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Letters to VVAW

By VVAW

Fellow Veterans:

I'm going back to a year ago when the President was shot to draw an analogy about the reasoning power of our President. Reagan stated that he heard and looked in the direction of the shots. He also stated that he felt a terrifying pain, but at first did not realize what had happened to him. Myself and thousands of other Americans, and millions of people around the world had no problem realizing what had happened to us in similar situations. I think we should all ask the question that Arlo Guthrie asks in the song "Presidential Rag." The Question is, "If you didn't know about that one, well then what else don't you know."

Coming up in time to the Presidential address to Congress on April 28, 1981. In his address the President said: "Sick societies don't produce men like the two who recently returned from outer space..." Maybe someday he'll also return. He continued, "Sick societies don't produce men like Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy who place his body between mine and the man with the gun simply because he felt that's what his duty called for him to do......" The President spoke for 20 minutes and exited, while our esteemed elected representatives game him a prolonged, standing ovation.

As I listened to our President, I was sickened, saddened, and scared that our President when speaking about our society, apparently forgot that this same healthy society also produces hundreds of thousands of young men who will, in a given situation, kill any number of other human beings in close combat. He also forgot to mention that his same healthy society actually runs institutions of education to produce people who will fly at supersonic speeds, miles in the sky with the singular purpose of dispensing explosive and fiery death on areas populated with civilians whose only desire is to live off the land they live on.

What makes this madness even worse is that America not only develops these obscenities but exports them.

Our leaders have chosen in El Salvador, the poorest country in the American's , where people die from complications of lack of food, to hand these tools of death and the knowledge to use them to a military regime that has no objections to using this weaponry on unarmed men, women and children.

Every day for months there are articles all through the media about El Salvador, with the statements from our government becoming more militant. As one of the remnants from American's last involvement in someone else's civil war, I consider it to be not only my right but my duty to offer my view of the situation. And here it is.

The government is lying to us about El Salvador. Some of the very same people who brought us the sacrilege known as the Vietnam war are back in our faces with the usual, "Communists in the basement, you're all going to die tomorrow" song and dance. Please think about it!

We have people telling us to be scared of communists who have only faced communists over tea and biscuits. I don't even wanna hear about the arisen military messiah Secretary of State's war record. Excluding COL Herbert and a very few others, a LT COL in Vietnam is a joke to me (and to anyone else who was in Vietnam except for a few other LT Col's and above and their succulents. I never saw them in the field. I know they weren't on my gun team or in my platoon. I'll tell you what I did see! What I saw was a lot of kids being used as bait so some high-ranking REMF could in the very same day dictate a letter to your parents about what a good soldier you were and now you're dead in truest, most glorious tradition of defending America's democracy, and here's and ARCOM with "V" to bury with you. And on the very same day, within hours, dictate another letter awarding himself a Silver Star or better for some purely fabricated act of heroism that came to him the night before as you lay bleeding to death in the dioxin-saturated water of some bomb crater...and he was having visions of sugarplums dancing in his head. You'll find very few officers, particularly senior officers, without Silver Stars or better from the Vietnam war. In the combat arms, the percent with these once sacred and now almost meaningless awards must by 100%. Dig into your memories, you people who were there.

Our President is another fine example of heroism and what it means to bleed for America. He spent World War II as a liaison to the pitched battles of Hollywood, the siege of San Diego and the invasion and scorched-earth policy of Bakersfield. His eldest followed in his father's proud tradition. Michael Reagan is 37 and spent the sixties dropping in and out of colleges and is proud that he won a speedboat race on Lake Tahoe in 1967, a year when many fine Americans died for no reason thousands of miles from their homes. While 9 million of us found our way into uniform, Reagan's sportsman son has not one day of military service in his miserable, candy-coated life!

The people of El Salvador are fighting because they are tired of being dragged out of their homes and shot like vermin for no other reason than asking their government for education, health care and the right to realize the fruits of their labor. The myth that our certifiable leadership puts out is that the people of El Salvador would quietly and happily starve to death if it wasn't for the communist influence of Nicaragua or Cuba or, heaven forbid, "The Soviets," or is it the Chinese—I can never remember whose turn it is. What they want us to believe is that without this infamous communist intervention the Salvadorians would be in perfect understanding and agreement why they must die, uneducated, from inadequate health care and malnutrition, while their military and friends think about dieting and vacations in Las Vegas.

If Cubans and Sandinistas are in El Salvador helping the peasants of El Salvador, it is only to America's shame that it isn't helping the forces standing proud and tall for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Pat Finnegan
New York

Gentlemen:

The Gray Panthers of Montgomery county, MD endorses Operation Dewey Canyon Iv. The fight of veterans for government recognition of the veterans' legitimate needs, and the financing of necessary programs to undo the damage to them is part of the same fight that older citizens are conducting for their own needs.

Best Wishes,
Abe Bloom
Convenor Gray Panthers Montgomery Cty