Monday, February 26, 2018
At least he's good for a laugh once in a while...
In a dim, dirty hostess bar on a sultry backstreet in the Pham Ngu Lao district of Valhalla, a bunch of the tattered shades of the boys from the 66th NVA Regiment and the 1/7th Cav take a break from pounding warm "33" beer and talking shit about the ARVN to stand up, drop their khaki and OD trousers, and hang a collective moon on the guy who couldn't run from their war fast enough but now claims that he would rush a mad gunman barehanded.
Over at the corner table Trung sĩ Vo and Staff Sergeant Baker spit sourly on the filthy floor and yell at the hostess for another round, cold this time, goddammit, but Hạ sĩ Nguyen thinks that the idea of Five-Deferment Donnie as a rootin' tootin' heeeero is so fucking funny he spits beer out his nose and Private Bookwalter has to pound him on the back so hard that he hits his face on the table and the whole squad, including Loi the B-girl, breaks up laughing.
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Trump's statement alone tells you how non-credible a person he is. A man obviously unsuited for leadership in any classic sense. And yet, given the utter bankruptcy of the neoliberal politician alternates, he was actually a competitively successful candidate.
ReplyDeleteWeep for the plight of the world.
If we want a better country, it's up to us to be better citizens. We HAD a "better" candidate; not a "great" candidate, but a better one that Trump. Between our political setup and our own gullibility and stupidity we got stuck with this bozo.
DeleteLoi, is that you mon amie? You are still beaucoup cô đẹp. Sorry I left you, orders are orders.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you could check with Vo for me to see if he has connections to get our boy Drump into one of those camps in the re-education gulag. The ones that re-created and made over so many sinful or incomplete individuals, or killed them trying? But maybe not. Lê Duẩn and Phạm Văn Đồng loved them those five-deferment guys like Donnie. They will probably award him your country's Glorious-Order-of-Friendship Medal.
Sentimentally, I kinda like the idea of the old enemies of Ia Drang sharing a beer and some bullsht in the Beyond. Would that we were actually sapiens enough to find ways that they could have shared that beer together as pals in life.
DeleteFDC -
DeleteI know some veterans who decided not to wait for Valhalla. They have visited Viet-Nam, and broken bread with (or more like shared rice bowls with) NVA and/or VC veterans. I would go back if not for the cost and for family commitments. It is a most beautiful country and the Viet equivalents of John and Jane Doe are warm and charming people.
But that kind of affection for former adversaries is easy for us. Not so easy for veterans of Cousins' Wars. Like the ARVN veterans or former RVN officials, professors and teachers, the press, dissident poets, or even communists that did not toe the Stalinist line out of Hanoi. They all ended up in forced labor camps where they were subject to beatings, malnutrition, medical neglect of beriberi, malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, suppurating infections and other tropical afflictions. I don't think they are embracing their conquerors and jailers.
Or for the Hồi Chánhs and Kit Carson Scouts who were sent to the worst of the worst camps. A fate worthy of traitors perhaps? But no trial? No hanging or bullet to the head? Instead they suffered constant beating, some beaten to death, starvation, food deliberately contaminated with human and animal waste. Their life sentences were short, and NOT from parole.
As our own proved, civil wars are the poison tree that bears the most deadly of fruit. The long travail of Vietnam was, in fact, a Thirty Years War of Asia and ruined that doomed land as badly as the original did the German states. The North got to harrow their captives because they won; had the RVN won the toll among their enemies would probably have been just as bitter,
DeleteThe Northerners were merciless, and I have no doubt that their surviving victims still hate them for it. But I'm not sure that it was some unique aspect of northern character, or Communism. I think it had a lot to do with the kind of person it takes to survive and win a war spanning generations; they looked into the abyss so long that what looked back was nothing but abyss.
FDC --
DeleteBy merciless Northerners, I assume you are referring to the Politburo or the Triumvirate at the top. Those guys - Duẩn, Thọ, Đồng, even kindly old Bác Hồ - and others around them were all paranoid. Too many years dodging the Surete and the Kuomintang. Too many double crosses both by them and against them from Viet Nationalists, Socialists, Monarchists, Catholics, heretics in their own party.
Many of those at the top of the hierarchy had spent years in prisons. Both Đồng and Thọ spent years in the French tiger cages of Poulo Condor 40 years prior to its expose in Life Magazine by Tom Harkin. The probably thought their own gulag was a huge step tpwards reform instead of the hellhole it turned out to be.
Those were the ones that implemented the re-education camps. And that term re-education camp is an extremely bad translation. The actual Viet words meant something more like place of re-birth or born again.
I couldn't see a Combat Vet running into an active firefight without something that is magazine fed in their hand, and I certainly can't see anyone of a civie nature, including moi even remotely thinking about running in with or without a weapon.
ReplyDeleteSo donny trump, talking shit about manbaiting an active shooter with his jiggly-puff belly, and wiggly-tuff butt?
No, not even in his most Walter Mitty mastubatory fantasy would silly-lil'willy go mano-on-mano with an armed shooter.
But I gotta say, Chief, that description of that bar reminds me of a biker bar I was once in...once...I want to reiterate that point, once. Realized, not my kind of people because they are far rougher crew than I could ever hope to be.
Sheerahkhan -
ReplyDeleteTrump always gets someone else to do the tough jobs.
Even in his senior year at military prep school he got his bully boys to do the hazing of sophomores. Apparently he was too worried they might fight back. The Donald is spinning on an Axis of Hypocrisy.
Wait...whoa, back it up...Donald Trump?
Deleteel Presidente del hombre machochismo pequeno?
Trump was in Military Prep School?
Ho-ho-ho...now I'll admit, I'm not a fanbois to the point where I know all details of donny el jefe pretender, but him being in Military Prep School, and then dodging military service with some lame ass excuses?
Oh...this is much worse!
Much, much worse.
sheerahkahn
(* note: i may have butchered my spanish sentence structure, forgiveness is asked, correction would be better)
Part of the Trumpenlegende is his military career at Richie Rich Military Academy, which Orange Foolius has compared to serving in the RVN. It's hard to tell if the idiot actually believes this, or whether it's just another piece of his bullshit.
DeleteWhat I think is funnier is his thing about how his surviving his sex life amid the AIDS-ridden hos of the Eighties is like him fighting his way thru the siege of Khe San. He's repeated that nonsense enough to make clear he genuinely believes it.