Marchin' to New Orleans

Out in the Boonies of Mississippi

Boots of the "Eyes Wide Open Campaign" memorials which appear all around the country to visually demonstrate the cost and impact of the reprehensible Iraq Occupation, aka the Vietnam Quagmire in Arabic. This was set up on Monday in the Vets Memorial Park in Mobile.

Today is an especially hallowed day. Thirty-eight years ago this morning the most nefarious and infamous event of the 12 year-plus Vietnam War occurred, the My Lai Massacre. As the the Toledo Blade Tiger Force series of articles several years ago too amply demonstrates, the actions of Lt. Calley's platoon was certainly not the result of one "bad apple."

It is most appropriate to mourn this day what happened that awful day, March 16, 1968, as it is to mourn all of the death and destruction of civilian populations in Vietnam then and in Iraq to day as we have learned too much about war criminal system of behavior the American Military Industrial Governmental Complex in Iraq today at Abu Graihb, Fallujah, etc.

Today we continue our march along the devastated "Gold Coast" of the Gulf, Biloxi and Gulfport, the strip of very prosperous casinos and antebellum homes lining the shore. When I saw it near the back of the bus from Jackson to Mobile last Monday, it looked exactly like what I experienced in Sri Lanka's Tsunami except the rubble was concrete, twisted steel & neon fast food franchise signs amidst 200 year old homes instead of the thatch and adobe rubble of fishing villages in Tricomalee.

Up Again . . .

The March has been incredible. Hopefully tonight I'll be able to upload some pics. Last night the wireless uplink kept breaking down last night and it was slower than a 28K dial-up. Took me 15 minutes to send several photos via email, and I was exhausted after getting only a couple sleep the night before. It is quite late now but I want to get up a few photos and share a little bit about what has been happening.

This is the beginning yesterday as we marched through Mobile to their Veteran's Memorial Park. Members of Iraq Vets Against the War, IVAW, include one who returned from the new " bad place" last week and got out of the Army.

Welp, four times I've tried to upload another photo and typepad keeps finking out. It's late, I'm exha usted again, and I need to get to sleep.

One incident from today. We are marching along U.S. 90 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, passing a hospital. A young oriental comes dressed in a shirt and tie comes out from the hospital lot. I knew he was Vietnamese and told that to Billy, another platoon commander from Vietnam. He asked us what we were doing. We told him and asked him his name. He replied, "Ahn." We asked him where his family was friend, and he said he didn't know, somewhere in the south, something like Be-eh Ke-ay. Let me tell you it was very strange, a most wierd twisting of time and place, talking to a Vietnamese young man with shiney braces on his teeth who spoke in southern drawl.

Hopefully, more tomorrow . . .

We Are Gathering . . .

Late night of the gathering day in a warehouse complex in Prichard, Alabama. Vets, from IVAW, VFP, VVAW, family members from MFSO, GSFFP, BTHN , survivors from MIRA, BLR, C-3NO CGC and PHRF, all ages, all types, all ethnicities, all striving to forge a consciousness of peace in these troubled times, all dedicated to helping each other W A G E   P E A C E as early tomorrow morning we begin this historic trek along the Gulf Coast, making our sure way to New Orleans.

I got my first glimpse of the devastated Gulf Coast this late afternoon, sitting near the back of the Greyhound bus on the way to Mobile. It looked exactly like  Eastern Sri Lanka after the Tsunami, except there were tattered casinos, high rise hotel/apartment complexes, battered neon signs and remnants of fast-food franchises. I'll be able to upload pictures along the way as we march. It is heartbreaking.

It is also heartbreaking to see the younger generation of Iraq War Vets, both the young men and the young women, who look so much like, yet so different from,  what we aging, long-in-the-tooth, greying-pony-tailed, pot-bellied Vets from 'Nam looked like 35 years ago. It just keeps happening, that cloudy, far-away look deep in the eyes, but not to the Chickenhawk, wannabe old men warriors in power.

One pic before I clean my salty bod and get some rest . . .

The Coordinators, Vivian, a blurred Stan, Ward and Paul giving us an orientation after the long first day of this historic Marchin' to New Orleans event.

Chillin', Waiting for the Bus

In a couple of hours I will for the first time in at least 20 years board a Greyhound Bus, which shall whisk me from Jackson to Mobile in about five hours. For me it will be a Freedom Ride in reverse. I graduated high school in 1961 and left Jackson to go to Xavier University in Cincinnati that Fall. It was at the height of the Civil Rights movement with lots of students integrating the buses and getting arrested when they arrived at the Greyhound Bus Station, now registered with the Department of Interior as a National Landmark, in Jackson. My last summer there, I joined the local chapter of SNCC and helped with Voter Registration. My parents were very active in an Interracial Council of Churches, and we had crosses burned in our yard. Exciting times; much has indeed changed, but much, also indeed ,remains the same.

Another reason why I am marching this week is to immitate, to a very minor degree, the excellent good work of another Vietnam Veteran, Claude Anshin Thomas. Thomas after struggling as most combat vets do with anger, rage, intimacy, a checkered educational/vocational career, became a devotee of Thich Nhat Hanh. For the past decade he has been a Buddhist monk and has made numerous Peace Walks all over the world.

In 1987, after I got out of a psyche hospital for major depression, actually misdiagnosed PTSD during the insanity of the Iran-Contragate scandal, I attended a retreat with Thich Nhat Hahn and Daniel Berrigan at the Open Center in New York City. He helped me immensely: I described to him how upset I still got whenever I heard the whump, whump, whumping sound of a Huey helicoptor, how it reminded me of the horror I experienced in Vietnam. He paused, looked down for several seconds, looked back up at me with a wide open smile and said something to the effect, "Instead of thinking of hell, let that sound be like a meditation bell to remind you to be grateful that you survived."

I shall carry Claudle's and Thich Nhat Hanh's spirits with me this week as I make the trek along the Gulf Coast.

Morining in Mississippi

Awake again in my childhood home, Jackson. Got a good night's sleep in a soft bed, the last for the next week. I am so blessed and most grateful -- folks in Iraq and along the Gulf Coast have not been sleeping in their soft beds for days, weeks, months, years, decades . . .

I am wearing one of the first VFP -- Veterans for Peace -- t-shirts I got a decade or more ago. It has a story that reminds me amid all of the awful destruction possible, both man-made and via natural causes, that there is always hope!

On the Christmas Holiday of 2004 I had it with me at the French Garden Guest House several klicks north of Trincomalee town on the eastern seacoast of Sri Lanka. On the gorgeous morning of December 26th, I was sitting on the veranda of my room contemplating: "Do I have a second cup of cofffee or do I go on my bike ride inland to visit a 2500 year old temple complex?"

I decided by grace of whatever gods/goddesses to go on the bikeride. About 10-15 minutes after I left the Tsunami wave happened. This was the result, all that was left of Room 4 and the several rooms of the Guest House.

The only "wall" standing after the destructive wave hit was the wall of the veranda within which I had been enjoying the serenity of a beautiful seaside morning 10-15 minutes before the wave hit.

In the room was my backpack with some clothes, a book I was reading and my Mac Powerbook computer. When I returned later than afternoon, I looked for it, but it was no where to be found.

Several days later I went back to the French Garden to see if I could find any of my belongings. Walking around the devastation, I found the t-shirt:

I'm wearing it today as I travel to Mobile to connect with other Veterans for Peace and survivors of the Tsunami-like devastation that hit the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina. There is always hope that as a society, as a nation, as a species, "We shall overcome!"

On the Way . . .

In Jackson, MS, my childhood home, at sister Meg's apartment. Spent the day traveling on Southwest from Islip Airport on Long Island with a three hour layover at BWI, Baltimore-Washington International, airport this afternoon. A bummer was that neither airport has Wireless Internet connectivity, so I sat around watching people and reading Jimmy Carter's book, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis. He sure has that right!

I also reflected that on April 5, 1967, almost 39 years ago, I was at BWI in my shiney new 2LT U.S. Army uniform, scared shitless, about to start the first leg of my journey to the long, pointless, morally reprehensible Vietnam War of my generation. Today I flew out of BWI again on the second leg of my journey to participate in the Peace Walk in protest of today's long, pointless, morally reprehensible Iraq War. And if anyone doubts that today's quagmire is any different from the quagmire of my baby-boomer generation check out this article, Iraq Through the Prism of Vietnam, by  retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom.

We just keep doing it over and over and over and over again. That refrain from the old Peter, Paul and Mary song, "When will we ever learn," keeps circling 'round my brain, "When will we ever learn!"

The No-Name Iraq War Mess

Here is a TomDispatch.com post that ran last Wednesday. Tom Englelhardt is one of the most perceptive and truthful alternative journalists writing today about the follies of the Bush Administration.

This post may perhaps provide you with TMI (too much information) about the dire straits the neo-con cabal in Washington has spun, literally and figuratively, the past three years with its ill-conceived Iraq War. Not only are they incapable of seeing what they have wrought in Iraq as the devastating disaster it is, but they can't even be truthful with themselves, much less with you and me, and name it what it is: a really nasty, ugly, awful, freaking, fucking WAR, for all gods & goddesses sake . . .

This is why I, a once citizen soldier who took an oath to serve & protect the U.S. Constitution, am Marching to New Orleans. Somehow the citizenry must do what our congressional leaders are incapable of doing since they are bought by and serve only their corporate masters. I must protest against the flagrant usurptation of power by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and the rest of the neo-con chickenhawks, who selfishly serve their only true god, corporate power and bottomline profit margins for only the slimmest margins of the pampered super-rich oligarchy, thereby tearing asunder our constitutional government and selling the scraps to the highest bidder.

Posted on Friday, March 03, 2006 at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is a TomDispatch.com post that ran last Wednesday. Tom Englelhardt is one of the most perceptive and truthful alternative journalists writing today about the follies of the Bush Administration.

This post may perhaps provide you with TMI (too much information) about the dire straits the neo-con cabal in Washington has spun, literally and figuratively, the past three years with its ill-conceived Iraq War. Not only are they incapable of seeing what they have wrought in Iraq as the devastating disaster it is, but they can't even be truthful with themselves, much less with you and me, and name it what it is: a really nasty, ugly, awful, freaking, fucking WAR, for all gods & goddesses sake . . .

This is why I, a once citizen soldier who took an oath to serve & protect the U.S. Constitution, am Marching to New Orleans. Somehow the citizenry must do what our congressional leaders are incapable of doing since they are bought by and serve only their corporate masters. I must protest against the flagrant usurptation of power by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and the rest of the neo-con chickenhawks, who selfishly serve their only true god, corporate power and bottomline profit margins for only the slimmest margins of the pampered super-rich oligarchy, thereby tearing asunder our constitutional government and selling the scraps to the highest bidder.

The More Things Change The More They Stay the Same

Here I am on February 14th, Valentines Day, of 1968 in the An Khe or Mang Yang Pass on Highway 19 in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, sitting in my gun-jeep munching on C-rats.

And here is a recent photo that I lifted last week from Thomas Barton's GI Special of an Iraq soldier in, I suppose, a Hummer or a Bradley.

So many differences:

• I'm in a black & white jungle; he's in a full color desert
• I'm in an M-151 Jeep; he's in a Hummer
• I carry an M-1 carbine; he carries an M-16 with infra-red scope
• I eat C-rats; he eats MREs.

So much the same:

• We're both the same too young age
• We're both bored, but scared shitless
• We both don't want to be there
• We both are being betrayed by the chickenhawk suits

"And," as another older vet of the dying generation of the "Good" War, Kurt Vonnegut, says,  "So it goes."

Why I Am Marching . . .

There are many reasons:

• Though born in Quincy, Massachusetts, and having lived for several years during the "Good" War on several naval stations, including St. Louis, Tulsa, Raliegh-Durham, Pensacola, where my father taught navigation to poor bastards before they got shot up over Tokyo or Dresden, my family home is in Mississippi. I grew up in the halcyon 50s in a middle-class surburb of Jackson. I visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast often in my youth.

• Ever since I returned home from a year's combat duty in the Central Highlands of Vietnam late in the afternoon of April 4, 1968, landing in Washington, D.C., much of which was blazing like other urban areas after the assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King, I have been an ardent peace activist. During the run-up in 2003 to the reprehensible Iraq War I volunteered to go to Sri Lanka for two years as a Peace Warrior, trying to manifest peace in the two decade brutal civil war between the Sinhalese Buddhist Government and the Hindu Tamil Tigers

• I survived, miraculously, the devasting Tsunami that destroyed much of the Sri Lankan verdant and magnificent sea shore on the morning of December 26, 2004. I "happened" to leave the Guest House, 25 yards from the sea where I was enjoying a relaxing Christmas Holiday, for a bike ride inland to visit an ancient temple on that gorgeous morning about ten minutes before the complex was totally destroyed by a huge tidal wave. This past August, after a couple of days in New Orleans, Lynn and I drove along U.S. Highway 90 to Biloxi three weeks before the Gulf Coast was devastated by a Tsunami-like tidal wave from Hurricane Katrina.

• I abhor the Iraq War and the policies perpetrated by President Bush's Chicken Hawk administration. Though none of the principles, Bush, Cheney, Perles, Wolfowitz, Rumsfield, Abrams, Rice, Gonzales etc. have ever served in the military, they are War Criminals in grevious violation of U.S. and International Law. I resent like hell that none of them had the guts to serve in the war of our generation, Vietnam. They are sociopaths, incapable of knowing or speaking the truth, who use hollow patriotic rhetoric, for selfish, self-serving, power-mongering ends. They have utterly trashed true American values of equality before the law and justice for all. In a blatantly Orwellian sense their illusions of Victory in Iraq  make us not only unsafer, but most damningly  they create a Facisistic police state that mostly serves their corporate masters.

So, my participation in the Marching to New Orleans peace march with other veterans and survivors of Hurricane Katrina threads together many themes and challenges I have experienced throughout my youth and adulthood, as hopefully I mellow in to a more serene and  peaceful way of being during my elder years.

Another Beginning . . .

Here I am again, posting in Cyberville, after a hiatus of almost eight months. I'm about to go once more on the Road. This time, however, it shall be for a brief trip, not a journey of 12 or so thousand miles for a couple of years, as I did last time. This jaunt shall only be several hundred miles from my wonderful new life with Lynn in our Long Island home and shall take only a couple of weeks.

Like the old Fats Domino song, "I'm Walkin' To New Orleans", I'll join other veterans for peace and survivors of Hurricane Katrina on Monday in Prichard, Alabama, near Mobile. On March 14th, we begin a historic trek, marching along the Tsunami-ravaged Gulf Coast, all the 90 or so miles to New Orleans. We'll hold rallies along the way with stopovers in Moss Point, Ocean Springs, Long Beach and Slidell. We'll mourn together in a huge rally in New Orleans on March 19th, the 3rd Anniversary of the Bush Administration's illegal, immoral, ignoramus invasion of Iraq. Here's the website describing this monumental event.

This blog -- Internet connectivity permitting -- will be a daily record of my experiences and reflections about the journey. If I have wireless or other broadband connectivity, I'll upload pictures along the way. If not I will add them after I return home to Long Island.

Just incredible -- I'm getting ready to "Saddle up" again . . .