Tag Archives: Vietnam

“All Gave Some . . .

But some gave all. And that is what this weekend is all about. So when you gather around the table for some traditional hotdogs and burgers this weekend, remember to hold hands and give a moment of silence to all those service men and women who are resting in ANC and in all those other hundreds of other  cemeteries spread around the world

Jazz Finally at Rest                    By: Greg Maresca

On January 24, 2022, less than a month after Robert “Jazz” Jasinski, celebrated his 60th birthday, his six-decade run on this third post from the sun came to an abrupt and unexpected close. It would not be until May 23, 2023, that his cremains would be finally interred to their ultimate resting place in Arlington National Cemetery.

As the nation prepares to observe Memorial Day, it was certainly a tailored time to have his last and long overdue request realized. The elapsed time of 16-months – two hockey seasons – would have stirred a hearty laugh tinged with a little disgust from my old friend. Jazz was all too familiar with the enduring federal bureaucracy having spent most of his life toiling on the front lines for Uncle Sam – first as a U.S. Marine and then with the Transportation Security Administration.

 The extended and unnecessary ripple effects of COVID-19 still resonate throughout America’s capital city and wokefully ground zero is Arlington National Cemetery. In no way does COVID still make such a prolonged wait for burial justified. It is nothing short of a national disgrace.

We have no issue with packaging multi billions in military aid to Ukraine and thought nothing of bequeathing nearly just as much military hardware to the Taliban in our flight out of Afghanistan – another national disgrace.

Millions pour over our southern border illegally, while we drown in government debt living in a cultural zeitgeist where plenty of folks think nothing of using a $1000 iPhone 14 Pro to check their food stamp balance.

The nation’s capital was like a second home to the Delaware County, Pennsylvania native having done a tour of duty at Marine Corps Headquarters. A favorite D.C. haunt of his was Arlington. Yet, it took 16-months to finally inter Jazz’s ashes among some of the men he served with and those he helped bury while serving with the Corps’ Casualty Notification Unit decades ago.

If Jazz had survived and knew that any veteran had such a long waiting period, he would have been heard. Given the circumstances, he never would have placed himself in a situation to jump the line, either.

Still, with this Memorial Day weekend upon America, we can’t bury some of our veterans in a timely fashion at the nation’s most hallowed and historic burial grounds affording closure for so many families.

There still exists a third of America who takes seriously the nation’s oldest president whose administration is devoid of many things, most of all – wisdom. According to Biden’s recent commencement address at nearby Howard University, America’s greatest threats are not foreign, but domestic. Is it any wonder why on this Memorial Day weekend, the nation is circling the drain of the abyss?

A call to Arlington’s general service number yielded nothing but excuses, namely COVID overkill. What was emphasized was how Arlington conducts approximately 6,400 burials a year averaging 30 per day. Their backlog consists of 4,500 extending the wait to 16 months – now in its third year.

Unanswered in another column from a year ago was when Biden abandoned Afghanistan in record time, why couldn’t he sign another one of his numerous presidential executive orders to expedite laying to rest heroic American veterans in a timely fashion?

Pulling punches is not in the Jasinski DNA as Jazz’s older brother Stan was generous providing solutions saying, “They (Arlington) need to think out of the box by holding larger ceremonies for groups at a time, use special ceremonial units or ROTC for extra manpower to reduce the wait. They have got to stop this ‘is what we have always done mentality.’”

Arlington guards the remains of more than 330,000 immortal souls buried under plain, white granite stones all in formation where every day is Memorial Day, and where waiting lists should be entrusted to the dustbin of history.

Arlington is the priciest of American real estate and is the unabridged narrative of the nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. And my old friend, whose ashes now finally rest here, would stress in no uncertain terms that we need to keep it that way.

Rest easy, Jazz, you are finally home.

Yes, may God please bless Jazz, and all the others who have served this once famous country. Amen

Postscript: I just received some very bad news from a Marine Brother, Sam Garland. Our best friend and brother Marine hero, LtCol Vic Taylor, USMC (Ret) from Steamboat Springs, CO has passed away. We know none of the details at this time. When I get more information, I will pass it along on here.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 An older picture (1959) of Vic as a LCpl

 

Originally posted 2023-05-28 10:52:31.

Is America Dying?

This was sent to me from a fellow Marine brother with the author unknown, but whoever took the time to write this, he or she has created an absolute masterpiece of gospel truth. I urge you to read it slowly and absorb it all. Then read it again. Nations  of long ago took centuries to fail, not so in today’s electronic world. The script has been written, the play appears to be in its final act – the United States of America as we knew it is doomed. Thank you Al

Men, like nations, think they’re eternal.  What man in his 20s or 30s doesn’t believe, at least subconsciously, that he’ll live forever? In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it’s harder to hide from reality…. as you lose friends and relatives.

Nations also have seasons: Imagine a Roman of the 2nd century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever…. Forever was about 500 years, give or take…. not bad, but gone!!

France was pivotal in the 17th and 18th centuries; now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire; now Albion exists in perpetual twilight. Its 96-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline.

In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population aging so rapidly that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone.

I was born in 1945, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century. America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the “Greatest Generation,” we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed. It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity.

We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world.  We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and now COVID. We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA – the blueprint of life.

But where is the glory that once was Rome? America has moved from a relatively free economy to socialism – which has worked so well NOWHERE in the world.

We’ve gone from a republican government guided by a constitution to a regime of revolving elites. We have less freedom with each passing year. Like a signpost to the coming reign of terror, the cancel culture is everywhere. We’ve traded the American Revolution for the Cultural Revolution.

The pathetic creature in the White House is an empty vessel filled by his handlers. At the G-7 Summit, ‘Dr. Jill’ had to lead him like a child. In 1961, when we were young and vigorous, our leader was too. Now a feeble nation is technically led by the oldest man to ever serve in the presidency.

We can’t defend our borders, our history (including monuments to past greatness) or our streets. Our cities have become anarchist playgrounds. We are a nation of dependents, mendicants, and misplaced charity.  Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.

The president of the United States can’t even quote the beginning of the Declaration of Independence (‘You know – The Thing’) correctly. Ivy League graduates routinely fail history tests that 5th graders could pass a generation ago. Crime rates soar and we blame the 2nd Amendment and slash police budgets.

Our culture is certifiably insane. Men who think they’re women. People who fight racism by seeking to convince members of one race that they’re inherently evil, and others that they are perpetual victims. A psychiatrist lecturing at Yale said she fantasizes about “Unloading a revolver into the head of any white person.” We slaughter the unborn in the name of freedom, while our birth rate dips lower year by year. Our national debt is so high that we can no longer even pretend that we will repay it one day. It’s a $30-trillion monument to our improvidence and refusal to confront reality. Our “entertainment” is sadistic, nihilistic, and as enduring as a candy bar wrapper thrown in the trash.  Our music is noise that spans the spectrum from annoying to repulsive.

Patriotism is called an insurrection, treason celebrated, and perversion sanctified. A man in blue gets less respect than a man in a dress. We’re asking soldiers to fight for a nation our leaders no longer believe in.

How meekly most of us submitted to Fauci-ism (the regime of face masks, lockdowns, and hand sanitizers) shows the impending death of the American spirit.

How do nations slip from greatness to obscurity?
* Fighting endless wars they can’t or won’t win
* Accumulating massive debt far beyond their ability to repay
* Refusing to guard their borders, allowing the nation to be inundated by an alien horde
* Surrendering control of their cities to mob rule
* Allowing indoctrination of the young
* Moving from a republican form of government to an oligarchy
* Losing national identity
* Indulging indolence
* Abandoning God, faith, and family – the bulwarks of any stable society.

In America, every one of these symptoms is pronounced, indicating an advanced stage of the disease.

Even if the cause seems hopeless, do we not have an obligation to those who sacrificed so much to give us what we had? I’m surrounded by ghosts urging me on: the Union soldiers who held Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, the battered bastards of Bastogne, those who served in the cold hell of Korea, the guys who went to the jungles of Southeast Asia and came home to be reviled or neglected.

This is the nation that took in my immigrant grandparents, whose uniform my father and most of my uncles wore in the Second World War. I don’t want to imagine a world without America, even though it becomes increasingly likely.

During Britain’s darkest hour, when its professional army was trapped at Dunkirk and a German invasion seemed imminent, Churchill reminded his countrymen, “Nations that go down fighting rise again, and those that surrender tamely are finished.”

The same might be said of causes. If we let America slip through our fingers, if we lose without a fight, what will posterity say of us?

While the prognosis is far from good. Only God knows if America’s day in the sun is over.

Author Unknown

Postscript: Read it and weep, forward or erase it! I read it three times and am now posting it to you, believing that we are at the moment in time to either stand up, or shut up! We now may soon be at the next stage in our country’s future. I believe it is closer than we think. God help us.

 

 

 

Originally posted 2023-02-08 11:36:04.

Vietnam Remembered

It matters not whether you were there or not. In fact, some of you are too young to even remember the state of the country during those tumultuous years. While I am not 100% a Webb fan, he is an intelligent Marine brother and I respect his service and loved his first book. The author; however, asks some good questions and presents an  interesting perspective on all that went wrong and what went right – yes there were some things that we did right. The Cronkite’s and Rather’s be damned, we did accomplish something there, and we certainly were not all drug addicts and baby killers. It’s somewhat of a long read, but I ask you to read it and think about those days, especially if you were there in the mud. I do apologize for the tardiness of this post; it should have been posted last Thursday, but my house took priority.

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Jim Webb

By Barton Swaim WSJ

Arlington, VA

Echoes of Vietnam, 50 Years Later

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, popular culture had basically one message on the Vietnam War: that it was conceived in American arrogance, was perpetrated by American savages, and accomplished little but psychological devastation and national disgrace.

Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” (1986) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), Brian De Palma’s “Casualties of War” (1989)—these and a thousand other productions, documentaries and articles told my generation that the war had been a gigantic fiasco that turned those who fought it into war criminals and frowning, guilt-ridden drug addicts.

The war ended officially on Jan. 27, 1973, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. That’s 50 years ago next Friday—an anniversary that will likely occasion a round of retrospective think pieces and cable-TV segments on the war’s legacy. More will follow in 2025 to mark the final American pullout from Saigon in 1975.

The country has moved on since the ’80s. The Vietnam War no longer elicits the sort of ostentatious regret it did a generation ago. To confine the discussion to Holly-wood, “We Were Soldiers” (2002) was one of the first major films to portray the average American soldier in Vietnam as decent and valorous; more recently “The Last Full Measure” (2018), though indulging in the usual antiwar pieties, acknowledges the bravery and decency of American soldiers.

We’ve moved on in politics, too.

The great scourge of supposed American war crimes in Vietnam, John Kerry—the man who averred in 1971 that American soldiers serving in Vietnam perpetrated war crimes “in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan”—was the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2004. He felt obliged to refashion himself as a war hero, and he lost.

The Vietnam War doesn’t lend itself to unambiguous interpretations in the way many wars do.

But with media-generated myths no longer dominant, and with the pain of losing 58,220 servicemen subsiding, are Americans ready to think about the whole thing anew? “Maybe,” Jim Webb answers after a thoughtful pause. Mr. Webb, 76, who served as President Reagan’s Navy secretary (1987-88) and a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia from (2007-13), commanded a Marine rifle platoon in the Vietnam bush in 1969-70. “Maybe,” he says again, looking unconvinced.

The biggest myth, to my mind, holds that the ordinary Vietnam combat veteran was so scarred by the experience that he couldn’t get his life together back home. Think of Travis Bickle, the lonesome, deranged vet of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”

Is there any truth to the stereotype? Mr. Webb recalls an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1986 claiming to find that Vietnam veterans were 86% more likely than everyone else to commit suicide. “I read it,” he recalls, “I broke down all the authors’ numbers and figured out how they came to this conclusion, and it was total bulls—.” The paper considered only men born during 1950, 1951 and 1952, and only those who died in Pennsylvania and California between 1974 and 1983. That didn’t stop the press from touting the study, “in essence claiming if you served in Vietnam, you’re probably going to kill yourself.”

In 1979 Congress hired the Harris polling firm to survey Americans on what they thought about the war and its veterans. At the time Mr. Webb was counsel to the House Veterans Affairs Committee. “Of Vietnam veterans,” he recalls, “91% said they were glad they served in the military, and 74% said at some level they enjoyed their time in the military. And 2 out of 3 said they would do it again.”

Was the war worth fighting?

Mr. Webb thinks on balance it was. He recalls a meeting with Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore. “I asked him a similar question,” Mr. Webb says, “and in his view, America won—only in a different way. We stopped communism, which didn’t advance in Indochina any further than it reached in 1975. We enabled other countries in the region to develop market economies and governmental systems that were basically functional and responsive to their people. That model has stayed, and I like to think it will advance, even in Vietnam.”

But clearly a lot did go wrong between 1963 and 1975. In his autobiography, “I Heard My Country Calling” (2014), Mr. Webb writes of “the arrogance and incompetence of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his much-ballyhooed bunch of civilian Whiz Kids whose data-based ‘systems analysis’ approach to fighting our wars had diminished the historic role of military leadership.” He repeats the same criticism of the war’s civilian leadership, and he insists the military tacticians in the field—American and South Vietnamese— did their jobs superbly.

Mr. Webb describes two problems the U.S. military was largely powerless to solve. First, the North Vietnamese government’s policy of sending assassination squads into the South. “Bernard Fall, a great French journalist, writes about this in ‘The Two Vietnams,’ ” a book published in 1963, Mr. Webb says. “It had been happening since at least 1958. The Vietminh started sending these squads back into the South, particularly central Vietnam. They were extremely smart and ruthless about it. These guys would go in and execute anyone with ties to any part of the South Vietnamese government—government officials, teachers, social workers, anyone.”

Over time, these murders sapped the population’s loyalty to the government in Saigon, and there was very little the U.S. military could do about it.

The second problem was the one many readers will remember well: the radical left’s successful use of the war, with the news media’s complicity. “Take Students for Democratic Society,” Mr. Webb says. “They were founded before there was a Vietnam War. The Port Huron Statement of 1962”— the document that founded the SDS—“doesn’t say anything about Vietnam. The goal of these revolutionaries was to dissolve the American system, and they thought they would accomplish that through racial issues. They didn’t get any traction—until about 1965 and the Vietnam War.”

Mention of the news media raises the subject of class.

The journalists reporting on the war, interpreting events for the American public, “were articulate, were from good schools, had important family connections,” Mr. Webb says. “You could see it all coming apart.”

Coming apart?

Mr. Webb describes a “divorce” between “upper strata” Americans and the military’s base of enlistees. That divorce didn’t begin with the Vietnam War, but the war accelerated and exacerbated it. “The military draws mainly from people within a certain tradition. It’s a tradition of fighting for the country simply because it’s their country.” Mr. Webb’s first novel, “Fields of Fire” (1978), is in many ways an imaginative portrayal of this fragmentation.

The book, which captures the war’s brutality but carefully avoids criticism of its policy makers, follows the war experience of three American servicemen. One, a Harvard student, means to get a spot in the Marine Corps band as a horn player but winds up as a grunt. He begins his tour by viewing the whole conflict through the lens of Jean-Paul Sartre (“Suffering without meaning, except in the suffering itself”) and ends, permanently maimed, shouting into a microphone at antiwar protesters back in Cambridge: “ I didn’t see any of you in Vietnam. I saw . . . truck drivers and coal miners and farmers. I didn’t see you.”

The military’s present-day recruitment difficulties, Mr. Webb says, have a lot to do with this cultural stratification. When civilian political leaders announce they’re “going into the military to purge ‘whites with extremist views,’ do they know what they’re doing? A lot of the U.S. military comes from a certain cultural tradition, and right now a lot of parents are saying to their kids, ‘Don’t go. You want to have your whole life canceled because someone said you were at a meeting where there was a Confederate flag or whatever?’ ” Mr. Webb sought the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, although he dropped out before the end of 2015. At a CNN debate Anderson Cooper asked each of the candidates: “You’ve all made a few people upset over your political careers. Which enemy are you most proud of?” Others answered predictably: the National Rifle Association, the pharmaceutical industry, the Republicans. Mr.

Webb’s response: “I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me, but he’s not around right now to talk to.” The liberal commentariat disparaged him for boasting that he’d killed a man, but Donald Trump won the general election by appealing to the sort of swing voters who weren’t offended by Mr. Webb’s remark.

Max Hastings, in “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy” (2018), writes of the Paris Accords that the U.S. “eventually settled on the only terms North Vietnam cared about, whereby its own troops remained in the South, while the Americans went home.” Mr. Webb, who speaks Vietnamese and has visited Vietnam many times as a civilian, agrees: “We did the same thing there as we did in Afghanistan: We cut our allies out of all the important decisions.”

“In 1972”—here he becomes animated—“ the South Vietnamese military was really starting to grow and become a lethal fighting force.” In the Easter Offensive, the North Vietnamese “ hit the South with everything they had.”

He picks up some nearby papers and reads figures: “14 divisions, 26 independent regiments and several hundred Soviet tanks hit South Vietnam. The Americans— we were nearly all gone by then. South Vietnam lost 39,000 soldiers; the communists admitted in their own records that they lost 100,000. They tried to take the South, and the South beat them.

And then, at Paris, we cut them out.”

Soon afterward, Richard Nixon resigned, Congress cut off funding, and Saigon fell.

“Then, of course,” Mr. Webb goes on, the communists “did the Stalinist thing—they put hundreds of thousands of the South Vietnamese finest into re-education camps. Two hundred forty thousand stayed there longer than four years. I have a good friend who was in a re-education camp for 13 years.”

Recalling a visit to Vietnam in 1991, Mr. Webb describes a night when hundreds of South Vietnamese Army veterans who had spent years in re-education camps gathered in a park near Saigon’s old railway station. “My Vietnamese friend told me many of these guys had been high-ranking officers. We could see some of them shooting heroin through their thighs. I thought to myself, ‘Wait a second— these were our people.’ ” Mr. Webb pauses for a moment, then recovers.

What have we learned from Vietnam? Not much, if the Afghanistan pullout is anything to go by. “The way they left was horrible, disgusting,” he says. “People said it looked like the fall of Saigon. No, it did not.”

As a military procedure, “the evacuation from Saigon was brilliant. In 1975, we had refugee camps all over the place ready to take people in—Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, Camp Pendleton in California, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Operation New Life in Guam.

These places were ready to go before the fall. We got 140,000 people out of there. What this administration did was a disgrace. There was no excuse for it.”

Before I leave, Mr. Webb shows me various pictures and artifacts in his office. The leg injured by that grenade still troubles him; he walks around the office with a slight but discernible limp. One black-and-white photograph he particularly wants me to see.

Taken in 1979, it shows a much younger Jim Webb with two pals from his rifle platoon. Tom Martin, who enlisted in the Marines while a student at Vanderbilt and served as a squad leader, is in a wheelchair. Mac McGarvey, Mr. Webb’s fifth radio operator—three of the previous four were seriously wounded—has no right arm.

All three men in the photograph are smiling.

Originally posted 2023-01-25 15:04:44.

Thank You!

For those of us who were there, this is OUR DAY! Enjoy it as best you can, but remember those who cannot. Even to this day, I stand by what I say in Chapter #28, The Silent Majority, of the book, kiss my ass!

                     Welcome Home Brothers and Sisters of all branches;                       WELCOME HOME!

Originally posted 2022-03-29 09:38:18.

What Lessons?

Good Day Friends, Brothers and Sisters.

I have been out of comms for nearly a month. Left on 27 July for a trip up the East Coast in the RV to visit friends, brothers, and family and returned this past Monday.  But then you don’t need to hear all about that. What I did do of import was remove myself from eveything newsworthy.  China could have nuked LA and I would have been oblivious. I sent out an email asking to hold all emails; sadly, some of you did not do that. I answered no emails, simply deleted them without reading them. I did not want to know what was going on in this once great nation, nor what that incompetent jerk living in our white house was up to. No emails, no internet, and no TV. What joy that was. Oh I did hear rumblings about things like Afghanistan, but could have cared less. I mean, let’s face it, I knew anything that administration would attempt would be a disaster since no one there has a lick of sense and any one in the military wearing a star and many wearing eagles are incompetent as well. 

So now I am back, but remain aloof of the goings on in the sandbox. At my age and station in life, I really could care less. It has become somewhat fun watching what “they” do.  American’s, in general are stupid, absolutely stupid! I read this a.m. where “his” approval rating is down to 44%. Which tells me 44% of our population are absolute imbeciles.

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know Nancy and I have returned and I will try and keep the blog going, but mind you it might be about things other than that idiot in the WH.  I did run across this one and thought I’d share it with you. Just another example of how stupid we are.

Semper Fi; Jim

A LOST LEARNING EXPERIENCE?

CIA Chief of Station, Saigon, Thomas Polgar, April 1975

  1. WITH RECEIPT PRESIDENTIAL MESSAGE ADVISING THAT EVACUATION AMERICAN EMBASSY SAIGON MUST BE COMPLETED BEFORE 0345 LOCAL TIME 30 APRIL, WISH TO ADVISE THAT THIS WILL BE THE FINAL MESSAGE FROM SAIGON STATION.
  2. IT WILL TAKE US ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES TO DESTROY EQUIPMENT. ACCOMPLISH BY APPROXIMATELY 0320 HOURS LOCAL. WE MUST TERMINATE CLASSIFIED TRANSMISSIONS
  3. IT HAS BEEN A LONG FIGHT AND WE HAVE LOST. THIS EXPERIENCE UNIQUE IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES DOES NOT SIGNAL NECESSARILY THE DEMISE OF THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER. THE SEVERITY OF THE DEFEAT AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF IT, HOWEVER, WOULD SEEM TO CALL FOR A REASSESSMENT OF THE POLICIES OF NIGGARDLY HALF MEASURES WHICH HAVE CHARACTERIZED MUCH OF OUR PARTICIPATION HERE DESPITE THE COMMITMENT OF MANPOWER AND RESOURCES WHICH WERE CERTAINLY GENEROUS. THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE FORCED TO REPEAT IT. LET US HOPE THAT WE WILL NOT HAVE ANOTHER VIETNAM EXPERIENCE AND THAT WE HAVE LEARNED OUR LESSON.

SAIGON SIGNING OFF.

Postscript: Paragraph 5 says it all

Originally posted 2021-08-25 12:25:41.