Wednesday, October 25, 2023

This octogenarian thinks Veterans Day should be a day of introspection and mourning

    The other day, I received an email blast from the president of a social club to which I belong:

Calling All Club Veterans!


If you are a veteran, please email that fact, 

your branch of service and years of service 

    I replied:

I wonder if the club members might be interested in how God saved me from the Vietnam war draft when I was in law school?

    She replied.

No, Sloan. I grew up in a small rural town and daft deferment for college was rare, as most boys didn’t go to college at all. My childhood sweetheart went to Vietnam at a time when the life expectancy for a lieutenant was 3 months. He was wounded but survived. A number of my older high school friends went to Vietnam and several did not survive. My hometown met every casket at the school stadium en mass to honor those soldiers. Sad memories.

The present goal is to honor those who served in our military at any time on Veterans Day.


    I replied:


My question was whether members of the club might be interested in hearing about the miracle that saved me from the Vietnam draft? I'm pretty sure I have known a lot of people who wished that did not happen.


Two of my college fraternity brothers were killed in South Vietnam. A law school friend in the Marines Reserve was sent there and stepped on a mine, which permanently messed up one of his legs. 


President John F. Kennedy came out against America getting into a war in Vietnam, and he was shot and killed. President Kennedy's younger brother Bobby, a US Senator running for president, came out against America being at war in Vietnam, and he was shot and killed. Martin Luther King and Malcom X came out against the white man's war in Vietnam, and they were shot and killed. The US Government put Muhammed Ali in prison, because he would not go to Vietnam and fight against people who had never caused him any trouble, nor called him no nigger (his words). 


Ali also said:


Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?

No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would put my prestige in jeopardy and could cause me to lose millions of dollars which should accrue to me as the champion. 

But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is right here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…

If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. But I either have to obey the laws of the land or the laws of Allah. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail. We’ve been in jail for four hundred years.

In mid-1988, my father invited me to attend a Downtown Birmingham Rotary Club luncheon with him. This was a top shelf Rotary club, its members were prominent or children of prominent members. The guest speaker was the CEO (or President or Executive Director) of The National Geographic. His topic was "Getting to Know Our Neighbors." He said the Geographic had come to think many conflicts between nations were caused, at least in part, by people not knowing much about people in other countries. He said a study had revealed that 95 percent of American high school and college students could not locate Vietnam on a map.


After the speaker finished his talk, he invited questions, The first question was, "Did the Geographic have a position on the Vietnam war?" The speaker said the Geographic had correspondents in Saigon, where there was a huge street demonstration of people carrying posters begging America to save them. The posters were in English . That demonstration was seen all over American television news. It swung American sentiment from against to for American military intervention in South Vietnam.

The speaker said the Geographic's correspondents spoke Vietnamese and French and they interviewed many of the demonstrators, who said they had been paid money by the Saigon government to demonstrate and carry the posters. They did not speak English and did not know what was on the posters or why they were demonstrating. The speaker said the Geographic did some digging and learned the money for the demonstration had been paid by American corporations and the U.S. Government.  

You could have heard a pin drop in the Rotary Club. Many of the older members, including my father, were WW II combat veterans. My father looked like he was going to throw up. He had never liked the Vietnam war. He said nothing about it then, nor during the drive back to where he had picked me up to go to the luncheon with him. He never spoke of it later.

In the spring of 2005, I joined a "Seekers" group, who met weekly in the Unitarian Church in Key West. The church minister, who just happened to be from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, attended each meeting. There were about ten of us. We talked about on and off beat topics. 

 

One day, a fellow maybe 10 years my senior said he had worked for the CIA and was stationed with a CIA team in South Vietnam when the French were trying to retake Vietnam and regain access to its rubber trees and other natural resources. Although publicly the American government was backing France, his team's mission was to help Ho Chi Minh beat the French, so America could have access to Vietnam's rubber trees and other natural resources. He said that Ho wanted to do business with America, but in the end America wanted too much. Not caring at all for Communist China, Ho sought out the Soviet Union's help. 

 

I sat in my chair waiting on a response from the other group members. No one said anything. I asked, "Did you hear what he just said?" There was no response. It was like being among the walking dead. Seekers? That older man and I became somewhat friends. He received copies of my shootings off of my mouth posted at my blog. We bumped into each other every now and then in Key West. Sometimes I retold that on my blog. A Key West reader of the blog told me that he knew the same man, who had told him the same story with a lot more details.

Consider also the false flag Gulf of Tonkin resolution in the U.S. Congress, which put all of the above skullduggery into full play and led to America eventually being split about down the middle, until Republican Richard Nixon was elected President and got America out of Democrat President Lyndon Johnson's rich white man$ Vietnam war, which was not worth one casualty on either side.

I didn't have in mind mentioning any of that when I asked the question you answered for the entire club membership, not knowing what they might say.

Sloan

    My father was a navigator-bombardier in an Army Air Corps B-29 bomber squadron stationed on Guam. He steered his aircraft to Japan at night, and amidst heavy anti-aircraft fire he dropped the bombs from his aircraft. He took black and white photos off all of that, which I saw when I was a boy. After the war, my father suffered a detached retnia, and then he suffered another detached retina, and that's why he wasn't called back into the Army Air Corps during the Korean war.


    Flash forward to 1999, when I met an older man, who said he was stationed on Guam with the Army Air Corps. The man said my father sometimes got his B-29 lost when they flew night missions to Japan and his plane had to ditch its bombs in the ocean and return to Guam. The man said no B-29 squadron on Guam wanted my father on their aircraft. Later that year, I met a woman, who then was turned every which a way but loose and upside down and inside out by the same angels that were doing that to me. She had been one of the students at Kent State University, who were fired upon by the Ohio National Guard, while they sat on the ground protesting the US Military expanding the Vietnam war into Cambodia. She said Archangel Michael told her that my father kept getting his B-29s lost, because his soul did not like killing people. My father and I were estranged, and I wrote him a letter about what I was told.


    During the Vietnam war, my father pulled strings to get my younger brother, who was a student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, into the Alabama Air National Guard in Birmingham, around the time future U.S. President George Bush pulled strings to get his son George into the Alabama Air National Guard in Montgomery, from which young George went AWOL. 


    At that time, college students were being drafted, but married men were not. I was married and attending the University of Alabama Law School in Tuscaloosa. During my third year in law school, 1967, my wife got pregnant. They started drafting married men, but not fathers. Our child came, and seven weeks later he died of sudden infant death syndrome, which wrecked my wife and me, and exposed me to the war draft.


    I wrestled back and forth between enlisting in the Marine Corps and applying for a student deferment, which would get me inducted into the Armed Forces upon my graduation. Finally, I drove to the Draft Board in Birmingham and applied for a student deferment. About a week later, my wife learned she was pregnant. I drove back to the Draft Board to try to undo the student deferment.The woman clerk, who had helped me fill out the student deferent form, said she was os sorry, but the deferment was irrevocable. She said she would get my form and show it to me. She opened a file drawer, pulled out a manilla file. As she read it, she said, "There's been some mistake." I asked, What mistake?" She said, "You applied on the wrong form, your student deferment is void, you will have to reapply." I said, "No thanks, I will keep my father deferment," I walked out of there feeling the weight of the world had been lifted off me, by God.


    My father never talked with me about my exposure to the Vietnam war draft, and I don't recall that I ever told him about the miracle. Nor do I recall telling anyone in my family about it. I took the miracle as God saying I was not supposed to be a part of that. Many years later, I would come to view the miracle as a statement of how God felt about the Vietnam war.


   For I had watched President Johnson say on national television that he would never  send American boys to die in a war in Asia, and then he did just that. i was prepared to go die there, when the miracle came. I came to take very seriously General Eisenhower's warning to America, as he left his second term in the White House: Beware of the military-industrial complex. Ike had led the Allied Command invasion of France and Western Europe in World War II. Ike knew the military-industrial complex best.


    President Johnson sent American boys to Vietnam to pick rich white men's cotton and be military-industrial complex cannon fodder. It was tragic. It never should have happened. There is nothing to celebrate about that war. It should be mourned as a terrible disaster that ripped America's soul to shreds.


    After Saddam Hussein's army invaded Kuwait in 1990, I watched a Larry King Live show, during which Ross Perot begged the first President Bush to keep America out of it. Perot said his company used to do business with Arabs, who fleeced his company every time. He finally figured out Arabs don't think ilie Americans, so his company stopped doing. business with them. Perot said Arabs keep getting into squabbles and they go into a tent and come out arm in arm, until they get into the next squabble. Perot said Arabs will seek Kuwait's oil to America, regardless of who controls Kuwait. Perot said he had hired mercenaries and went with them to rescue his company employees being held hostage in Iran. He was a patriot, and Iraq invading and taking part of Kuwait was not worth one dead or wounded American soldier. 


    Not long after that, i watched President Bush say on national TV that he could not let the American way of life be threatened, and he began lobbying Britain, France and other United Nations countries to form a coalition to rescue Kuwait from Iraq. it came out that, before sending h is army into Kuwait, Saddam Hussein had polled the American ambassador regarding Iraq taking part of Kuwait, which once had been part of Iraq, until the British and French had meddled in that region. The American ambassador, a woman, said America had no position on that. Saddam took that as a green light. He and President Bush were buddies, dating back to when President Bush was Director of the CIA and Iraq was an American ally against Iran. Saddam felt set up and betrayed by president Bush. Saddam tried to have President Bush killed.


    A Saudi Arabian Prince named Osama bin Laden had been an American ally in Afghanistan, against the Soviet Union. Armed with shoulder anti-aircraft missile launchers provided to his soldiers by America, Osama and his Afghan soldiers defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Long before that, the Afghans had defeated the British. Afghanistan had huge mineral deposits, and poppy fields, and was a trade route to Asia and its oil and natural gas fields. There was a plan of building oil and gas pipelines from those field through Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf. Osama asked Saudi Arabia to let him bring his army to Saudi Arabia, and they would drive Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait. Saudi Arabia rejected Osama's offer and allowed President Bush's coalition troops to staton in Saudi Arabia and from there go into Kuwait and drive Saddam's army back into Iraq. Osama was enraged that his country had allowed infidel troops into Islam's Holy Land. Thus was planted the seed for 9/11.


    Three nights before 9/11, a voice I associated with Archangel Michael asked me in my sleep if I would make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity? I woke up, startled, wondering what that was about? I made the prayer and went back to sleep. Three days later, I understood why I had been asked to make the prayer. I thought the 9/11 attacks were horrible, the work of the Devil. But I knew the history above, and I did not think America had clean hands. My concern on 9/11 was the younger President Bush would get America into a protracted war overseas that could not be won. I knew 9/11 was bait, a trap. A few days after 9/11, as i walked out of a U.S. Post Office, I felt Michael's presence, and then I heard, "America needs to get out of the Middle East altogether and let Israel and Islam work it out or fight out, and in that way learn which, if either of them, it God's chosen people." 


    I watched the young President Bush and former Halliburton CEO now Vice-President  Dick Cheney lead a United Nations charge into Afghanistan. I watched them invent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to persuade the UN to sanction the invasion of Iraq,which had nothing to do with 9/11, but Iraq had oil and other mineral resources. Halliburton made a lot of money in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Halliburton hoped to build the pipelines across Afghanistan. I read online an open letter to America from Osama bin Laden, in which he told Americans why he had orchestrated 9/11, and their president was easy to bait and they should get themselves a new president.


    I shared all of that with quite a few people back then, and later, and what I got back was blank stares. Same happened after I shared with people what the fellow from the National Geographic had told the Birmingham Downtown Rotary Club about the Vietnam War, and what the former CIA fellow had told us at the Unitarian Church in Key West. 


    Then, Barack Hussein Obama ran for president, claiming to represent hope and change. I was smitten by him. I gave his campaign $2,300. In a dream, Archangel Michael told me that Obama had the potential to be the Antichrist. i told a lot of people about that, and all I got back was blank stares. After Obama won the 2008 election, and before being sworn in as President, Obama was awarded the Nobel Price for Peace, which i figured was because he was half African-American. After accepting the peace prize, Obama aggressively continued the Cheney-Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and proved he and the potential to be the Antichrist. American boys were sent into whose two wars to pick rich white men's cotton and be military-industrial complex cannon fodder. Those two wars were not worth one dead or wounded solder or civilian on either side.


    Before the draft dodger Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, he said the war in Iraq was invented. After Trump was sworn in, on national television, he said the natural resources of Afghanistan and Iraq should be monetized to repay America for those two unwinnable rich white men's wars for profit. Both wars were traps laid by Arabs, who thought nothing like Americans and viewed America as The Great Satan and their duty to Allah to defeat. All rooted in the older President Bush ignoring God's messenger Ross Perot on Larry King Live.


    There is no way America can win a war against Islam. Nor can Israel win a war against Islam. It's Biblical, rooted in Genesis, where God told Abraham that Isaac's seed would become a great nation, and Ishmael's seed would become a great nation what would cause Isaac's seed trouble. Moses, Judaism, Jesus and Christendom descended from Isaac. Mohammed and islam descended from Ishmael.


    President Biden caught bloody hell for pulling American troops out of Afghanistan. He should have pulled American troops ouf of the Middle East altogether. He should have stopped giving Israel financial aid and weapons. He should have put American soldiers in American schools to protect children from domestic terrorists. He should have stationed American troops along the southern border to stop the invasion from Mexico.


    President Biden should have stopped Mexican produce and manufactured products from coming into America; he should have made American businesses operating in Mexico return to America or forfeit their Mexico profits to the U.S. Treasury; he should have stopped Americans from going to Mexico- until Mexico stopped the invasion.


sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

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