Monday Music Break: Born in the USA

Here's Bruce Springsteen with Born in the USA from 1984:

But really, the big question is this: Are politicians, especially Republicans who seem to have carved out their own patriotic niche just for this song (I'm looking at you, Ronald Reagan), too stupid to know what it's really about? According to Parker Malloy at The Daily Beast, the answer to that question is yes, they are.

In case there's still a question, here are the lyrics:

Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Got in a little hometown jam so they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said "son don't you understand now"
Had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there he's all gone
He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now
Down in the shadow of penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a long gone daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a cool rocking daddy in the U.S.A.

Hmmm. Not quite the patriotic anthem they want you to think it is, is it?

The World's Oldest Profession -- in Modern Vietnam

When I went back to Vietnam in 2008, I went in naively believing that prostitution was illegal and that it would no longer be the kind Wild-West-Everything-Goes attitude I had experienced as a young soldier 40 year earlier.

In fact, things were pretty quiet on the sex-for-sale front in Hanoi. I had only one approach and offer, a really cute little slip of a girl who sidled up to me on the street about ten o'clock at night and asked in a quiet sotto-voce, "Would you like ...mahsshage...? I figured that prostitution still existed but was being run on the q.t., a sort of sub rosa approach to the world's oldest profession.

I asked her a few "journalist" questions, engaging her long enough to look around and see her "guy" idling on a motorcycle a half a block away, looking like he'd leap for a chance to rip my lungs out. I did find out that a blow job would be $40, only eight times what it would have been 40 years earlier. But those 1968 prices were for Saigon, and we were a long way from there. Finally I had to turn her down and she left kind of crestfallen, as though I had personally snatched the $40 out of the mouths of her children. And maybe I had.

But when we got to Saigon Ho Chi Minh City it was Katie Bar the Door! Every tourist hotel in our price range had a small bar attached to it, and those bars were literally crawling with nice, good-looking Suzy-Wong-type hookers. There I learned that most of the girls were sort of freelancers, who worked for the bar itself, and the bar owner took care of the bookkeeping and the protection. Blow jobs had gone up to 60 Dollars, so it doubled the inflation rate to twelve times the going rate back In The Day.

I was -- am still -- happily married at the time and I figured that She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed would not accept my actions as legitimate historical research -- "Please, dear. I had to do it. For my art! For Science!" So I did not take the opportunity to sample the local wares. But I did lean that prostitution is much more prevalent, much more open in Ho Chi Minh City than anywhere else in Vietnam., The cops? They get paid off for looking the other way when not actually providing security for the girls. It all seems to work out well, even though prostitution is still technically illegal there.

Which is why I found a current article in Cracked so interesting: "No Fat Tourists: 5 Rules of Life as a Prostitute in Vietnam". Read it for an eye-opening look at the World's Oldest Profession being conducted in a "Communist" Country. I put quotes around that since it's kind of hard to see a culture that operates almost fully on consumption, has huge advertising billboards along every highway, and has its own stock market as a "communist" country...

Lucky Pierre

When I made my triumphant return trip to Vietnam in 2008, I happened to run into an old French guy in a bar in Hanoi. He was a veteran of Dien Bien Phu and like a lot of veterans of his generation, he was on a tour to reconnect with his old battlefields -- I was actually surprised at the number of old French guys in Hanoi, either on their way to or coming back from their battlefield tour.

This battlefield tour is, I was told, a big deal in the former North Vietnam. I didn't go on it myself since it meant a minimum of two days from Hanoi to go out there and back, just to see what is now a remote clearing in the jungle. But it meant a lot to the guys who were fighting there in 1954, and I don't begrudge them that.

Anyway, Pierre had to have been at least 75 years old (assuming that he was about 20 at the time of the battle of Dien Bien Phu), but he didn't look or act that old. He was actually pretty spry for an old guy -- I can only hope that I am as spry when I am that age (which is creeping up on me sooner than I want it to...).

When he found out I had been an American soldier during the Vietnam War (or as the Vietnamese refer to it, "The American War") he had some questions for me.

This is a capsule summary of my conversation with Pierre -- you'll just have to imagine Pierre's accent:

"I am Pierre, " he said when I introduced myself. "They call me 'Lucky Pierre'. I was at Dien Bien Phu. Not a scratch. I was in Algeria. Not a scratch. I never even got the Indochine Venereal Disease. I was very, very lucky, and that is why everybody, they call me 'Lucky Pierre'!"

I hoisted my beer. "Well, here's to you, Pierre l'heureux!"

"Ah! Alors vous parlez français?"

"Un peu. Je suis un cours de français à l'université, mais il ya plus de plusieurs années..."

And that launched a verbal flood of French from Lucky Pierre, none of which I really got. Admittedly I was just showing off, and I had pretty much exhausted my already dangerously-low reserves of French. (I actually did study French in college a million years ago, but it was all pretty stiff textbook stuff and it did not really stand me in good stead in later life, neither on my trips to France* nor on my trip to Vietnam.)

But, a couple of "33"s later, Pierre said something to the effect of, "Why did you Americans think that you could just step in and take over when we French had lost so badly?" I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.

It was an easy answer. "Because you were French."

And that is the easy answer, but not in the conventional the-French-are-fucked-up kind of way you might think. We Americans really did think that we were better than the French (and we still do), and it was that very American arrogance, more than anything else I believe, that led us too down the garden path to defeat (there's no better word for it) in Vietnam: "Get outta the way, Froggie, and let a pro show you how it's done!"

"Because we were French??!!" Pierre said, sounding a little offended.

"Calmez-vous there, Pierre. It's really because we were Americans."

"Oh, you Americans," he said in an exasperated tone, shaking his head.

And that about summed it up, for both of us.

---

* When She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed and I were on holiday in France and tried to get our point across by stumbling around some awkward attempts to speak the lingo, most people were immediately helpful and guided us along, even to the point of speaking English themselves -- all the French want, all anyone wants really, is a little respect, and by and large Americans don't give it to them -- Americans already speak the language of god (the Bible was written in English, goddammit!) and there's no reason to resort to anything less.
So you won't hear any snarky comments about the French from me. Go get your fucking "freedom fries" somewhere else.

50 Years Ago Today in Vietnam

On March 8, 1965, the first official US combat troops, consisting of 3500 Marines, landed in Da Nang, Vietnam. There had been of course an ever-increasing number of "advisers" on the ground since before the 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, but these Marines were the first Americans who were sent there in force with the sole purpose of rooting out the Viet Cong to protect "democracy" in the not-really-a-country of South Vietnam.

We all know how well that worked out: Not well.

Sidebar: We very easily could have been there eleven years earlier. I knew a guy who had fought as a Marine in the Korean War and who was subsequently stationed in Japan. He told me one time that when it became obvious that the French would be defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the US loaded his whole division onto transport ships and headed south. For about a week they hove to, just out of sight, off the coast of North Vietnam while they made preparations for an amphibious landing. Then, for no stated reason, they suddenly left and steamed back to Japan.

I still have no idea what that was all about.

Before you dismiss this as just some more barracks-room braggadocio, keep in mind that I heard this story about 1961, long before most people in the US had even heard of Vietnam, let alone be able to find it on a map.

Reading The Reviews of My Book

I don't do it very often -- and I probably shouldn't do it at all -- but yesterday I dropped by to read the Amazon reviews of my book, A Bad Attitude: A Novel from the Vietnam War, to see what people are saying. The average customer review score, according to Amazon, is four-and-a-half stars out of five. A bunch of people loved it, but if I read those five-star reviews too often it'd just give me a swelled head.

There are three people, though, who wrote "hated-it!" reviews and gave it only one star.

Well, in a quote that is usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but was actually from a guy named Max Reger,"I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me."

My favorite of these Hated-Its was one entitled "Disgrace and dis honors [sic] Vietnam combat vets", in which someone calling himself Sgt Maj EMP says:

(Note: All of this is exactly how it appears in the original--I didn't edit it at all; you'll see my comments in red inset between brackets)

First, did not finish. Couldn't take it after 200+ pages.
Fragging? Want to talk about fragging? Lifers got publicity but in the field, folk like Dennis didn't finish their tours [Sounds like a personal threat to me]. Anyone who read this crap and was there can figure out why.
USMC, 67-68-69. Hill and border fights, northern I corps. Ton of issues in rear if you ever got there. Grunts rarely got there. Never had more than 120 - 125 people in what was supposed to be a 200 man company. Had to have damn good excuse or shot to get there [Unclear what this means...]. Then you get to meet real heroes like Dennis, I guess.[Nothing in my book paints me as a "hero"] Telling it like it was...... BULLS***. [How would you know? You were in the field and not in "the rear"]
Race? Huh? Take a good look at 60's America. I think there were a ton of race riots [So? There was one at Long Binh Jail as well; it's in this book -- what do those others have to do with whether or not that happened?] , with a whole lotta other stuff, going on then. What's the matter Dennis ? A few brothers hanging together got you and some other whiteys scared? [Where did I say I was scared of black people?] I'm white, Caucasian , German Polish , Chi-town, west side. What's the fuss? Some stuff going around but hell, there were a ton of NVA that had us outgunned, outmanned and they tried to kill us anyway possible. And you want to talk about race, lifers, drugs, fragging.... all the stuff that people that dissed us way back then to now [Are you saying that none of that happened?]. Vietnam is the most misunderstood and historically inaccurately portrayed war [Because of people like you going all Rambo on it since 1982] -- down to our written history [Written by academic historians in accordance with historical facts.] -- because of all the Dennis s that did and did not serve.[Not clear what this means...]
Speaking of lifers, yeah, a ton of s*** who didn't know which way was up. But I also got to serve with some SNCOs who did WW II and Korea. They taught me a lot -- I was only 19 then. They were my mentors, my heroes. I've used their life lessons every day after. [Again, so what? They weren't around where the events of this book took place   -- our lifers were pretty much all dicks.]
As soon as my time in Nam was up -- yes, I spent 20 months there in a rifle company -- I got out. After a few years and dealing with folk who give 5 stars to this kind of sensationalized crap, I rejoined. Needed to be around some real folk -- you take the good and the bad. [Do you really?]

Okay, let's dial it back a little there, Rambo. I can guess from the fact that you have been out of the service for what, 30 years, and you still insist on being called by your rank -- Sergeant-MAJOR -- that you were likely the kind of dick NCO that draftees hated. By your own admission you spent all your time in the field, so how can you presume to even know what was going on in "the rear"? "Disgrace and dis honors [sic] the...combat vets"? There aren't even any future "combat vets" in my book. ???!!!

But opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one. Sorry if this book didn't adequately provide for your needs and wants and desires, Sarge.

But, to be charitable to you here, you are in your dotage (I'm the same age as you and I know dotage when I see it...) and likely read only the blood-and-guts war stories that shore up your own fantasies (see How Do We Know What We Know? from earlier this month).

At least you claim you got 200+ pages into it before you realized that. Sarge, I don't believe that you didn't you read any of the other reviews before you bought it. It's not like you didn't have a clue going in as to what this book is about. From your comments, though, it looks like you tried to read a completely different book -- I don't think you actually "get it"...

But, as I've often said, everybody is "Rambo" in his own war movie.And that's you, Sarge.

So, Sarge -- 'scuse me, Sergeant-MAJOR -- old buddy, know this: Since -- fact -- it took nine men in "the rear" to support one grunt like you in the field, I'd say that my book is the better description of what Vietnam was "really" like for 90% of the soldiers who served there than all those blood-and-guts books you love.

I was a draftee and I had the same chance as anybody else -- like 80% of my fellow soldiers in my basic training platoon -- to end up in the infantry. I lucked out and got sent on an alternate path. It's not one that I chose -- nor likely would have chosen for myself -- but it was my duty and I did it, and I'm proud of that fact. I am frankly getting a little tired of all you fucking latter-day combat-snob neo-Rambos looking down your noses at REMFs ("Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers") like me.

Okay, diatribe over. Let's get back to the real world. And from now on I hope I will be a little more philosophical when it comes to mentally-challenged and thinking-impaired reviewers.

So Bill O'Reilly Was in a "Combat Situation, Okay"?

Normally I am pretty willing to give a little slack to people "misremembering" shit that happens to them. See for example How Do We Know What We Know, about the whole Brian Williams fiasco. So I was willing to cut Bill Orally a bit of slack over the years on his claims that he was "in a combat situation, okay?"

But if you as a "newsman" are going to pitch shit on a fellow reporter, you ought to make sure your own skirts are clean. Which is why I experienced a certain amount of schadenfreude glee when I read the Mother Jones story, Bill O'Reilly Has His Own Brian Williams Problem.

BillO of course was not so happy. He immediately doubled down by saying that he never said he was IN the Falklands for the Falklands War, just that he covered the war. From Buenos Aires and Montevideo. You know, where all the combat was -- NOT!

Media Matters has combed through various transcripts and compiled a bunch of quotes from BillO on this topic. Read them and then you tell me if he did not claim that he was in combat in the Falklands War. Maybe he didn't say those exact words, but context is everything, and the kind of people who are his normal audience are a little short on the nuance thing: "Because I was in a situation, one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete." Look at that and you will see that even the average listener, let alone the Bill Orally fan, would think that he heard that BillO said he was "in the Falklands". Also, an aside from the 12-year-old that lives inside my head..."this one time? at band camp?"

Like I say, I'm willing to give a guy a little slack if, for example, he says he was in combat and we learn that he wasn't actually IN combat but was actually a block away and saw it go down. Everybody does a little "résumé enhancement" from time to time, but I'm not going to claim that I was in the 1968 Tet Offensive when I was actually half a world and three months away from Vietnam at the time. I can, however, say that I was in the so-called "Little Tet" of 1968, literally almost from the time my boots hit the ground at the Bien Hoa airfield on the 10th of May.

Speaking of that, BillO, you were born in 1949, which means that you were 18 years old in 1967. Why didn't you go to Vietnam? Why didn't you avail yourself of the opportunity for that real "war experience" you apparently craved so much that you thrust yourself onto the Mean Streets of the "war zone" of Buenos Aires at the very end of the Falklands War.

On the March 19, 2008 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly used his "war experience" to criticize Bill Moyers: "I missed Moyers in the war zones of Falkland conflict in Argentina, the Middle East and Northern Ireland. I looked for Bill, but I didn't see him."

Yeah, BillO,  I looked for you in Vietnam but I didn't see you, either.

Kill the K-Cup

As you may recall, I've never been one to let a good meme go unabused. Here's Kill the K-Cup, a clever horror-movie parody of Godzilla, et al., featuring something I am just learning about now, the The K-Cup.

To show you how out of the mainstream I really am, I had no idea that such a thing existed. Or why anyone felt it was necessary. If you just want a fresh-brewed single cup of coffee, you don't have to go all earth-killer on the environment to brew one. All you need is a Vietnamese Phin Filter.

I fell in love with this little device the last time I was in Vietnam and brought one home with me. It's stainless steel, completely reusable, no waste and no ecological issues. Except of course for when you want to dispose of the stainless steel... But why would you want to? You have the means to a perfect cup of coffee right there.

Anyway, it really comes down to a question of getting the right grind. I experimented with it a bit with different grinds, and then I ended up taking it to my local barrista at my locally-owned and customer-centric coffee roaster company, and she took a practiced look at it, thought a bit and then did just the right kind of grind for it. She even brewed it up right in front of me, just to make sure.

Now when I need just a single cup, I have it in less than five minutes. You can get one for yourself at Amazon. Naturally.

Weasel coffee is, of course, optional.

The Return of "The Return of 'Hanoi Jane'"

I probably shouldn't look at those stats as much as I do, but one thing interesting popped out at me. The one post, aside from the Sarah Palin fake photo, that seems to get consistent page views on a regular basis is from way back in November 2010, The Return of "Hanoi Jane". In just the last month, this tops the list of hits on this blog, being out in front of the next most popular for the month, Rick Santorum, Communism, and the Separation of Church and State by almost double.

So I guess the title of today's entry is kind of misnomer. There hasn't been a return -- she's been there all the time, marching along with an impressive and consistent number of page views, week in and week out. Why is that?

Is it because among a certain segment of the population, "Jane Fonda" is synonymous with "traitor"? That is true enough, but that doesn't explain the continual popularity of that particular page on this blog, despite the fact that it is now over four years old and there have been only eight comments on it, the latest being from last May.

I did a Google Search for Hanoi Jane Fonda traitor and "The Return of 'Hanoi Jane'" did not come up in the top 100 hits. A lot of sites found in that search do show a visceral rabidly unreasoning hatred of Jane Fonda, though, beyond all rational thought and despite the sites that try to clear the air and examine how many of those "traitor" stories are true. (Depending on your defintion of "treason", pretty much none of them -- see this Snopes account. for example, or this open letter from NAM-POW president and former "guest" of the infamous Hanoi Hilton, Mike McGrath.)

It really remains a mystery to me.

Monday Music Break

In honor of Veteran's Day yesterday and all of my fellow Vietnam vets, here is the Monday Music Break, We Gotta Get Out of This Place by The Animals.



This song was the anthem for every soldier in Vietnam. Special Services was responsible for morale in Vietnam, and they made every effort to bring some of the comforts of home to the soldiers, including hiring a large number of local Vietnamese rock and roll bands to entertain the troops. Most of the band members spoke limited English and learned the songs by listening to the records and memorizing the words. Sometimes this turned out to be unintentionally funny, but mostly not so much...

These bands could be found everywhere in South Vietnam, from huge installations such as Long Binh to isolated single-company outposts such as the transportation unit where I was stationed. Every band that showed up was required to have this song in its repertoire, and it never failed to bring down the house when they played it.

And kudos to YouTube's schultz234, who put this video together using photos and films from the war, for a high school class in US history. Thank you.

Proselytizing at the Point of a Gun

In 1966, at the beginning of the huge buildup of American forces in South Vietnam, a group of Mormon so-called General Authorities (LDS bigwigs, including the recently deceased "Prophet, Seer and Revelator" Gordon Hinckley, then only a member of The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles),  made an official trip to Vietnam for the Dedication of the Land of Vietnam for the Preaching of the Restored Gospel. In Mormon land, this dedication is a Very Big Deal.

I would guess that it was also considered by the average Vietnamese -- those who were even aware of it -- to be just one more step in Yankee imperialism, since the ceremony took place on the rooftop garden of the Caravelle Hotel, then and now one of the most luxurious and exclusive hotels in Saigon. I couldn't drink there, none of my friends could drink there, and no one under the rank of bird colonel could drink there. Totally off limits to all but the top echelon.

I was in Vietnam later than this, in 1968-69, and one of the Group chaplains where I was stationed was a Mormon (despite the fact that there were probably only two or three Mormons in each of the two battalions in the Group -- go figure). I heard with my own ears his incredible statement that, since Vietnam was so dedicated, it took a war to make sure that God's promise was kept to the poor savages who inhabited that benighted land.

I don't know how much of that was official Mormon Doctrine, but I assume that it was pretty much right on, since this particular chaplain was a scion of Mormon Royalty: His father was one of the General Authorities of the church and the official guru of Mormon Doctrine (he even wrote a book on it). The opinions of those General Authorities on various matters have a similar weight and authority to pronouncements from the College of Cardinals in the Catholic Church.

I assume that since the Communist victory in Vietnam and their takeover of the country, the Mormon missionaries haven't been welcomed back in any number. So much for that whole god-wants-the-Vietnamese-saved thing, I guess.

Which brings me to Mitt Romney (you knew it was coming). His Mormon faith is not just a facet of his existence, it is all of it. There's no way to separate it from him as a person. Or him as a President. Which scares the living shit out people who are aware of the violent history of The One True Church. If he buys into the whole proselytizing at the point of gun thing -- and why shouldn't he? -- then what's to stop him from pulling some weak-ass excuse out of his ass (are you listening, George W?) and invading some other poor benighted land that needs to have The Restored Gospel brought to its savage denizens?