I spoke to my dad a few days ago. Our conversations usually drift between several unrelated topics and this one was no different. He mentioned that he had recently watched American Graffiti. The iconic film serves as a snapshot of youth culture in the early 60’s. America at the height of peace and prosperity. My dad was born in 1949, so I asked him if he felt the film had managed to portray that time period accurately. He said that it did an excellent job of capturing the feel and aesthetic of the time. That led to a few minutes of him reminiscing about his childhood during that era. Most of his memories of that time were pleasant enough, but he mentioned something in passing that really stood out to me.
In the late 50’s and early 60’s, modern methods of pest control were in their infancy. A problem presented itself to communities up and down the east coast:
The Problem: How can we control the awful plague of mosquitoes we face each year?
The Solution: Create a fog machine that blasts DDT everywhere, mount it to the back of a truck, and then just kind of cruise around people’s neighborhoods and give them all a good coating.
Maybe we could even encourage the local kids to chase after those fog vehicles like they would an ice cream truck.
My dad still describes this stuff with a sense of nostalgia. Happy memories of a more innocent time. A simpler time when children could spend their summers joyfully being poisoned by government-dispatched pest control vehicles.
That generation grew up at the same time that the war in Vietnam was escalating. Being drafted and sent off to fight became a very real possibility for my dad. He decided to voluntarily join the navy, rather than take his chances at being drafted and in all likelihood sent to the infantry. He already had an interest in aviation, and was fortunate to be able to get assigned a job as an aircraft mechanic.
He was assigned to an aircraft carrier and spent the next few years servicing the naval refueling planes that flew over Vietnam. The thing about working with aircraft in Vietnam was that those planes were being used to coat as much of the Vietnamese jungle as possible with a powerful herbicide known as Agent Orange.
Agent Orange was incredibly effective. Dense swaths of jungle which offered secrecy and refuge to the enemy could be killed off in short order. Planes flew night and day to drop the herbicide from overhead and reveal the terrain for the benefit of ground forces and further airstrikes.
If you were working on or near any of those planes, you too would get a daily dusting of the compound. As it turns out, chemicals that are great at killing living things don’t typically discriminate when it comes to which living things they kill. This included humans. While people who were exposed to Agent Orange didn’t necessarily fall over dead on the spot, many suffered a myriad of health issues for the rest of their lives as a result of this exposure.
As time wore on, those health issues continued to present themselves in veterans of the conflict at an ever-increasing rate. The Department of Veterans Affairs eventually admitted responsibility for a slew of recurring issues effecting veterans who had been exposed. The VA offered disability benefits, and in some cases settlements, for the consequences of such reckless negligence.
Around the time that he turned 60, my father was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma. He knew it was likely related to his time in service, so he contacted the VA. Based on the time period and duty station that he occupied in the war, the VA ultimately approved a disability claim. Apparently, Hodgkins is alarmingly common amongst the service members who were around these chemicals.
My father spent the next several years being subjected to chemotherapy, radiation and a laundry list of treatments and medications. He was constantly unwell and miserable. On top of the physical illness brought on by both the treatments and the disease, there was the mental strain of facing his mortality to deal with. He felt at the time that even if he did live through the illness, he would be a weakened and reduced version of himself by the time it was over.
He ultimately made it through that ordeal and has been in remission for several years now. I thank God that we were given more time with him. I’m also furious that he was ever made to go through all of that in the first place. I feel the same way about all of the men who served in that war.
Our conversation then veered to a particularly ugly chapter of the war that I hadn’t been aware of.
The Vietnam war became extremely unpopular in the United States. When the draft began pressing people into service, that unpopularity began leading to unrest. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had an interesting solution. He initiated an amendment to draft eligibility standards known as “Project: 100,000”. The military would lower the thresholds for intelligence and mental aptitude in draft eligibility requirements. The result was what came to be known as “McNamara’s Morons”. Men of suboptimal IQ and cognitive ability were suddenly qualified to be recruited or drafted and sent to fight. The results were as disastrous as you might imagine. The casualty rate for those drafted under the new standards were three times higher than those of the average service member. These men had previously been barred from service for a reason. Their spatial intelligence and ability to learn and follow instructions was inadequate and caused significant issues during training. These men were not fit for service and it was obvious. McNamara sent them off to be killed anyway.
McNamara’s program and its terrible results are a testament to a disgusting lack of humanity in the country’s leadership at that time. It’s bad enough for a country to be involved in a war it has no direct need to fight. It is even worse if conscription is used to field an army for that war. But to specifically target vulnerable and mentally incompetent men in order to pad draft numbers is monstrous. It actually manages to get worse, though.
U.S. involvement in Vietnam lasted for decades, but the bulk of ground troops were deployed from 1965-1973. What has come to light in recent years is that by 1964, the military brass and politicians in Washington already understood that the conflict could not be won. Secretary of Defense McNamara recalled in his memoir that service chiefs told him in 1964 that they could not define a “militarily valid objective for Vietnam.” The United States didn't pull out of the conflict completely until 1975. McNamara would later admit to having known the war was a mistake before it even began. He pressed on regardless.
McNamara rolled out his monstrous Project 100,000 in 1966. Two years after being advised by the heads of the armed services that there was no clearly defined or valid objective in place. He sent those men, who had no business even serving, to die. He sent them despite knowing ahead of time that there was no justification for it.
Of course, our government’s despicable actions are only compounded when we consider that aside from “The 100,000”, every other man that was drafted was also sent to fight and die in a war that their leadership knew ahead of time was unnecessary and not winnable.
So those at the top knew the war was over and that it could not be won. Rather than put a decisive end to the conflict and ensure that no further U.S. service members died in vain, they dithered for 8 years. They were trying to save face. That effort cost the lives of 58,220 Americans and was ultimately a failure. The evacuation of Saigon was a humiliating end to a needless tragedy.
While my father was not one of “McNamara's Morons”, he did enlist and deploy to Vietnam in 1968. This means that the entirety of the time my father spent being exposed to toxic chemicals and weathering the assault on Da Nang, his leadership knew that there was no point to any of it. The thousands of lives that were lost or ruined were a price they were willing to pay in order to avoid embarrassment or a loss of political capital.
This conversation with my dad had really taken a grim turn. In an attempt to shift gears, we tried to find something lighter to talk about.
I told him about a book I’ve been reading called I Heard You Paint Houses, which is what Martin Scorsese used as the basis for his 2019 film, The Irishman. The book follows the story of Frank Sheeran, a hit man for the mob and close friend of the infamous boss of the Teamsters Union, Jimmy Hoffa.
The book doesn’t follow the typical mob story of glamorous “live fast, die young” gangsters rising to power and finally going down in a hail of gunfire or being sent away to prison. The real story is actually much more mundane.
Frank Sheeran served in the U.S. Army in Italy during World War II. Upon returning home from the war, he floated from job to job for a while. He ended up getting a union job and eventually made connections to mob figures that were influencing that union. Frank rose through the ranks quickly due to his discretion, reliability, and willingness to kill anyone that became a problem for the mob.
There is nothing glamorous or romantic in this story. Frank is a cold and distant man who has no qualms about ending the lives of others. He reliably does the mob’s bidding in the same way a man might show up for his shift at a factory each day. At the end of his life, Frank senses that he hasn’t lived very well, but fails to really understand the moral repugnance of his existence.
The mob was only able to achieve the levels of corruption and influence that it did throughout the twentieth century due to the services of unthinking and amoral men like Frank Sheeran.
While I had started telling my father about the book in an attempt to steer things away from the depressing Vietnam discussion, Frank Sheeran’s story only served to bring my mind right back to the vile behavior of our leadership from that time.
The men who orchestrated the war in Vietnam knew from the start that it could never be won. There is no way to describe their actions as anything but evil. However, those actions could only be carried out with the cooperation of underlings with no compunction about seeing innocent men killed in service of business or politics. McNamara was an evil man who devised an evil plan. It was McNamara’s trusted lieutenants and a vast array of willing politicians that would have to carry that plan out, though. They were all too willing to do so. In that way, these men were no different than Frank Sheeran.
Frank Sheeran was the type of man who is needed for such jobs. While Sheeran served the mafia and not the military, his disposition and willingness to callously carry out the will of his superiors without flinching or expressing regret for his actions is what allowed evil plans to become evil deeds. That what is required for true evil to hold sway. The plans of evil men can’t come to fruition without the presence of thoughtless goons and ambitious opportunists willing to help realize those plans.
After the humiliation and disaster of the U.S. campaign in Vietnam, a valuable lesson should have been learned. Unfortunately, this was not the case. In 2021, The United States finally withdrew all troops and officials from Afghanistan. The country was retaken by the Taliban before we were even able to get everyone out. It was an absolute disaster, as humiliating as it was tragic. It was also completely unsurprising.
The release of the Afghanistan Papers demonstrated history repeating itself once again. The documents brought to light that the politicians and military brass in Washington had known from the outset that the notion of a unified Afghan State under a secular government was impossible. They had known for years that any advances made would be undermined and undone immediately in the absence of U.S. enforcement. They understood that the entire enterprise had been a massive misstep and they understood it early. And yet, the war continued. Political and military leadership had deliberately lied about these facts to mislead the public. They had distorted nearly every aspect of the situation in Afghanistan to create the impression of progress that was not actually being made.
Thousands of lives lost. Trillions spent. Countless resources wasted. All for a premise that was known by those selling it to be false. Once more, we were not spared humiliation upon our exit.
We hear a lot these days about the struggles the military is having in reaching its recruitment goals. This shouldn't surprise us. We are told there are many reasons for this shortfall. Culture war issues, political tribalism, a lack of fitness for service in today’s youth, the list is endless. Could it be much simpler than that, though? Could it be that young Americans are finally getting wise to the game? They see the damage done to the veterans of the previous wars. They see the indifference their government has shown toward those veterans following their time in service. They understand that the pretense for our involvement was known to be illegitimate long before any action was taken to stop the madness and save American lives.
Why would they have any reason to believe that they won’t also be carelessly tossed into the meat grinder to make a political point or a quick buck?
Maybe those in the halls of power will notice this and begin to reassess the wisdom and morality of pushing for endless, unnecessary wars. Perhaps they’ll stop trying to send young men to die for their own financial or political gain.
Nice post, Obsolete. It's great to hear individual stories like your father's. I take a more conspiratorial view to Vietnam, personally. I see the war as being *deliberately* unwinnable (as opposed to merely meant to save face) and tens of thousands of lives deliberately sacrificed to further our central bank owner's larger goals. Norman Dodd stated that while investigating tax exempt foundations he interviewed H. Rowan Gaither, president of the Ford Foundation. Gaither explained to Dodd, “Most of us here were, at one time or another, active in either the OSS or the State Dept., or the European Economic Administration. During those times, and without exception, we operated under directives issued by the White House, the substance of which was to the effect that we should make every effort to alter life in the U.S. as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union.” In the same way, bleeding tens of thousands of U.S. dead followed by ignominious loss would severely dent U.S. patriotism and help their long-term goals for one world government...(this isn't to argue we should have been in Vietnam, we shouldn't have been).
Afghanistan was a straight-up 20 year intentional forever war to rape the taxpayer as Assange explained so eloquently here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IGU_7alJ80 . Then they just switched the grift to Ukraine to continue it...
A great essay laying bare the truth of it all. War is a racket indeed.