God, Guns, & Ginny

Well, of course it was righteous. Bear any burden, pay any price, what you could do for your country. Godless communists, after all. You may have been only seventeen, but you’d seen them already in Hungary, Cuba, Berlin. Something had to be done, and someone would have to do it. There is something about a thatched-roof hut in the middle of rice fields, burning, a mortally wounded woman softly keening, child dead in her arms, that can’t be blamed on Chairman Mao, Castro, Lenin, or Das Kapital. Heavy artillery flattened that home. Ours. Our guns did that. Long before I reached my thirteen months, I …

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“The People vs Agent Orange,” the PBS Documentary

by Paul Nichols Formidable advances in technology have generated various long-term health problems for US servicemen and women. And likewise, to opposing forces and the general public who reside in the war-torn countries, including the unborn. History provides too many examples: Ionized radiation exposure during nuclear testing in the 1950’s in Nevada and South Pacific Islands caused numerous cancer deaths among witnesses too close to ground zero. Gulf War Syndrome from Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan spawned significant human-made health maladies from factors such as toxic exposure to smoke and fumes from burn pits and contamination from depleted …

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“We Forced Them to Be Brutal to Us”

by W.D. Ehrhart Does anyone ever notice those ubiquitous black-and-white POW/MIA flags anymore? You see them everywhere: post offices; federal, state, and municipal buildings; many banks and other privately owned properties; even at all the rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike. I’d be willing to bet that almost no one under the age of 40 has any idea what those flags are supposed to represent, or how and why they got where they are. Indeed, even most people over 40 probably don’t know or have long since ceased to think about it. But for over a quarter of a century, the issue of American …

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A Free People Need a Free Press

Friday, October 21, 2011 — The Editor conferred with his spiritual advisors last Sunday; which is to say, he sat down with a couple of fellow ’Nam vets and their life partners and drank beer and talked for several hours. These events are always their own reward, but something special came with this one. That should have been no surprise, since as it took place Wall Street was being Occupied. The Editor was told in no uncertain terms that now is the time to hammer home relentlessly the idea — previously expressed in this space — that the people in each and every Congressional District …

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Tet Plus 43 Years

Monday, January 31, 2011 — Today marks the 43rd Anniversary of the start of the Tet Offensive, the most catastrophic success in U.S. military history, and Vietnam’s most successful military failure ever. In the early morning hours of January 31st, 1968, more than eighty thousand North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong troops carried out hundreds of attacks on almost every significant city and town in South Vietnam. No one was more surprised that the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), the Pentagon’s headquarters in Saigon. The most shocking attack was on the U.S. Embassy, less than 6,000 yards southeast of the MACV compound, where Embassy personnel …

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