Dona, your last phrase "but I especially enjoy my right as a Citizen of this Wonderful Country to use my Right to Free Speech" Apparently, like most of the above you don’t understand that if we didn’t fight for our rights as a free country, the communist would take us over like they have been trying to do for years and you wouldn’t have the freedom of speech that you do now. Most people say war is senseless and uncalled for. Has everybody already forgotten about 911? Are we not supposed to fight back?

I agree that this war has gone on way too long, and it is time to pull out. But, I do agree with it being necessary.  

Dona

I just can’t imagine anyone saying that you don’t love your country.  I have read you a lot and you may disagree with some of the things our country has done, I would never call you unpatriotic.  You are right, free speech is your right and no one can take it away from you.  Keep speaking. 

I do not want our country to be the police of the world.  Is that our biggest export now?  Sometimes I wonder about that. Since our manufacturing base has diminished over the last  40 years, and most everything we innovate or design ends up being manufactured by some other country, what do we have to offer the next generation in the way of jobs?  

While trying to get my son out of the army I learned that 15,000 young men and women signed up for the military in July. That is probably why the unemployment numbers went down or held their own.  So what are we becoming as a nation?  

I have to disagree with one point that you made, we do go into other countries and volunteer and serve to help make those countries better.  I got an email the other day from a daughter of one of my friends, who is in Africa working with the local tribes.  She is not alone, there are many there with her.  The group has been going for a long time and improving the lives of many.   The U.S. effort against HIV in Africa has made us heroes to many over there.  The USS Comfort, a medical ship, goes all over the world and the doctors perform surgeries and dispense medical care to those that can’t get it or can’t afford it.  They vaccinate and increase longevity for children in poverty stricken areas.  There is much much more.  The US pays about 25% of the UN’s price tag - yet they constantly vote against us, but we continue to contribute.

But, I am with you, I would rather they send medicine and aid instead of guns and tanks. 

Dona: Someone who loves their country like you do should criticize that country, for that is the truest example of love––wanting it to be the best it can be, and working to make it so. Below some snippets on war:

The Barbary Wars provided the first occasion on which the U.S. government attempted to overthrow a foreign government, the regime of Yusuf Karamanli in Tripoli; it did  not succeed.

America’s victory in the Spanish-American War, was, in Roosevelt’s words, the “first great triumph in what will be a world movement.” For well over a generation before that “splendid little war,” as John Jay famously called it, the U.S. had acquired no foreign lands. The sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor on Feb.15,1898, finally forced the reluctant McKinley to declare war on Spain for the liberation of Cuba, giving the U.S. Navy a chance to show off its newly acquired power.

The Contras in Nicaragua carried out, with funding from Washington, some of the most egregious human rights violations in Central America, yet were lauded as “freedom fighters.”  Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader the U.S. backed in Angola’s civil war, murdered and tortured with a barbarity that far outstripped the Taliban. The rebellion Savbimbi began in 1975 resulted in more than 500,000 dead. Reagan called Savimbi the Abraham Lincoln of Angola. …The mayhem and blood-letting we backed in Angola were copied in many parts of Africa, including Zaire and Liberia.

When Oliver Wendell Holmes was ninety-one he tried to read a poem he liked about the Civil War to Marion Frankfurter (Felix’s wife) but broke down in tears before he could finish it. They were not tears for the war. They were tears for what the war had destroyed. Holmes had grown up in a highly cultivated, homogeneous world, a world of which he was, in many ways, the consummate product: idealistic, artistic, and socially committed. And then he had watched that world bleed to death at Fredericksburg and Antietam, in a war that learning and brilliance had been powerless to prevent. When he returned from that war Boston had changed and so he American life. Holmes, too, had changed but never forgot what he had lost: “After the Civil War the world never seemed quite right.”

The Vietnam War: Notes taken from Barbara Tuchman’s  The March of Folly

: )1945-46 In Embryo

Ignorance was not a factor in the American endeavor in Vietnam pursued through five successive presidencies, although it became an excuse….The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.

   The question raised is why did the policy-makers close their minds to the evidence and its implications? This is the classic symptom of folly: refusal to draw conclusions from the evidence, addiction to the counter-productive. The “why” of this refusal and this addiction may disclose itself in the course of retracing the tale of American policy making in Vietnam.