A hangover cure, anyone?
When I was young and stupid, we held the best hangover cure to be yet more alcohol. That did work, sort of....
So here we are, chewing the rag over a long-lost war, Viet Nam, when the only argument is about how or why we lost, not over the fact that, yes, we did lose, in that the Republic of Viet Nam, our chosen ally, finally was conquered and ceased to exist.
Would language lessons have helped us then? Perhaps, but it's not quite like high school Spanish to learn, Vietnamese, is it? Arabic is another tough one: what's Arabic for "Hände hoch! Stehen bleiben!" and how should one remember that under the stress of wondering who wearing what is under that burkha?
General Sherman may never have said, in so many words, that "War is hell," but he did state that "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it." One of our most popular military correspondents, Ernie Pyle, to read his stuff now, one gets the idea that some engagements consisted of handing out Hershey Bars to orphans instead of killing lots and lots of Germans and perhaps a few civilians as well. If that isn't an attempt to refine the cruelty of war, then what is it? Those were simpler times, though, when we were shielded from truth by distance and censorship. Today, thanks in part to one little dweeb currently basking in his fifteen minutes of fame, we know far too much about truth, and that is making it very, very awkward to go to war, even if it may seem that some folks really do need killing.
In there somewhere must also be the notion that in war, yes Jane, one uses "disproportionate force." That is just common sense, otherwise one should expect the policeman to drop his gun and pull a knife to fight someone armed with same.
In the time of the Viet Nam War, our indigenous chuckle-heads made the NLF and the NVA out to be the good guys, and the American military and our allies to be the bad guys, hence the original Hanoi Jane rooting for "them against us." Okay, there was the odd Communist massacre, as at Hue, brutal, carefully planned so wide-ranging, and done in cold blood, but there was nothing that could not be either brushed aside by comparisons with My Lai, or else politely ignored or contradicted.
Now, though, it's pretty hard to root for folks who want to see women killed for riding bicycles and such-like, (the shameless hussies)! I guess this is why we are hanging back now from taking that traditional hangover cure for defeat, plunging into yet another foreign adventure, while even the Janes do not seem to be able to figure out who to root for. Of course they know to protest against whatever it is we shall do, as soon as we figure out what that is. If we lob a few Tomahawks into Bashir's bedroom then that is unprovoked aggression using disproportionate force, but if we do nothing then that shall be a failure to support the brave fighters for Syrian freedom (and their right to keep women out of school and off bicycles).
Should we have a whip-round to buy Hanoi Jane a one-way ticket to Damascus, to do some anti-war, pro-peace demonstrating? I am sure there are photo ops a-plenty there, sat in the back of a "technical" on a 37-mm. antiaircraft gun. Why, yes, there she is, on You-Tube, grinning, gurning, waving happily at the camera in the Apache... but then the picture blossoms white as the soundtrack erupts in an argument about who authorized the use of a Hellfire on such a low-value target. Yep, "disproportionate force" once again, as if to say that we shall never learn.