Download PDF of this full issue: v55n2.pdf (41.4 MB)

Profit-Mode Diplomacy

By Allen Somerset Meece

Just out of high school in 1962, I joined the US Navy to see the world. I assumed I wouldn't have to kill anybody unless they first tried to invade the shores of North America. I believed I was joining a defense department, but I learned it is an offense department. Its job is to protect "American Interests Overseas." It enforces American Corporate Imperialism.

Corporate America resents "government FOR the people" because that phrase excludes Big Shots like themselves, who are not "people." They are money-making robots. So they ordered their Offense Department to kill innocent people in Nam for trying to install a socialist economic system to replace the old French Imperialism that they had just managed to boot out of their country at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

History has proven that the Vietnamese were right. While the French corporations were exploiting them, they couldn't even manage to feed themselves. Now they are a wealthy "most favored trading nation" of the US. They are doing fine with the new socialism. Like modern China and Russia, Vietnam is incorporating a significant portion of free enterprise into its commercial version of the social pie. They are using hybrid economic systems. We could have left Vietnam totally alone, and they, and fifty-eight thousand of us, would have come out better.

When I'm in the District of Columbia, I see the fifty-eight thousand names on the shiny grey Vietnam Wall who were comrades-in-arms who bled for a lie.

In the early sixties, the Corporate Ad-Serving Media parroted the government's initially criminally misinforming program. The fake mainstream media spread The Big Lie. They parroted fake information that said "The Viet Cong are not Freedom Fighters. They are part of the Sino-Russian Global Monopoly that wants to take your democracy, your car, and your girlfriend, probably."

After I completed Fleet Sonar School in Key West, they sent me on a warship to "Vietnam, Republic of."

The war-savvy US Government claimed there was a "military conflict" over there.

When my warship arrived in The Nam, there was wholesale slaughter already taking place. It was a sovereign nation that wanted to be left alone to fight its own civil war, just as America had had to do in its civil war in 1861.

But opportunistic Corpos had wedged themselves into the situation. They were escalating an internal conflict into an international-level blood shower with indiscriminate high-explosive cluster bombs and holocaust-producing napalm gasoline burns, terrorizing and frying both innocent families and unwilling combatants.

I was appalled to see my "respectable and honorable" government lying to everyone about its foreign invasion. I saw the country of Abraham Lincoln promulgating war on a beautiful little rice pot of a country. My common sense was confused.

The Vietnam death machine was producing happy days for Big Shot Industrial Owners. At the same time, it buried fifty-eight thousand young, unsophisticated, and well-intentioned American military personnel who were told that they were fighting for their own freedom.

That commercially lucrative war was never approved in Congress as the US Constitution requires. Instead, Congress merely gave the President a blank check to "protect freedom." What that blank check actually accomplished was to make it okay for one person, the President, to allow the US military to do whatever it wanted to do to make the Vietnamese people afraid to be Socialists.

In 1995, I was shown that my suspicion of Covert Insanity was correct when a Vietnam Warrant Officer of Intelligence, named Sedgewick Tourison, published a book titled Project Alpha: Washington's Secret Military Operations in North Vietnam.

Sedgewick wrote about how our "sterling" US Government concealed an "International Dirty Tricks Department" called the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA started the Vietnam American War at the behest of its CUDs, its Corporate Unofficial Directors. The CUDs are in the employment of the Corps. Still, they do "Lobby" duty in government buildings and influence national policy, and foment wars and enable the CIA's perverse black operations with our tax money. It was that way then, and it still is now. Maybe always will be, if we're not more forceful.

Fifty-eight thousand souls behind those names on the Vietnam Wall in Washington are asking us to do them one little favor in return for their sacrifice—vote well!

Allen Meece was a sonar technician on the USS Edwards, DD-950, from 1963 to 66. He is the author of "Tin Can", a novel about destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf, available at the Amazon online bookstore.