How much? How many? How long? Why?!!! And keep this fact tucked beneath the pillow: Add 30,000 forces to the mix and the total will then sum to more than what the Soviets had.

::::::::

Today, December 1: A day for tears.

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen; they're not listening still --
Perhaps they never will...
— Don McLean, “Vincent / Starry, starry night”

Reflecting on the speech from the US Military Academy at West Point the president is scheduled to make this evening, I began the morning with a Mexican coffee. (2 parts superheated black coffee, 1 part each tequila and Kahlua, topped with a very generous helping of whipped cream.) It wasn't that I needed it, to get going. I'm not much of a drinker: half a glass of wine or half a can of beer — “or,” never and — are pretty much my limits. No, this morning I just didn't give a damn.

***

In January I'll turn 64. I've concluded a few things about myself, especially over the past few years. I can be a pretty gruff old bird. It's within me to be the coldest of cold steel that no one would want to encounter. Last year, a group of men gathered in Afghanistan. They buried a 13-year-old girl to her neck, then stoned her to death . . . because, as she'd been the victim of rape, their religion supposedly demanded it! I know as a truth that this grizzled Infantry sergeant would have no difficulty whatsoever, lining each of them on their knees, then one at a time quite deliberately blowing their brains out. Easy. No qualms at all. They just do not belong on this earth while I'm alive. But on the other hand, I cannot watch Brian's Song — the 1971 made-for-TV movie starring James Caan as the very white Brian Piccolo and Billy Dee Williams as the very black Gale Sayers, both of the Chicago Bears — without rivulets of tears streaming down both cheeks. For all who haven't seen it — do.

Piccolo, graduated from Catholic Central High in Ft. Lauderdale, went on via a football scholarship to Wake Forest, where in 1964, after leading the country in rushing and scoring, was named the ACC Player of the Year. Despite his stellar achievements, because of his size, small to NFL standards, he went undrafted, and only made the Bears' taxi squad (practice but unable to suit up for regular games) as walk-on tryout.

Sayers was raised in Omaha, and while at Omaha Central High set a state long-jump record of 24 feet, 11 and inches. He then went on to an All-American career at the University of Kansas, crowning those achievements by being drafted by both the Bears and the Kansas City Chiefs NFL teams. Beginning with his rookie season with the Bears, Sayers set one NFL record after another.

There was absolutely nothing about Piccolo's or Sayers' backgrounds that could ever have led any objective observer to suppose anything but enmity might dominate their relationship. Both were trying for the same running back position on the same pro team. George Halas, the Bears' owner and head coach, had that season instituted a policy wherein same position players would room together regardless of race. This at a time in US history when whites just did not fraternize, let alone room, with blacks. It is both significant and essential to bear in mind that the high school and college careers of the two occurred prior to passage of Lyndon Johnson's (Kennedy's) Civil and Voting Rights Acts.

As discordant as some yet today regard racial relations, in the mid-60s there were social lines and rules of conduct that one just did not cross. To add to the tension, the white player, Piccolo, from the first, was forced to take a back seat to the black Sayers.

Piccolo's professional record, unlike that of his team- and roommate Sayers, was anything but stunning. Although on the roster from 1965 through 1969, it wasn't until 1967 that he earned an actual playing spot on other than the taxi squad and special teams. In 1967, however, he became backup to all-Pro Sayers, and in 1969 eared a starting position as fullback. During the ninth game of the 1969 season, however Piccolo removed himself from the game, complaining of severe difficulty breathing. When the team returned to Chicago, he was examined, then diagnosed with embryonal cell carcinoma — cancer. In June the following year, Brian Piccolo lost his battle with the disease.

Brian's Song is not a story about football, or any other sport. Rather, it is a story of a racial relationship that is of genuine agape love. The sum of Piccolo's and Sayers' humanness far, far exceeded the diminutive fraction of their differences that, in the beginning and the end, did not matter. It speaks to what each of us can become and thereafter be: better human beings, tolerant and loving . . . despite every superficial predisposed inclination to be otherwise.

And when I suggest better, I also mean better informed; skeptical of not only whatever anyone else has told us, lectured us repeatedly on, schooled us in, and indoctrinated us to, but skeptical as well of our own preconceptions and biases and knee-jerk Pavlovian conclusions. We can teach and learn from each other and the past. We can see folly . . . before it blossoms, because we've seen it before.

As sad as was and is the death of Brian Piccolo, what moves me to tears is the sheer beauty of the proposition, realized by the two protagonists, that indeed we can be better. And that all that is necessary is that we have the will and the courage to make it happen.

***

But today, for another reason, I truly want to cry.

***

Without going into the arcane intricacies of Vietnam, the fertile genesis of the calamity was an American ethos of both our nascent fear and our historic arrogance, the fundamental truth was it was no one's fault. The tragedy was born an ugly child on November 22, 1963, when the 35th president of the United States was murdered. In the spring of '63, Kennedy had sent Marine Commandant, General David M. Shoup to Vietnam, to review the situation, and to report his findings to his Commander in Chief. Shoup told Kennedy, “Unless we are prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expands beyond our control.”

However he had authorized an additional few thousand advisors, they were sent primarily to learn whether any level of American logistical assistance could provide the sort of support to the South Vietnamese that would encourage them to better, less corrupt governance and an ability to defend themselves. The order authorizing additional forces and logistical support were accompanied by an authorization that, should the effort prove fruitless, American forces would begin their withdrawal, a withdrawal that was to be completed in 1965. In volume 3 of U.S. Department of Defense' US — Vietnam Relations, Kennedy makes his position clear, “to introduce U.S. forces in large numbers there today, while it might have an initially favorable military impact, would almost certainly lead to adverse political and, in the long run, adverse military consequences.”

The Greek tragedy that was Vietnam was that, beyond the chance he might bring Texas into the electoral vote column for the Democratic ticket, the Kennedy's had no further use for Johnson, and kept him as far out of the loop as they could. As vice-president Johnson knew nothing of Kennedy's skepticism about Vietnam, or the plans for withdrawal. As president he knew everything of the Republican's intentions to savage him ferociously should he not do all he could to win in Vietnam. And so the horrific acts unfolded.

To suggest it was no one's fault isn't completely accurate, however. Many of the generals knew. And they either misunderstood the limits of their branch's real power, or they deliberately lied to Johnson, and to the American public. Curtis LeMay knew. So did Maxwell Taylor. Except for bombing the North “back to the stone age,” Johnson gave the generals "on the ground" and in the air everything they requested

In the end it wasn't enough, because no matter what this country might have provided it would never have been enough. We did not have “enough” more that we could have given, unless 59,000 US dead was insufficient, unless 250,000 dead South Vietnamese soldiers was insufficient, unless killing 1,100,000 NLF was insufficient, unless killing 2,000,000 South and North Vietnamese civilians was insufficient.

And yet, in some ways the dead are the lucky ones. Their battles are over. Last month, Four-star General Eric Shinseki, now head of the VA, reported that 300,000 American veterans, most from the Vietnam War, are, and have been for years, homeless. Unshaven, in dirty, tattered clothes, they beg on our street corners and freeway on-ramps. They scavenge dumpsters behind our fine restaurants for scraps, the scraps the finer citizens of this land demurred. From one place to another, they push the rickety stolen shopping carts that contain all that is theirs in this world, in this life.

I've heard some folks, those with homes and families and food in the fridge, say, “That's what they want;” referring to the homeless. Yeah . . .. A kid just out of high school either enlists or gets drafted, and what he wants most of all is to be a wigged-out, homeless, 60-year-old whose body shakes and whose head rolls from side to side as if he has Parkinson's. Yeah . . .. If you can believe that . . ..

But Shinseki didn't stop there. He said our veterans from Desert Storm and the more recent batch from Iraq and from Afghanistan are rapidly adding to the population. Suicide is higher than at any time since the military began keeping track. So are the rates for violent crime: murder, aggravated assault, domestic violence, robbery, theft . . .. And the spikes all occur within a few weeks or months of returning stateside from combat tours, prevalent especially in those who have served repeated tours.

Tonight, the first day of December, Barack Obama will tell the nation of his plans to send some multiple of 10,000 more US soldiers and marines to Afghanistan. And he will have his supporters to those plans.

Other than for perhaps purely political reasons, political reasons that by definition are never pure, why?

Afghanistan is not a country, at least in the sense that we think. It is a loose aggregation of feuding tribes only 15% of whom can even read or write. Whatever governance there is within the geographic bounds that delimit the territory is corrupt to the core. The ambitions of those who claim leadership are to seize as much wealth from the already destitute peasantry as it can, not build a nation. Whatever al Qaeda there once was in Afghanistan is gone; gone to the western mountains in Pakistan, gone to Somalia, gone to Yemen, gone to the Sudan, gone to the Philippines, gone to central Africa and even to Paris and to London and to many, many other places around the globe.

Any chance of success, with “success” never having yet been even vaguely defined, will first require educating a population to read to some minimum serviceable level. That is going to demand building schools in areas where the mullahs and tribal chieftains don't want schools; unless madrassas where only the most radical of Islam is tolerated can be twisted as a "school."

So . . . how many years? Really . . . how many years? At what probable rate of success? And for how many American taxpayer dollars? And, en route to the securing of the mission (Whatever the hell that is), how many Americans will be killed or horribly mutilated to the point they and their families will be getting lifelong medical and financial support?

Just Iraq and Afghanistan to date: GAO now estimates we're headed to $3 TRILLION. Who out there will posit with a straight face that an Afghanistan will be less?

How much? How many? How long? Why?!!! Reread Shoup a few paragraphs up . NOW! And keep this fact tucked beneath the pillow: Add 30,000 forces to the mix and the total will then sum to more than what the Soviets had when they were seized in the ongoing nightmare.

I'd like everyone who has served in one of the branches of this country's military — including the Coast Guard — to stand up, to be saluted. Your service was honorable, regardless that you may have, on occasion, done things while serving that were not the least honorable. All that acknowledged and said, serving at Point Barrow or aboard the Big E or at a missile silo in the Dakotas or Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado bear no relationship to jumping from a Huey in Pleiku, in Quy Nhon province, or in any of the combat operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. No relationship; suck it up! To my way of thinking, you have neither a legitimate affirmative vote nor valid affirming opinion on the issue: whether to send additional military forces to Afghanistan.

To all others who feel more troops should be sent, yet who never donned a military uniform, Please leave the room. As with Dick Cheney, Fred Kagan and every war-happy neocon who deigned donning the uniform of your country, your ignorance, and unabashed duplicitous hypocrisy are a disgrace to your neighbors, to your country and to yourselves. Let me be plain, here: I am not Jesus — I will not ask that you be forgiven just because you know not what you do, and I sure as hell will not forgive you.

A week ago I told of an encounter with a woman in my 55+ community who opined how she'd “rather fight them over there, than here” and who, notwithstanding her notion on the essentiality of more troops, would not encourage her military-age grandson to enlist for a combat tour. Sarcastically she felt it necessary to remind me, “You do know, don't you, that we have a voluntary military?” One, the greatest peril the woman ever faced in her nearly 70 years was that a bundt cake might not turn out as she hoped. So, she is obviously not a component of the we who she suggests will be fighting them anywhere. Two, on her mindlessly ignorant and thoroughly callous and obscenely ugly sentiments alone, I not only concluded to forgo attending the community's Thanksgiving dinner, but decided to have no further voluntary contact with her, or anyone of her unseemly ilk.

Lessons have been offered. The names of the teachers are etched on a black granite V in Washington. Others are still trying to teach us. Their haggard faces and empty stares can be seen in every urban city. We do not have to trek down this terrible road. We just do not have to.

But we're going to.

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
We would not listen; we're not listening still --
Perhaps we never will...

— Ed Tubbs
Palm Springs

Authors Bio:
An "Old Army Vet" and liberal, qua liberal, with a passion for open inquiry in a neverending quest for truth unpoisoned by religious superstitions. Per Voltaire: "He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity."