Kosovo, told Congress the U.S. would need at least 400,000 troops on the ground in Iraq to hold the peace. He was ridiculed by the assistant secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and basically dismissed from command by Donald Rumsfeld as not the kind of the "out of the box"-thinking officer we wanted to run our show.
Gen. Fred Weyand, chief of staff of the Army, wrote in a now famous 1973 analysis of the Vietnam War that "(t)he American way of war is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful. We believe in using 'things' - artillery, bombs, massive firepower - in order to conserve our soldiers' lives. The enemy, on the other hand, makes up for his lack of 'things' by expending men instead of machines, and he suffers enormous casualties. ..." General Weyand went on to explain: "As military professionals we must speak out, we must counsel our political leaders and alert the American public that there is no such thing as a 'splendid little war.' There is no such thing as a war fought on the cheap. War is death and destruction. The army must make the price of involvement clear before we get involved."
Bernard Fall, a war correspondent who covered the defeat of the French in Indochina, wrote in 1965, at the beginning of our war in Southeast Asia, "... American airstrikes and naval engagements against North Vietnamese fixed installations and warships have already taken place ... in actual military effectiveness, the worth of such operations is nil. ... Primitiveness carries its own kind of invulnerability when matched against sophisticated weapons."
No one listened then, and, inexplicably, no one listened now.
The signature weapon in Vietnam was to be the helicopter and vertical envelopment, along with the massive firepower of U.S. artillery, fighter bombers and B-52 raids. It didn't work. Ultimately, we gave up - our military superiority neutralized by the realities on the ground - and, taking our 58,000 dead and some 350,000 wounded, simply went home.
There was a conversation recorded during the Paris Peace Talks in 1974 between an American colonel and a North Vietnamese officer. In many ways it summed up our 10 years in Vietnam and undermined the contention that it was a lack of political will and public support that led to our spectacular failure in Southeast Asia.
"You know," said the American colonel, " you never defeated us on the battlefield."
The North Vietnamese officer pondered this remark a moment.
"That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."
Perhaps more to the point today, there was a joke making the rounds of the Pentagon in the early '70s when any hope of a military success in Vietnam had vanished for everyone except the administration.
There were many versions, though they all went something like this: The administration asked IBM for use of its largest super-computer. The Pentagon loaded all the data on the war: tonnage of bombs dropped, numbers of villages pacified, number of Vietcong and North Vietnamese killed or captured, tons of rice confiscated, areas of the country under U.S. and South Vietnamese governmental control, divisions of South Vietnamese troops trained and ready to fight, insurgent cells infiltrated, numbers of hospitals built and school rooms painted.
After all the data had been input, the administration asked the important question. "When will we win?" The computer spun its disks and raced through its microprocessors and, after 10 minutes, printed out the answer: "You won in 1968."
The point - and a not too subtle one - is that armies can only do two things: They break things and kill people. Some would argue that should be all they do. They cannot impose democracy and they certainly cannot nation-build.
There was one issue, though, one fact, one unspun number that might have made a difference in Vietnam, and maybe even in Iraq and certainly in Afghanistan. It was a number ignored 40 years ago and dismissed today.
In the late 1950s, with U.S. concern growing about Southeast Asia and a potential communist takeover, President Eisenhower sent General Ridgeway, former commander of our troops in Korea, to assess military needs in case we became involved in saving South Vietnam for democracy. Six weeks of traveling through Vietnam convinced Ridgeway that to win a war we would need at least a million troops who would have to stay in-country for at least 10 and most likely 20 years.
The largest number of troops we ever had in Vietnam, and that was only for one year, was 500,000. We went to war then and have gone to war now with hundreds of thousands of troops fewer than a clear-eyed view of the realities required.
Those who gave us Vietnam knew the number of troops that would be needed and simply ignored the recommendations. Like this administration, they did not need to be bothered by reality.
It has all been written about. Joe Galloway and Gen. Hal Moore's "We were Soldiers Once and Young;" David Halberstam's "The Best and The Brightest;" Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie;" my "365 Days," Ron Kovic's "Born on the Fourth of July," Col. Harry Sumner's "On Strategy."
It is all there, everything that went wrong. The need for more troops on the ground, the inability to close the border to enemy supplies and reinforcements, the lack of any real exit strategy, the fact that the enemy always had the initiative in deciding when and where to fight and when to withdraw, the decade-long effort to train a South Vietnamese Army that would last less than a year after we left. It all sounds eerily familiar, because it is.
In a real way, Iraq has become a twice-told tale. What is almost inexplicable is that those who concocted this war, never having served in Vietnam, simply overruled those who had, and, with an arrogance and hubris that best resembles that of the flawed characters in a Shakespearean play, went out and replayed those same mistakes.
Vietnam has always been the crazy aunt in the attic. This administration has tried mightily to distance itself from that connection. And anyone who brought it up - politician, reporter, columnist, TV anchor, citizen - was to be attacked as foolish, uninformed and, if necessary, a "cut and run" defeatist.
There were to be no photographs of American caskets coming home. The president declined to attend military funerals. The planes flying in the wounded were to land at Andrews Air Force Base at night. Medals for bravery and valor were not to be encouraged. Four years into Vietnam, more than a hundred Medals of Honor had been awarded. In this war there has been two Medals of Honor. Yet, Vice Admiral Donald Arthur, co-chairman of the Department of Defense Mental Health Task Force, got it right this year when he said, "Not since Vietnam have we seen this level of combat."
Each month we lose on average a battalion of soldiers, half of those killed or severely wounded. There is an astonishing amount of courage, bravery and commitment in Iraq and Afghanistan that has gone unrecognized and unappreciated as a way of keeping the real facts of this war out of the public consciousness. If you give a medal for bravery you have to tell why.
History shows that when wars are badly begun, the errors and problems accumulate. It takes extraordinary leadership - Lincoln during our civil war - to overcome a bad beginning. For those who still refuse to connect the two wars, it is here, unarguably, that Vietnam and Iraq are exactly alike.
There is, of course, that one great difference between the two. It can be summed up in a comment by a neurosurgeon at the Combat Support Hospital in Balad. It was hardly ever heard in the surgical and evac hospitals in Nam, were deaths rather then wounds were a fact of life. "We can save you. But you might not be what you were." It is being said more and more as the troops of this war continue to make the fight in Baghdad, Mosel, Falluja and Ramadi ... .
Ronald J. Glasser, a physician in Minneapolis, is author of the acclaimed Vietnam book "365 Days," which draws on his experiences as an Army hospital physician in the late 1960s. His most recent book is "Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq." His e-mail address is ronglasser@comcast.net.
23 Comments so far
Show All"...armies can only do two things: They break things and kill people."
Actually, military power also does a few other things: all bad.
Militaries deform their own members and the citizens of the nations they attack in body, mind and spirit.
They rape, both their own women and those of the nations they attack.
They torture and build massive prisons and concentration camps.
They create millions of cases of PTSD.
Even when they are at base, they create massive amounts of pollution - the US military is the greatest polluter in the history of humanity.
They drain public treasuries and heap obscene profits upon corporations.
The list goes on...
Military power, because of its horror, has only two legitimate uses:
Peace-keeping (with international permission) when all other options fail.
National self-defense: when all other options fail.
Its use should be extremely rare and only after open debate and collective public decision-making, which is what we would do if we had a democracy or representative republic.
We don't.
" It was more then amnesia..."
My guess is that it was also more than amnesia.
"It was more then amnesia that had sent these 400 students into their reveries. It was a complete lack of communal or personal interest in those our government had sent, in their name, to run the most dangerous roads in the world. No one cared."
No, and I don't really care either. If they are college freshman, 18 years old, then they weren't able to vote any part of the current government into place that waged this illegal war; so where do you get off acting like it is their responsibility what happens to an invading, torturing, murdering volunteer army in a foreign country without even mentioning that more Iraqi's and Afghans have died? Lecture to thirty-fifty year old businessmen instead; they are the one with the money and power in this country, and they are the ones who should be "drafted" if such a thing happened. I mean honestly, if you have no sympathy for young people other than ones who sign up to kill, then go give your miserable speech somewhere else.
There is an astonishing amount of murder, rape, and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan that has gone unpunished and unrecognized.
http://www.dreamingearth.net
Point is: "then","than." Get it?
Read Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly".
LBJ knew we couldn't win but he didn't want to be the guy that 'lost Vietnam', for that would cost his party the next election and would ruin his legacy.
It did both anyway, in spite of our dropping more explosives on this tiny country than we dropped in WWII.
Our cause was unjust and based upon duplicitous allegations (Tonkin Gulf) and fear-mongering (domino theory).
We could never win, no matter how many grunts were sent over there to become bullet-stoppers, how many WMDs (agent orange) we used on the peasants, how much terror we unleashed (My Lai). We could only affect how many Vietnamese and others would lose. Some even wanted to use nukes and make sure everybody lost.
Change-
LBJ to Bush/Cheney/Rove
Vietnam to Iraq
Tonkin Gulf to 9/11-Saddam links
domino theory to universal Caliphate
agent orange to depleted uranium and white phosporus
My Lai to Abu Ghraib
and it reads the same. Soon we can add Iran and Pakistan to the list. We have lots of nukes.
I would add Stanley Karnow's book on Vietnam to the list. David Marr too wrote a good one.
For a great read specifically dealing with wounded and dying, as well as female PTSD, check out Linda Van Devanter's book "Home Before Morning" Lynda was a field Army nurse so it's all first hand. Sally Field took out an option in the early '80's to make a movie of it. Wonder why she never followed through; could have landed her another Oscar with a decent adaptation for screenplay.
I haven't read it in a while, but I imagine it would give a lot of insight into the price our country is going to pay to have women, most of whom are wives and mothers(definitely in the Guard and Reserve Units) trying to take up prior roles in childrearing, family caretaking roles etc. with PTSD.
*For a great read specifically dealing with the wounded and dying,as well female PTSD signs and symptons, check out Linda Van Devanter's book "Home before Morning."
The important point of the prior mention got left out of edit. I think this book would give insight into the price our country is going to pay when we realize the fallout that having unprecedented numbers of primary caretakers coming back to resume prior child- rearing and elder care roles with PTSD and no treatment in place for them.
sorry mr. glasser, but if your lecture was any where near as boring as this essay, then you really can't blame the students for not paying attention. instead of trying to get people to sympathize with soldiers fighting in a war, why not try to get people to sympathize with those trying to end the war? those are the REAL soldiers quite remeniscent of the earlier revolutionaries that had no formal uniformss or fancy medals and weapons but only their bravery, strength, and wisdom.
"No one listened then, and, inexplicably, no one listened now."
As someone who frequently flirts with political apathy (and also a recent UCLA alum), I feel the need to defend your undergraduate audience.
Look at the level of democratic responsiveness in the U.S. government. It is a JOKE. Why on earth should those 17- and 18-year-old kids get themselves worked up and angry about a situation *they can do nothing to change*? I'd say the students' inattention was not only explicable, but actually reasonable, as a form of psychological self-defense.
Until America is a democracy, there will always be a temptation toward apathy.
It's a bit troubling to see the defensiveness of the young citizens (or whoever is defending them) about their not giving a shit about his presentation. On the one hand, his presentation was not about the criminal nature of the administration--he can't talk about everything and it's not his expertise; and part of taking on an administration like this one IS to speak out about many things, including its poor treatment of young soldiers and the parallels in our history. Plus, a bit of compassion for the thousands of brain injured troops is not incompatible with deep, painful grief and anger and rage at the crimes committed against the Iraqi people by our leadership (and by our troops, perhaps, and by the apathetic and often just plain stupid, ignorant masses here at home who can't even be bothered to learn enough to realize that, say, Iraq did not "cause" 9/11.)
I suspect there are two "culture gaps" between Dr. Glasser and his young listeners that explain some of this apparent apathy. One, which he notices, is the current lack of a draft. It's easy to ask "who gives a shit?" if you feel both that there is nothing you can do to address/stop the present criminal (and criminally stupid) war, AND if you don't have any kind of immediate, personal stake in the matter. It's entirely self-absorbed, but human and understandable. And yes, there MAY be a draft--our military is vanishing and Bush has at least one more war he and Cheney want to start. (And this time they've closed the Canadian border, kids.)
But the second "culture gap" may be more subtle: in Glasser's (and my) generation, partly BECAUSE of this draft but also because of many cultural upheavals that are now part of the "boring history of the baby boomers" that is sniggered at by the current crop of young people, there was also a common belief, drummed into us in many ways, that it WAS our responsibility, and was within our power, to at least somewhat change the world for the better. Not that this feeling is "missing" now--I don't know, really, though having taught a whole lot of very bright grad students in the last few years I'd have to say that if that belief is there, it's not all that noticeable. And not that we "boomers" were entirely successful, though we ain't dead yet and it's likely that our old habits of "questioning authority" and challenging illegal government actions and taking this shit personally, which millions of us still continue to do, are a big part of the reason there has been such a sea change in Bush's popularity in the last few years. There was a feeling in Glasser's generation that it WAS our war, our government, and that we'd have to bust our asses to gradually, via the actions of millions of us, make the war stop, the corruption go away.
Were we totally successful? Is it the Age of Aquarius? Not hardly. But the opposition was vast: millions of corporations (those people who now give you jobs in cubicles, treat you like vermin) whose interest is ALWAYS in a strong republican "government by the wealthy, for the wealthy." They still have vast power. But then, this is a struggle that goes back to Hamilton versus Jefferson, and will go on for generations. That's not to say you don't try, dammit. If it weren't for millions of people trying, ensuring that laws were enforced, getting laws changed and enacted like minimum wages, 40 hour workweeks, social security, fighting Nixon out of office... well, we'd be living in your worst nightmare of a Nazi death camp by now. Check it out.
We are now really living with the blowback of those Nixon/Nam times: Nixon was driven out, but his evil henchmen, chief among them Cheney and Rumsfield and other "dark leaders" like Kissenger (who still has Bush's ear regularly, may he rot in hell) ...these henchmen were determined to "rise again" and to "finish their mission" of making us, basically, a totalitarian "strong executive" country.
So, kids, it's simple: either you start to pay attention, decide this IS your fight... or you end up living in a very dark world. Put the video games down and raise hell.
"and so it goes"
NETMINNO: The Sally Field (would-be) script you mention would get over as well in Hollywood these days as SICKO would with big pharma and the insurance megacorps.
WYNDYCHIME: You raise interesting points, and I am certainly part of that "raise hell" generation, and resent when commentators try to lump all baby boomers into a category of sell-outs. I think media has caused a huge psychological disconnect in the young. They are so focused on THEIR private lives, they are less connected to the big picture. The lack of empathy is also troubling, and it seems to me those raised on computer games and "virtual" reality really lose the capacity to genuinely FEEL what others feel. Maybe this is some kind of grand protection if the shit does hit the fan, that they not implode from the emotional overload such a shock to America's "land of the free" system would constitute when/if the Bush junta does declare martial law.
"Of course Iraq is not Viet Nam" some wit (not I) already observed: "Iraq is a DRY heat, and this time the language our troops don't speak is Arabic".
windchyme50, talk about defensiveness, not to mention self-delusion. Bush, Cheney, and the entire congress who voted in favor of the Iraq war were all baby boomers. They started this war, and it is their responsibility to stop it. Just like it is your responsibility to mop up all of the sludge you've created in the environment, and not the young people of the future. But indeed, Glasser is a boring, condescending bigot who went into his speech already disliking the crowd because they drank coffee and possessed laptops, cell phones. A crowd can easily pick up when someone is communicating that, and will tune out. None of us know the political views of those students, or ever will. So speculating because they didn't like a very self-assured persons speech is futile. Treat younger people as equals without any preconceived prejudices and maybe you will learn what some of them actually think.
Windchyme and Siouxrose - I agree with both of you. Perhaps the most troubling thing about Dr. Glasser's article is that these were PRE-MED students and they had no empathy or even interest in the kinds of injuries they might be called upon to treat in their (probably war-filled) future(if any). Why are they medical students at all? As a doctor's daughter and mother of another one, I can tell you that these are not the attitudes that make good doctors.
I can also say that during the Vietnam War the thousands of people who protested the war did so because we CARED, not only about our own soldiers but about the Vietnamese people too. I guess I've become an old fogey, but without identification with all people on poor old earth we'll never become civilized again.
Yes, your right wing love of murderers caused you to come out en masse, but the real leftist youth of today isn't inspired by the rantings of nationalist old hypocrites who want to punish the young generation for the new war they started.
Though I have had no direct experience with today's college age generation, I'm not particularly concerned with their supposed apathy, their lack of empathy or insight, or whatever. Generally, they seem to be more aware than those of us in the boomer generation.
I haven't seen the 2000 stats, but in 2004, if the rest of the US had voted like college students, Bush would not have been re-elected.
Maybe Glasser's audience was bored because he wasn't telling them anything new.
The other culture gap is class-based. The US army is a volunteer one, at present. If those flag-waving yahoos, who all their lives dreamed of wearing the uniform and shooting foreigners, chanting "U S A" should now find themselves shot at - serves 'em right.
As for these students being pre-med: the medical community in general can be very unsympathetic toward self infliced injury. Try showing up to a hospital on a weekend with a broken arm if you are wearing a football jumper (sweater). If some wannabe rambo gets shot - you know what these guys are going to think of that.
Dr Glasser may be a well-intentioned person, but this article is a study in low political consciousness. The doctor knows something about working in Army hospitals in the late '60's, but this hardly qualifies him to issue broad commentary about the "truth" of the Vietnam War.
He writes (of the various Vietnam-era books): "It is all there, everything that went wrong. The need for more troops on the ground, the inability to close the border to enemy supplies and reinforcements, the lack of any real exit strategy, the fact that the enemy always had the initiative in deciding when and where to fight and when to withdraw, the decade-long effort to train a South Vietnamese Army that would last less than a year after we left. It all sounds eerily familiar, because it is...
...Vietnam has always been the crazy aunt in the attic...."
- This is all utter hogwash. He never mentions the key points about Vietnam: that the US role was immoral & unjustified; we committed mass murder & shattered a nation that had done us no harm.
The problem (for example) was not that we needed "more troops on the ground." The problem was that we had no right whatsoever, to be putting troops there at all. The problem was not that we were unable "to close the border to enemy supplies." The problem was that the enemy was defending their own country against murderous foreign invaders -- us. And so on. Note that the doctor never mentions that "we" murdered several million Vietnamese civilians, guilty only of living in a land targeted by the US military machine. He never mentions the chemicals we used to poison their land into perpetuity.
And Vietnam was not "the crazy aunt in the attic." It was a horrific crime committed by the US government, which graphically demonstrated a profound core sickness in our society (the same sickness now manifesting itself in Iraq).
Since the doctor seems never to have considered most of these points, the rest of what he has to say is worse than worthless. The only value of the article is educational: it's a textbook case of a brainwashed American who wrongly imagines that he understands the Vietnam War.
RICH M: Good points. I noticed this too, a kind of tacit acceptance of the military's right to might, negating the FACT that it does so much harm!
GRANDMA: I just became a Grandma, too! And when I look into my grandson's eyes I WANT a world worth living in for him and the millions of children like him. This universal (in healthy people) sentiment is why when Indigenous American Indians planned a potential battle, they went to discuss the options with a council of GRANDMOTHERS first! There was a posting several days back on CD relating to a group of Indigenous persons rightly seeking representation in the U.N. And as I responded on that post (as now), SUN BEAR and other prophetic Indigenous voices have related that a time will come when the white man (Western civilization) will need to humble themselves and ask for direction from the indigenous wise persons who understand intuitively how nature works, and can speak her language. That's right left brainers... LANGUAGE! I spent a long afternoon in Singapore (feeling more like Woody Allen, admittedly, than a bona fide spiritual seeker of truth) learning the MANTRAS of the 4 elements from two disciples of a very powerful Indian guru. (I study MANY religious systems to find common threads of truth among them.) The mantra for earth had perhaps 64 syllables! There was NO way I could pronounce all of them correctly so my imagination was running wild with comedy script scenarios of those entities I might instead invoke from my pronunciation deficit, Hindu style!)
How many readers remember that some Midwest town hired Indigenous natives to invoke rain via a rain dance and it worked, but they didn't want to pay them for their time and service! We may think Western civilization is superior in every way, but there is much wisdom that's been bypassed in our rush to "progress," a progress that right now threatens sustainable life on this fragile planet. ALL things come full circle... human beings may soon indeed return to the indigenous for refresher courses in those lessons their ego-driven aggression and greed have missed.
Siouxrose - Congratulations! Ain't it great?
You say "a time will come when the white man (Western civilization) will need to humble themselves and ask for direction from the indigenous wise persons who understand intuitively how nature works, and can speak her language."
True, and I think the time is here. Indigenous people know (or at least they once knew) how to maintain a sustainable environment. It may already be too late, but it couldn't hurt if we tried to learn from them even at this late date.
But here we part company (perhaps) - I don't think religion has much to do with it. In fact religion can be very destructive, as Sam Harris points out in his book "The end of Faith" and also as Jared Diamond discusses in either "Collapse" or "Catastrophe" (don't remember which) in his examination of the Easter Island statues. The Easter Islanders were apparently trying to get the attention of their gods so they would save them - instead of using some of the trees they cut down to drag the statues up from the quarry more sensibly - to hollow out a few canoes instead to save themselves. But they (apparently) had faith. And they perished waiting for those never-arriving gods.
Besides, religion may be the most divisive force on earth. Just look at our long bloody history. Not to mention the present time too. A lot of religious myths are charming, but it's not wise to believe them.
I believe in the SPIRITUAL not orthodox religion. There is a world of difference between the two, although just as the word ORGANIC has been largely co-opted by industrial food and things that are anything but, the most recent edition of The Writer's Market uses the word SPIRITUALITY to substitute for the huge and growing Christian book publishing market niche. The indigenous had ties with spiritual forces, as do shaman, as do mystics, poets, artists, and persons who have seen and felt things that are never written about in linear textbooks and such. Shakespeare understood this. Before I decided to not pursue a phD. in English education, I thought I'd do a doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare's use of the magical and mystical. I may still write it for the sake of others.