Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Magnificent Storyteller Soldier Reveals What He Saw In Vietnam

Richard Mellor

I have never seen this but I would love to have met this guy.  I have friends and co-workers who had family in Vietnam and some of them never came back. I lost a friend and co-worker from a rare skin cancer that was caused by the herbicide we know as Agent Orange that also contained dioxin that the US poured on the Vietnamese, their food and their own troops.

This was not a war of course, any more than the Korean Peninsula was. US imperialism intervened in civil wars on the side of those that would best serve its interests. In Vietnam the US propped up a government that couldn't get elected by its own people. It cost some 3 million Vietnamese their lives and even today some Vietnamese children are born with deformities due to this chemical warfare the US waged on them.

Close to 70,000 US workers died fighting for US corporate interests. When we consider the wives who lost their husbands, girlfriends their lovers, mothers and fathers their children and grandparents their grandchildren, the toll on the US working class effected far more than just the dead. The cost in monetary terms was astronomical. The illegal invasion of Cambodia killed some 600,000 and the bombing of Laos destroyed entire cultures and left Laos as one of the most bombed countries on earth. Obama, on his visit to Laos never apologized for this war crime.

Those celebrities that support it and use their celebrity status to encourage young workers to go fight for Wall Street are as guilty. Pat Tillman in my view was killed for refusing to play that  role, just the opposite. Time magazine and the investors that owned it and all the propaganda rags that are used to dupe working people in to fighting their wars are equally responsible for the deaths on both sides.


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