Vietnam War

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What’s Going On

/ Phil Strawn / 2 Comments

Marvin Gaye had it right…

Here we are, nearly 60 years later, and the lyrics to his song, “What’s Going On,” have never rung truer. War, riots in the street, brother killing brother, mothers grieving over their dead sons and daughters, fathers and sons disagree over almost everything, and the socialists and foreign invaders are taking over our country. Karl Marx is celebrating in Hell along with Adolph and the rest of humanity’s demons.

I was a teenager graduating high school in the late sixties, and in that first Vietnam draft. I knew there was a good chance I would wind up in Asia, either killing to survive or being killed. I stayed in a 1-A, draft status through college, vowing that if I was drafted, I would join the Navy and follow in my father’s footsteps. Sure, it was a family thing: my great-grandfather was a Texas Ranger for a while, a deputy; my grandfather fought in the trenches of France in WWI; and my father served at Pearl Harbor in WWII. So was it expected of me to be part of what Vietnam had become? To this day, I am not sure, and age has made my memory of then cloudier than it should be. But I still remember the music that kept those young men and women over there sane. Some of it was harsh, mean, belligerent protest; much of it was peaceful, but forceful in its own way.

My wife, Momo, and I were the Woodstock generation. Me, a rock n roll guitarist, her a straight-laced, Catholic school girl, plaid skirts, fish sticks on Friday, and bruised knuckles, compliments of the nuns’ rulers: a jarringly intelligent girl with a protest gene that led her to speak her voice about the war. I wasn’t as forceful about it as she was. Now we have much of the same things Marvin Gaye sang about happening in our country. What goes around comes around, and it’s not always good.

Back then, it was us young folks against the establishment, our parents’ views, and our grandparents’ staunch loyalty to this Republic; don’t trust anyone over thirty. We didn’t see it; we were too busy being young, idealistic, and, most of the time, plain stupid about the reality of what was carrying us on top of the wave of discontent.We would give others the two-finger peace sign as we passed them by, not knowing that it meant “victory” and that Winston Churchill made it famous. Our parents had fought the evil that wanted to end America and knew, at best, it was a temporary fix. They tried to tell us, but we didn’t listen; the music and the evening news rewired our thinking, taking away our logic.

Will our grown, adult children teach their children well? Momo and I carry our own fears and insecurities from our upbringing and subliminally pass them on to our children, who will do the same with theirs. We have to ask ourselves: did we teach them well enough to overcome those moments? Will they see their parents’ hell slowly go by?

Do our children and grandchildren have the fortitude to stand up for this country and lay down their lives for the good of it? Ben Franklin was a genius when he told a woman, when asked, ” Do we have a monarchy or a Republic, he replied, “Madam, we have given you a Republic, if you can keep it.” Can we? Will we? Lord, put your divine hand on every citizen of this country and lead us to victory over the forces of evil that are real and coming for us.

Just In Case You Forgot

/ Phil Strawn
Hanoi Jane yukking it up with her little buddies in North Vietnam

Yes, folks, she’s in the news again and for all the wrong reasons, just like before. Popping up here and there, showcasing her surgically enhanced face and body, accepting little awards and being fussed and fawned over by an age group of devotes that don’t know what the Vietnam war was, or when it happened. I included this adorable picture if you forgot what “Hanoi Jane” (Jane Fonda) really was and is. I think it catches her at her best. I wonder if she took some excellent color photos of our POWs with her fancy camera and shared them with their families back in the United States?

“Party Like It’s 1975”

/ Phil Strawn / 4 Comments
Evacuating the American Embassy in Saigon

The demented old man occupying the white house mumbles, gaffs, and orders our military to leave Afghanistan. Pack it up, leave the keys in the visor and get the hell out, pronto. Yet, the Taliban, those crazy well-organized army of zelotes, demon processed devils from Hell with 12th Centaury Muslim beliefs, are taking back their country at record speed.

Did the United States believe that we could save the Afgan people from their history and fate? Did we learn nothing from the Vietnam War and our ill-fated escape in 1975? Someone, please show the current administration some newsreels from that time. Is John Kerry advising Biden?

As a teenager in the 60s, the real, and “living color” Vietnam war show came on every night at 6 PM, and Ken Burns (bless his heart) had nothing to do with this production. Nevertheless, it was the staple for all news shows from 1967 until its end in 1975.

NBC, ABC, and CBS ruled the airways. Cigarette smoking, bourbon drinking mad-men. Groomed and over-paid talking heads spitting out controlled information for our curiously horrified consumption. Lester Holt didn’t invent this type of journalism, but he damn sure paid attention and learned from his predecessors.

The grand wizard from Texas, LBJ, and his Washington DC cronies kept a tight reign on their messaging. As a result, American casualties were deflated, and Viet Cong deaths were inflated. But, of course, none of that crap mattered, except that we were losing our young American men at an alarming rate.

Television had not yet discovered that death and gore, like sex, sells to the viewing audience. We were holding on to our 1950s values by a single frazzled thread.

The assassination of Kennedy was the beginning of the end of our Ozzie and Harriet-induced innocence. Vietnam was JFK’s war-baby; and his downfall. Good old Texas boy, LBJ, found a way to energize the economy and re-stock the Washington coffers using the war as his vehicle. My father was a home builder at that time and he said he never made as much money as he did between 1966 and 1970. The guns were blazing, and the times were amazing.

Daily films of dead young American soldiers weren’t good for ratings or advertisers. “Wonder Bread” and “Proctor and Gamble” couldn’t compete with dead Americans on television, so, the war footage was heavily edited for family viewing. It was all about optics and fending off the exploding protest from the anti-war hippies, coddled and protected college students, and eventually, plaid shirt Bermuda shorts, mini-dress wearing suburbanites. 2021, in a sense, is much like 1975.

Take the words “Vietnam” and insert the phrase “Middle East,” and you will see that we are repeating history.