Life & Death

Occasionally I'm reminded how far outside the mainstream I am when it comes to dispatching living things. I'm troubled by squishing spiders. Anything larger or more attractive I usually take outside to set free. I'll swat an insect on my skin it is looks like a biter/sucker, but mostly I just flick them off.

Couldn't hunt if you paid me.

Hated fishing because I had to club the fish after the hook was removed. (And I know fish are dumber than hammers.)

One of my co-workers keeps chickens. He eats the eggs and cooks the birds when they stop laying. He's had some problems with foxes and raccoons and rats getting into the coop, and takes undue pleasure in shooting same when he gets a chance. Last night he caught some cute little baby raccoons in his trap and was positively giddy over the prospect of going home to shoot them tonight.

I held my tongue. I'm a sissy.

Mrs NoCo grew up on a farm, raised beef cattle most of her life, but her dad had to have somebody else come in to slaughter and dress them. Even his refusal to give them names or allow his girls to get close to them, emotionally, didn't make it easier for him to send them to market. Me, I want my meat to come in cellophane.

The book I'm reading, about Suelo, indicates that at one point he got so hungry he caught a lizard with his bare hands and tried to bite off the head while it was still alive. I'd starve long before that.

Cows and lizards and chickens are pretty stupid animals. I wonder how a game hunter can kill an elephant, or a whaler a whale, or a poacher a gorilla. Foreign to me.

I wonder if I was threatened by an animal, and it was smarter than me, if I'd feel obligated to surrender?

Well, you know what they say. Being well adjusted to a sick society is not the same as being sane. Sounds to me like you've kept your sanity in a crazy world, that's not a bad thing. Compassion is still something that fascinates me. Why some of us have more than others. IDK but I'm like you.

Ben and I have discussed keeping chickens and small goats and part of the problem with it is I will never see those animals as potential food sources and will never allow them to be treated as less than I would a person. That creates issues. I struggle with my veganism and understanding people who seem so compassionate and love their pets and yet have no issue with cruelty in other forms.

An aversion to meat that looked like meat preceded my conversion to veganism. I could do something like pepperoni or a hot dog that in no way resembled it's animal form but give me a pork roast with the skin on and I puke, almost instantly, as my brain fills in the gory details without permission.

Since this thread was posted, I have come back to it several times, considering whether or not to contribute anything. Maybe I shouldn't. I'll scribble something here and see if I can hit the Send button.

I have never intentionally killed an animal, with the exception of black widow spiders and rattlesnakes that were close enough to bite me. We have tarantulas on the property, and I sometimes have to stop the car and wait for one or more of them to saunter across the drive. I also stop for a covey of quail to cross the drive. It hasn't been easy but I have avoided hitting any of the numerous squirrels we have here. I should have a bumper sticker that says, "I brake for everything."

When we had our cat put down last week, my wife stayed in the room when the final injection was given because she said she didn't want Elinor to be alone. I could not. I had to leave the room. Even typing this paragraph chokes me up a bit.

Now for the other part: As a young man, I spent thirty-one months in Viet Nam. And I did what men do in combat. Strangely, there is only one incident, out of scores, which has stuck with me and caused problems in the nearly fifty years since it occurred. All of the others faded from memory almost immediately, seemingly meaningless to me at the time, and have stayed away. Yet, I still get sad when I remember having to have my Siamese cat put down almost thirty years ago.

Why do I react so differently to the deaths of humans and small animals? Was I, as Jenni said, "well adjusted to a sick society" in Viet Nam?

Viet Nam was the first of many wars where the U.S. asked soldiers to be intentionally immoral. Then they prosecuted people like Lte Calley for doing what they asked.

Yosarian was right.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Viet Nam was the first of many wars where the U.S. asked soldiers to be intentionally immoral.

You are completely wrong about that, or else you have a bizarre definition of immoral.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Then they prosecuted people like Lte Calley for doing what they asked.

No. Calley was not asked or commanded to do what he did. He was a little punk, and I'm surprised that he survived. Many like him were prevented from such actions by their own men.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Yosarian was right.

Yes, he was.

I didn't want this thread to become an argument about that war. I just wanted to contribute to the "Life and Death" conversation.

_Howard wrote:

You are completely wrong about that, or else you have a bizarre definition of immoral.

I say this with complete understanding.

Before Viet Nam civilians were not intentionally targeted. Well except for Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I say this with complete understanding.

And just where did you acquire your complete understanding of that war?

NoCoPilot wrote:

Before Viet Nam civilians were not intentionally targeted. Well except for Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden.

Not really true. For example, early in WWII, Germany was in the process of gaining air superiority over England. Churchill and friends bombed Berlin with the idea of provoking the Luftwaffe to change their strategy of attacking British airfields. It worked. Outraged by the attack on civilians, the Germans switched to a strategy of bombing cities (London, Coventry, etc). At that point, both sides were bombing civilian targets. The limited assets of the RAF were allowed to survive and fight, and eventually win, the Battle of Britain. (The calculated ruthlessness of the British strategy, deliberately sacrificing both German and English civilians, isn't usually commented much.)

Yes, but that's Britain and Germany. I specifically said the U.S.

Atrocities in the First World War were common between those forces too, but as far as I could determine, not the U.S.

_Howard wrote:

And just where did you acquire your complete understanding of that war?

I'm sure I don't understand the Viet Nam Conflict (it was never officially declared a "war") as well as somebody who "served" in it (31 months, yikes.) I sweated through three draft rounds and had a high lottery each time, so I escaped it by the skin of my teeth. I had many, many friends who went and a lot of them didn't come back.

But I've read a fair bit about it since then, and think I have a pretty good understanding of the motivations that got us into that morass and the reasons we couldn't extricate ourselves when it became obvious we weren't being welcomed as liberators (gee, where have I heard that before?) The "Fog of War" movie about McNamara was a pretty good summation with the advantage of hindsight.

I know why returning troops weren't welcomed as heroes, and I know why Jane Fonda went to Hanoi. I remember "Girls say yes to boys who say no." I remember Kent State and levitating the Pentagon. I remember Nixon getting re-elected on a promise of ending the war.

And I remember Life Magazine's pictorial, "One Week's Dead." I cut it out and saved it. Made my dad read it. I still have it.

_Howard wrote:

No. Calley was not asked or commanded to do what he did.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Wikipedia wrote:

In his new defense, Calley claimed he was following the orders of his immediate superior, Captain Ernest Medina. Whether this order was actually given is disputed; Medina was acquitted of all charges relating to the incident at a separate trial in August 1971. Taking the witness stand, Calley, under the direct examination by his civilian defense lawyer George Latimer, claimed that on the previous day, his commanding officer, Captain Medina, made it clear that his unit was to move into the village and that everyone was to be shot for they all were Viet Cong. Twenty-one other members of Charlie Company also testified in Calley’s defense, corroborating the orders.

_Howard wrote:

Since this thread was posted, I have come back to it several times, considering whether or not to contribute anything. Maybe I shouldn't. I'll scribble something here and see if I can hit the Send button.

I have never intentionally killed an animal, with the exception of black widow spiders and rattlesnakes that were close enough to bite me. We have tarantulas on the property, and I sometimes have to stop the car and wait for one or more of them to saunter across the drive. I also stop for a covey of quail to cross the drive. It hasn't been easy but I have avoided hitting any of the numerous squirrels we have here. I should have a bumper sticker that says, "I brake for everything."

When we had our cat put down last week, my wife stayed in the room when the final injection was given because she said she didn't want Elinor to be alone. I could not. I had to leave the room. Even typing this paragraph chokes me up a bit.

Now for the other part: As a young man, I spent thirty-one months in Viet Nam. And I did what men do in combat. Strangely, there is only one incident, out of scores, which has stuck with me and caused problems in the nearly fifty years since it occurred. All of the others faded from memory almost immediately, seemingly meaningless to me at the time, and have stayed away. Yet, I still get sad when I remember having to have my Siamese cat put down almost thirty years ago.

Why  do I react so differently to the deaths of humans and small animals? Was I, as Jenni said, "well adjusted to a sick society" in Viet Nam?

I just don't know.

I often wonder if I could kill a person. I have the distinct feeling it would go way better than killing an animal. I can muster some hate for a person but not really for animals.
In Nam you had the advantage of war (if you can call it an advantage) when someone has a gun on you it feels perfectly justified to shoot. You really didn't have a choice. I'm glad your mind hasn't penalized you for that all these years. Were you well adjusted to a sick society? IDK Maybe you were just surviving. It's not like the war was your idea. On the other hand, as a young man, you may not have fully realized where your own personal ethics were on the topic yet. Maybe you were just going with the flow for a while there. I suspect it was more complex than either of those answers, though.

As much as I can't tolerate animals dying I'd have been like your wife. The only thing that would hurt as much as losing one of my dogs would be not being there for them when they go. So, even when genuine compassion is there it comes out in different ways.

When mom worked at the VA I saw some of the men who had returned from Nam. At that time, in the 80's, that was our most recent war and most of the VA was flooded with mental cases and article 99s (though they called them "floaters" where my mom worked) and men that looked at you but didn't seem to be seeing you. That war was tough and its aftermath was tough. It was full of nasty shit that wasn't new but it was new to the American public hearing so damn much about it.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I'm sure I don't understand the Viet Nam Conflict (it was never officially declared a "war") as well as somebody who "served" in it (31 months, yikes.)  I sweated through three draft rounds and had a high lottery each time, so I escaped it by the skin of my teeth.  I had many, many friends who went and a lot of them didn't come back.

But I've read a fair bit about it since then, and think I have a pretty good understanding of the motivations that got us into that morass and the reasons we couldn't extricate ourselves when it became obvious we weren't being welcomed as liberators (gee, where have I heard that before?)  The "Fog of War" movie about McNamara was a pretty good summation with the advantage of hindsight.

I know why returning troops weren't welcomed as heroes, and I know why Jane Fonda went to Hanoi.  I remember "Girls say yes to boys who say no."

Have you read T.S. Eliot's "Naming of Cats"? A cat has three names: its common name, its fancy name, and a name that is known only to the cat.

If I may... Each war is three wars: the common war (what news reports tell the public),  the fancy war (the politics and money components), and a war that is known only to those participating in it.

Undoubtedly true. I'm glad my number never came up.

I was never concerned about draft numbers. I was sent over there in late 1964. Hell, it was almost a year after that before we were even given combat pay. I got back in May of 1967 (my enlistment had expired in March, but they just seemed to like me so damn much they kept me around for a while more).

'64 was pretty early -- everyone was just called "advisers" at that point weren't they? Were you training the SVA, or leading combat missions?

Yes, we were called advisers. I think there were about 30,000 Americans in country when I first got there, and about 400,000 when I finally escaped.

We usually referred to the SVA as ARVN. Don't know why; maybe because the acronym was easy to pronounce.

I did a little of this, a little of that.

I remember when my daughter was about eight years old (1988), there was something on television about Viet Nam. She asked me if I had been there and I told her yes. Then she asked me what I did over there. I  told her that when she grew up, if she still wanted to know, she could ask me again. She was fine with that. Fortunately, she has never broached the subject again.

Just for grins, here's an old ARVN hat I wore in 1966-67.

I had many long conversations about war with my dad, who served aboard an LSM in the Philippines. He more-or-less supported my fervent desire in 1967-9 not to serve, although he was a little ambivalent about it. Later in his life, in his 80s, he became very nostalgic about his crewmates, I suppose as they began dying off in alarming numbers.

He always felt that WWII was a noble war, to stop Hitler. He absolutely supported the use of the atomic bomb against Japan, because he thought invasion of the Japanese homeland was next on the agenda and would have been very costly. I tried to discuss Gar Alperovitz with him but he wouldn't hear of it.

But Viet Nam? Korea? Iraq? Afghanistan? Grenada? Libya? Bosnia? He thought our goals and mission and definition of "victory" were way too vague to commit troops.

If your dad served on an LSM, then we have something in common: we were both in the Amphibious Force. Of course, the few times I got to the Philippines, it was much more fun than when your father was there.

Yeah, WWII was always referred to as "the good war." In fact, for at least twenty years after I got back, I refused to acknowledge publicly that I had been in Viet Nam. Used to  lie about it.

There was no valid reason for our involvement in the Viet Nam war, or other of the belligerent actions we have voluntarily gotten into.

By the way: Thank you for spelling the name Viet Nam properly.

_Howard wrote:

There was no valid reason for our involvement in the Viet Nam war

I always believed it was about titanium.

Third_stone wrote:

There is an important element that helps to explain this war that is not mentioned in this review. Dwight Eisenhower said before the national governors conference that "if we lose Vietnam we lose the space race".
He said this because Vietnam has one of only a few supplies of titanium in the world, and important material in space craft at that time. By the end of the war we had carbon fiber and no longer needed titanium.

Source

http://tuoitrenews.vn/features/18780/titanium-mining-exhausts-locals-land-in-central-vietnam

NoCoPilot wrote:

_Howard wrote:

There was no valid reason for our involvement in the Viet Nam war

I always believed it was about titanium.

Fucking titanium. I should have known. <slaps self on forehead>

And is that why the French were there?

_Howard wrote:

And is that why the French were there?

Among other reasons -- France had been in IndoChina since 1887, well before titanium was a valuable commodity.

Jim Isham wrote:

The French colonization of Indochina (what is now Vietnam, Cambodia, and later Laos, possibly Siam [Thailand] 1887-1893 was part of the general European land grab by Britain, France, and the Netherlands of South Asia, Southeast Asia, the East Indies, Borneo, and New Guinea in the 19th century (also Africa, I might add) in order to gain empire and resources. The general pattern was to exploit the rich resources of rice, oil, iron ore, rubber, tin, and later bauxite and titanium, among others using colonials employed at slave wages. Basically they were seeking wealth and power, like every other industrialized nation. That's about all I know.

Source

IndoChina News wrote:

The French have recently taken on their next conquest in imperializing a section of southeast China: Indochina. Indochina consists of the three countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. With more and more European countries fighting for a limited amount of land for their nationalist and political gain, Indochina has a desirable location that allows easy access for trade routes and close proximity to the trade markets of China. Besides their good location, Indochina is also rich in natural materials like oil, tin, and titanium, which all brought more wealth to the French. The fight for land between all the various European powers is making the desire for land even stronger.
Not only does France want Indochina for their resources and location, but they also are taking advantage of them for economic gain. Indochina’s cheap labor gives France a place to take all their materials to be made into products ready to be traded with other countries. The Industrial Revolution has made labor a necessity in countries, and places like Indochina give European powers the cheap labor they are looking for.

Source

Jonathan Schell wrote:

It's often said that truth is the first casualty of war. In Vietnam, however, it was not just that the United States was doing one thing while saying another (for example, destroying villages while claiming to protect them), true as that was. Rather, from its inception the war's structure was shaped by an attempt to superimpose a false official narrative on a reality of a wholly different character.

In the official war, the people of South Vietnam were resisting the attempts of the North Vietnamese to conquer them in the name of world communism. The United States was simply assisting them in their patriotic resistance. In reality, most people in South Vietnam, insofar as they were politically minded, were nationalists who sought to push out foreign conquerors: first, the French, then the Japanese, and next the Americans, along with their client state, the South Vietnamese government which was never able to develop any independent strength in a land supposedly its own. This fictitious official narrative was not added on later to disguise unpalatable facts; it was baked into the enterprise from the outset.

Accordingly, the collision of policy and reality first took place on the ground in Trieu Ai village and its like. The American forces, including their local commanders, were confronted with a reality that the policymakers had not faced and would not face for many long years. Expecting to be welcomed as saviors, the troops found themselves in a sea of nearly universal hostility.

No manual was handed out in Washington to deal with the unexpected situation. It was left to the soldiers to decide what to do. Throughout the country, they started to improvise. To this extent, policy was indeed being made in the field. Yet it was not within the troops' power to reverse basic policy; they could not, for instance, have withdrawn themselves from the whole misconceived exercise. They could only respond to the unexpected circumstances in which they found themselves.

Same source as Third_stone above