Nancy Gish wrote:
>
> I'm not sure I am recovering yet. But if Kerry's chances were
> questionable, Hillary's are not. I happen to admire her immensely and
> think she would be a wonderful president, but she would have no chance
> at all of being elected.
She probably could be elected if she could be nominated. After four more
years of bloodshed in Iraq a Democrat is sure to be elected. Just as a
Republican would have been a sure-thing in 2008 had Kerry won this year.
(For he would have pursued the same hopeless foreign policy that Bush is
pursuing.
I can sort of imagine how you and Bob are feeling by stretching my
memory back 52 years to Stevenson's defeat in 1952. And probably I would
have felt like that had Johnson lost in 1964 -- but in the spring of
1965, just a few months before my 35th birthday, Johnson ordered the
invasion of the Dominican Republic, and my world began to spin. I have
been quite indifferent since then to the winners & losers in
presidential politics, my hopes being fixed on the power of
extra-electoral mass movements.
> She is about the equivalent of Jane Fonda to
> the part of the country who hates Jane Fonda (whom I also admire).
This is no barrier to election. Every winning and every losing total is
mostly made up of those who are merely following in the footsteps of
their grandparents. :-) That part of Bush's majority you characterize
here will "hate" any DP candidate (just as a large proportion of Kerry
voters will vote for any Democrat). It has been 60 years since either
party has held the whitehouse for more than 3 consecutive terms.
Concerning Fallujah, the following poem by the Vietnam veteran Steve
Hassett
Armed Forces Day
We fuckin never had a fuckin chance
halfway up that useless fuckin hill
we hit the shit an lost the doc
the RTO an all three goddam
squad leaders and two platoons
got pretty chewed up trying to
make the ridge but no one can say
the men of Alpha company didn't
make one goddam good effort up
on that hill and I'm sure
that, even after we had to fly in
another battalion, my men
will agree in my saying that charley
gave us one hell of a fight but
there was never any doubt and the feeling
here at brigade is that while our
casualties were heavier than we'd
have liked them to be, the overall
kill-ratio is highly in our favor in
light of the gains made, division
TOC announced today, the oucome
has been entirely satisfactory with the
hill, a fortified enemy stronghold, taken
late Tuesday after three days of assaults
made by elements of two battalions
which received light to moderate losses,
USARV's spokesman said, during the course
of the operation in which a force
of NVA regulars was trapped on
Hill 618 on the Cambodian border
was abandoned today according to
the Department of Defense briefing
only one week after elements of a
US airborne division spent
four days securing it.
Also by Steve Hassett
Christmas
The Hessian in his last letter home
said in part
"they are all rebels here
who will not stand to fight
but each time fade before us
as water into sand . . .
the children beg in their rude hamlets
the women stare with hate
the men flee into the barrens at our approach
to lay in ambush
some talk of desertion
were it not for the hatred
they bear us, more would so so
There is no glory here.
Tell Hals he must evade the Prince's levy
through exile or deformity
Winter is hard upon us. On the morrow we enter
Trenton. There we rest till the New Year.
Both poems from _Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War_,
ed. by W.D. Ehrhart, Texas Tech U. Press, 1989.
The opening lines of "A Relative Thing, by Ehrhart himself
We are the ones you sent to fight a war
you didn't know a thing about.
It didn't take us long to realize
the only land that we controlled
was covered by the bottom of our boots.
----
A Time journalist "embedded" in the force attacking Fallujah reports
that in the last few weeks the occupation forces have lost control over
much of Baghdad. But so far in the present war fewer Iraqi citizens have
been killed than by the bombing and sanctions during Clinton's
presidency.
Carrol
