A Gathering of Smeagols

That’s what I think of when I see these middle-aged guys, still sporting their military dress and embracing the simple mythology of the war of their day. It doesn’t matter to them that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon knew and admitted the futility of fighting in Vietnam. It doesn’t matter that the architect of the war, Robert McNamara, admitted that the whole thing had been a mistake. It doesn’t matter that the country rejected it, that their own government dumped deadly chemicals on them while they were there, or that the same thing is happening now with the war in Iraq. For these guys, it’s an obsession with the past that they can’t let go of long enough to see that the same thing is happening again. Their “precioussssss…”.

So there they were last weekend, in Washington, DC to kick a little hippy ass, wave their 35 year old Not fond of Fonda signs, swap tales of the glory days and, ironically, protect the Vietnam wall – a memorial, if anything, to unnecessary death, political folly, and prolonged deceit.

Perhaps the Smeagols should be thinking about the missing WMD they were promised and the 3800 of their brothers & sisters in arms who have died looking for them.

“Master betrayed us,” they might think. “Wicked, tricksey, false. We ought to wring his filthy little neck.” 

 1  |  2