Donald Trump was double cruel about Iran casualties minimized importance of veterans killed and created unrealistic correlations with other wars

As a Vietnam era draftee, I will always be focused on the avoidance by our country of unnecessary war. Donald Trump’s campaign included a commitment to avoid future wars. Well and good. 

Echo opinion letter published in the Las Vegas Journal-Review by Thomas B. Petersen in St George, Utah.

But, during Donald Trump's disaster on Sunday's (June 7th,  “Meet The Press” interview with journalist Kristen Welker, it was (justifiably) pointed out that he had not made good on his campaign promise to avoid future wars, and that there seemed to be no end in sight to the U.S. attacks on Iran. 

Donald Trump's response was to draw comparisons to our involvement in World War II, Korea and Vietnam in regard to durations and casualties, making the specific case that 😕😢only 13 U.S. casualties in the current war and the current two-month duration to date paled compared to our losses in previous wars.

His justification for the Iran war as having cost us only 13 casualties versus more than 50,000 in Vietnam was especially offensive to me. His campaign promise to avoid future wars was not kept, and our war with Iran is not justified. 😡😒😞😧😠😭😢

Donald Trump gave a failed April Fool's speech. It was no joke. Obviously Trump is lost and cannot find a way out of the mess he created,

Maybe Trump Should Not Have Given This Speech. His messed up "speech" raised more questions than it answered about the war in Iran. By Tom Nichols. Americans have been waiting for Donald Trump to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. 

Echo opinion about Donald Trump's failed April Fool's Day stupidity speech about Iran. 

Published by Tom Nichols in The Atlantic magazine. 

For weeks, Donald Trump offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his prime-time address on April 1, 2026, might as well have been a sick April Fool's joke, His (so called) speech was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.

Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. (IOW, Trump was a "Fool", for trying when he is not capable of explaining anything, much less trying to describe a reason to go to war.)

Trump’s critics (including me) castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation about the war to the American people. But, given his April Fool's performance  his address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.

A speech that should have been a clear explanation about why the United States is fighting a nation of 92 million people began, instead, in shambolic style. He discussed the operation that captured the president of Venezuela, perhaps hoping to make listeners believe that the Iran war will be a similarly short operation. 

Trump then said that Iran has taken losses never seen “in the history of warfare”—as if the destruction of, say, the Axis in World War II had never happened.

Trump offered little that was new, instead repeating the same lines from a short video presentation the night that he ordered attacks on the Islamic Republic, more than one month ago. He listed—rightly and correctly—the various offenses that the fanatical Iranian regime has perpetrated against the United States and other countries for nearly a half century. 

Nevertheless, he couldn’t help himself: He patted himself on the back for killing the Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani in his first term, and for canceling the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama. (“Barack Hussein Obama,” of course.) The United States, Trump claimed in a strange moment, had emptied out all the banks in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia as part of that deal—“all the cash they had”—to send that “green, green” currency to Iran.

But, back to the war Trump illegally launched: What is America fighting for❓ Trump insisted that Iran must never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. Almost no one would disagree with this general point—certainly I don’t—but Trump presented no evidence that Iran was nearing the nuclear threshold. 

Instead, Trump simply asserted that the Iranian mullahs were going to get a nuclear weapon and that the United States had to stop them: In other words, he admitted to launching a preventive war based on something that might happen one day.

Trump, however, then undercut his own point by assuring the country that Iran’s “nuclear dust” was buried under mountains of rubble, inaccessible since the great success of last June’s joint Israeli-American strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. The Iranians would never be allowed to excavate any of it, he said.

So, then, perhaps the war was about regime change, which would be the surest way to stop every evil plan gestating in Tehran, including nuclear weapons and terrorist plots. Well, no, it turns out, the war is not about that either. 🙄Trump explicitly denied that the goal was to bring down the Iranian theocracy—a staggering claim given his exhortations to the Iranian people on the first night of the war that their hour of liberation was at hand. 

After denying that the U.S. goal was regime change, he then claimed that regime change had now already happened because so many Iranian leaders have been killed.

In addition to ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump laid out three other goals that he said were now within reach: neutralizing Iran’s ability to project power anywhere through terrorism, destroying the Iranian navy, and eliminating Iran’s missile stocks and production capabilities. As with so many other Trump promises, he said that  these goals would be accomplished in two to three weeks. 

How he will do all of this was left unclear, other than that he will hit Iran “extremely hard.”

Meanwhile, Tehran still controls the important Strait of Hormuz. Trump said only that other nations should go in, clear the strait, and take Iran’s oil. He chided Americans for their impatience; the two world wars, and conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq took longer than the current war, he said. (BTW, the outcomes of all three of those wars were disasters. Korea war is still not settled, Vietnam collapsed, Iraq was based on a lie, to destroy "weapons of mass destruction" that did not exist.)

Trump He also lied when he waved away any economic concerns. Everything will get better, he promised, telling viewers that only a year ago America was a “dead and crippled country” that he personally rescued. 

Oddly, Trump claimed that the United States has never been more economically prepared for a conflict—the “little journey,” as he called it—like the one he has led against Iran.

Trump also said things that might come back to haunt him. He vowed not to let Israel or America’s friends in the Persian Gulf “get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form,” as if Iran were not already inflicting damage on them. 

And, Trump assured Americans that gas prices would come down. (They might, but not anytime soon.) He threatened, yet again, to bomb all of Iran’s electrical plants, a likely war crime if carried out with the completeness that Trump promised, should Iran refuse to … well, do whatever it is he thinks they should do. “We are unstoppable,” he said, noting that U.S. forces were in combat against “one of the most powerful countries.” (This, too, is nonsense: It takes nothing away from U.S.-military valor to admit that Iran was at best a second-tier power even before the war.) 

America might be unstoppable, but Donald Trump is obviously at loose ends now that the Iranians have a chokehold on a major part of the world’s energy supply.

Maybe the only bright spots in the speech were in the things the president did not say. He did not, as many observers expected, prepare Americans for the introduction of ground forces into Iran. (If he now goes ahead with such an operation, he will have betrayed the public by misleading them about the course of the war.) And he did not eviscerate

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and threaten to pull out of the alliance, as some expected him to do because of his ongoing anger at major European powers’ unwillingness to join a war they did not start.

If Donald Trump meant to be reassuring, however, he missed the mark. The reality, as best we can tell, is that Trump fully expected the Iranian regime to collapse in a matter of days or weeks, and he is now flummoxed to find out that a major war is a lot more complicated than he—or (the failed) Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—realized. The president’s delivery tonight was hardly a confidence-building exercise. He was, as he himself might say, low energy—mumbling and lapsing into the repetitive phrases that come out when he’s riffing on a point instead of reading the speech in front of him. (I lost count of how many times he said “like nobody’s ever seen” and “decimated” and “never before.”)

Donald Trump is looking like he is lost and downtrodden. Perhaps he should have stayed off the podium for a bit longer, rather than display how adrift he is to the American public and the world.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must fire Pete Hegseth he is creating "killing everything" culture a danger to the public

Pete Hegseth (aka "Whiskey Pete") is being mercilessly mocked behind his back in the Pentagon, according to insiders.

Echo report by Erin Keller, published in The Independent, the Daily Beast and Yahoo.com

Staffers reportedly furnished the self-proclaimed “secretary of war” with a brutal new moniker that leans on his insatiable appetite for war and obsession with killing: “Dumb McNamara.”

The businessman turned statesman is often credited with bringing the U.S. into the war, a conflict that killed between 1.4 million and 3.5 million people. He pushed so hard for more U.S. involvement in the conflict that it was eventually dubbed “McNamara’s (Failed) War.”
Current and former U.S. officials have told Zeteo that the former (Fake) Fox and Friends host is being painted as a dumb version of Robert McNamara, the defense secretary who became a symbol of America’s failures in the Vietnam War.

Hegseth, for his part, acted as one of the main cheerleaders of Donald Trump’s war in Iran. In fact, Trump even credited, or blamed, him for promoting it so ardently. “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, ‘Let’s do it,’” (OMG❗😓) Trump said during an engagement in Tennessee earlier this week.

McNamara, who was defense secretary under both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, repeatedly gave glowing assessments about the U.S. military’s performance in Vietnam, despite knowing full well, as declassified papers later revealed, that the conflict had turned into a disaster.

He famously reversed course midway through his tenure in 1967, when he belatedly began to openly advocate against the war.

That year, in 1967, he commissioned what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret investigation that questioned the wisdom of American involvement in the war.

Hegseth appears to have no such inclination. “We negotiate with bombs,” he said Tuesday. “You have a choice, as we loiter over the top of Tehran.” 

(IOW: George Santayana in 1905, as "Those who cannot remember the past- history- are condemned to repeat it".)

The next day, Hegseth stood at the Pentagon’s first monthly worship service since the Iran war began and prayed not for peace, but for what he called “overwhelming violence” against America’s enemies.

“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth said. “Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” (Psalms 25:10- All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth toward those who honor his covenant and decrees.”)

The Hegseth (aka Dumb McNamara) irreverent service comes as a lawsuit challenges religious activities and policies within the Defense Department.

Donald Trump and Kristi Noem and Tom Homan must stop failed quota numbers used by ICE in their illegal dragnet

Let me get this? So, children are captured and detained by ICE because the evil operations must reach deportation quotas❓  OMG❗💢

Deportation quotas are a 2026, version of Vietnam body counts
In Vietnam, soldiers were rewarded based on body counts. ICE deportation quotas are a chilling reminder of that policy.

Echo essay published in the MinnPost in Minneapolis Community Voices by Ralph Brauer. 

Officials and the mainstream press debating our immigration crisis are ignoring the elephant in the room: the policy of setting deportation quotas. To a historian, this policy ominously recalls the infamous Vietnam body count.

The flawed brainchild of then U.S.

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the body count supposedly measured the success of combat operations by tracking the number of enemy soldiers killed in each encounter. 

When troops realized they were being graded on how many corpses they could amass, this macabre idea quickly ran off the rails. Seymour Hersh discovered “there were three-day passes for the men who achieved high body counts; sometimes whole units would be rewarded.” As Hersh showed with stomach-churning detail, it did not matter whose body was counted or how they died.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The administration has dictated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deport 1 million people by the end of the year. If we divide this number among the states it yields an average of 20,000 per year, per state.

The Migration Policy Institute calculates Minnesota has 100,000 undocumented immigrants. Complicating this, 41% of families have children under 18 eligible for birthright citizenship. Three-quarters of the work-eligible undocumented are employed, with 20% in manufacturing, 11% in construction, and 10% in health care. Imagine the impact on communities if they lose these workers. It is estimated that the Minneapolis occupation has cost some businesses 50-80% of their revenue because ICE causes workers to stay home and drives away customers. We don’t yet know what it has cost the state economy.

ICE has also provided questionable information about how many arrests are truly the “worst of the worst” or the fate of those who disappeared into its American gulag. Last November, the conservative Cato Institute estimated 73% of ICE detainees have no prior criminal conviction. The Homeland Security website says, “70% of all ICE arrests are of criminal illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the United States.” These widely divergent numbers suggest ICE body counts are as reliable as those from the Vietnam War.

Unreliable information poses another problem. Hersh discovered Vietnam War troops received “no meaningful instruction in the Geneva conventions or in the proper treatment of prisoners of war during training in Hawaii or in South Vietnam.” Much like the Army struggled to train the flood of Vietnam draftees, ICE scrambled to rush agents into the field, causing cutbacks in training.

That training is complicated by the lack of clarity about objectives and tactics to achieve them, which is at the root of problems with the Vietnam and ICE body counts. As the war dragged on, the question grew about how the enemy could muster increasing resistance when it supposedly lost so many soldiers. (Evil❗) Stephen Miller’s command that ICE deport a million people by the end of this year seems to be pulled from President Donald Trump’s hat and raises additional questions.

Does the administration want to remove only violent criminals or any non-citizens❓Do we deport a taxpaying business owner with a family for a decade-old speeding ticket❓ What about asylum seekers or those currently filing for admission❓ What information is used to make those arrests❓

Answering such questions demands spelling out clear rules of engagement that parallel those of other law enforcement agencies. ICE defenders constantly turn the debate toward deporting violent criminals who are here illegally. These zealots seem unconcerned if this is done in accordance with the rule of law and our values. Maybe we should ask them: “If local police behaved like ICE, would you tolerate it❓”

What if police forced citizens to carry their papers to the grocery store like ICE❓ What if police dragged a 50-year-old naturalized American from the wrong house into the snow wearing only boxer shorts like ICE thugs? What if police ignored court orders like ICE❓ What if police wore masks and said they did not need warrants like ICE❓ This may be OK in some fascist dictatorship, but not in a nation that fought a revolution against unreasonable searches and seizures.

To ensure ICE follows the rules, the country must insist on clear rules of engagement and verification that all violations are investigated and punished. This includes deliberately ignoring court orders and disregarding suspects’ constitutional rights. As Seymour Hersh would remind us, body counts can lead to atrocities like My Lai. Too many have already been shot by ICE. How many more will we lose before the country acts❓

Ralph Brauer, a retired historian who lives in Northfield, Minnesota, is the author of the recent book “The Age of Discontent.”

Republican outrage about Donald Trump's Epstein Files betrayal gives Democrats the chance to find the cause of this cover up without acting political

Echo opinion published in the Seattle Times by Matthew Yglesias

Right wing maga conspiracy theorists are betrayed.....by Trump❗ Who knew❓ Bipartisan outrage over Epstein

The controversy over the mysteriously evil “Epstein Files,” which  Donald Trump’s administration first pledged to release and then decided not to, has Democrats back in touch with one of America’s great political traditions: anti-establishment conspiracy theories. 

Not only is this good for the party, it is also — dare I say it — healthy for U.S. politics. (This theory is likely the reason why Trump's monotonous mantra of a "hoax" is not sticking.)

Theories of this type differ from the more extreme Russiagate allegations against Trump (or Trump’s infamous charges that former President Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya) in that they are not narrowly partisan. 

As such, they are especially appealing to the kinds of people who are disengaged from politics and alienated from mainstream institutions. In other words, just the kinds of people who’ve flocked to Trump’s banner over the past decade.

These sorts of views used to be distributed much more evenly across the political system, or even primarily on the left. When I was a kid, the kinds of people who believed the government was covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life also tended to believe that the government played a role in the spread of crack cocaine.

A classic pop-culture work of conspiratorialism such as Oliver Stone’s 1991, film “JFK” did not exactly endorse the Democratic Party’s criticisms of President George H.W. Bush. But the general thrust of the film — that oil interests, Cuban exiles and Cold War superhawks conspired to murder the president in order to escalate military involvement in Vietnam — was certainly left-wing. 

After all, when the movie came out, conservatives had held the presidency nearly continuously for two decades. Why shouldn’t people on the outs with the system gravitate toward the left?

Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami political scientist who studies conspiracy theories and politics, emphasizes that conspiratorial thinking is typical of the politics of outsiders. It’s normally seen on the losing side. 

Shortly after “JFK’s” movie release, Bill Clinton was elected president. (Hmmm❓Not sure I agree with this correlation...😞😩😧- the movie "JFK" had nothing to do with Clinton's election, BUT, the photo with young Clinton shaking JFK's hand on July 24, 1963, probably had a nostalgic influence)

Nevertheless, so the leading conspiracies of the 1990s, often attracted a right-wing gloss because a Democrat was in the White House. Then came George W. Bush’s term, full of dark whispers regarding the real truth about 9/11 and Michael Moore’s popular documentary suggesting the whole thing was part of some scheme to build a pipeline through Afghanistan.

What’s unusual about Trump is that he leveraged conspiratorial thinking in a very explicit way for a politician. He overcame the Republican establishment with outsider support in 2016 — and then managed to retain his outsider status even while he was (still trying to be 🙄) president.😞

Which is not to say that Epstein conspiracy theories will deliver the midterms for Democrats. But, it is worth thinking about how they can build on the Epstein story, which continues to dominate the news cycle. Uscinski and eight co-authors published a 2021, paper suggesting a two-axis organization of American politics. 

Rather than the conventional political compass, with economic issues on one axis and cultural issues on another, they put essentially all ideological conflict on one axis and an establishment/anti-establishment on the other.

They show that both parties used to have large anti-establishment wings, with Bernie Sanders gaining a lot of support in 2016 not only from left-wing Democrats but also from a bigger tent of anti-establishment Democrats. Across the next several cycles, those less ideological Sanders voters became Trump supporters. The Epstein controversy has fractured Trump’s movement in a more profound way than any number of seemingly more substantive issues precisely because some of his supporters are basically anti-establishmentarians with vague or disorganized policy views.

Democrats, especially Democrats who aren’t socialists, need to relearn the habit of standing up for the little guy, versus the establishment, in ways that go beyond the distributional tables of a tax bill. 

A core reason that Epstein conspiracy theories are so widespread is that the public is broadly cynical about the way rich people are treated by the state and the legal system.

These themes complement standard Democratic Party policy goals, but many voters understand them in terms of personalities. 

When Barack Obama first ran for president, he was the fresh-faced outsider who was going to bring new people into government and fix the mess in Washington. He was in office for eight years. But who have been the party’s nominees since? A former first lady and secretary of state followed by two vice presidents in a row. It’s not hard to see the party as a closed circle of establishmentarians.

The kind of change many people want is not necessarily dramatic policy change, but change in personnel — the elevation of outsiders uncorrupted by ties to the system, either the party’s or the government’s. To maximize the opportunity provided by Trump’s various stumbles, whether on policy or personal corruption or Epstein, Democrats need to do more than pound the table. They need to find people who can constructively channel the kind of anti-establishment outrage that made Trump president, and is now testing his presidency.

Matthew Yglesias: is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”

Saying "Thank You For Your Service" is NOT a DonOLD Trump quote. Instead he said "suckers" and "losers" OMG!

As a Vietnam veteran, I will not be participating in my town’s Veterans Day commemoration this year. Echo opinion letter published in the Boston Globe:  

In 1964, I enlisted in the United States Coast Guard, as did my father in 1942, and as would my nephew in the 1980s. 

After two years of sea duty on a cutter based in New Bedford, I volunteered to stay with my ship when it was ordered to the South China Sea in spring 1967. 

My shipmates and I boarded and searched the many fishing boats and commercial ships in and around the Mekong Delta. We provided fire support to allied units on the ground, rescued downed pilots, and conducted clinics in many of the villages in the area. I was proud of my service.

I have been struggling with my fellow Americans’ choice in this election. I’ve been thinking about President-elect Donald Trump’s previous remarks about US troops, how he’d called fallen service members “suckers” and “losers,” according to his former chief of staff.

My shipmates and I, and hundreds of thousands of men and women in uniform, put ourselves in harm’s way for this country. 

While I do not speak for my fellow veterans, Trump’s election to a second term has me questioning my own service. 

The medals, the pageantry, the many heartfelt “Thank you for your service” comments notwithstanding, I believe our service has been devalued by millions of my fellow Americans. So I’ll be having a quiet lunch Monday with a Vietnam vet buddy, and we’ll try to get over this apparent dismissal of our service as irrelevant. I could cry.
😢
From Jim Canavan  in Scituate, Massachusetts

Dump the Chump: Donald Trump has "chump" syndrome!

Definition of "chump": A stupid or foolish person.

An echo opinion published in Bakersfield.com, in California:

In his latest attempt at self-glorification, a coffee table book named "Letters to Trump," the former guy president goes out of his way to insult and demean a true America hero, the late Senator John McCain, who died nearly five years ago. What is Trump's problem?

Maine Writer- Juliana L'Heureux at the gravesite where Senator John McCain is buried in Annapolis at the U.S. Navy Academy, in Maryland. (L'Heureux photo)

Shame on Trump the chump! i.e., Trump the Chump (T the C)

In his latest attempt at self-glorification, a coffee table book named "Letters to Trump," the former president goes out of his way to insult and demean a true America hero, the late Sen. John McCain, who died nearly five years ago. What is Trump's problem?

He will never be regarded as a real hero! He will never receive the respect and honor that McCain so rightly deserves?

McCain served willingly and heroically in Vietnam while "Captain Bonespur" hid behind his daddy's store-bought medical excuses? What is Mr. Trump's problem? Is he so insecure that he has to show himself on computer-generated bubblegum cards doing and performing mighty deeds that he has never done and never will do?

McCain was the real deal. An honest-to-God, real-life Vietnam veteran who fought and suffered for his country. He faced and endured horrors that you cannot even begin to imagine. Where does Trump get the nerve, the unmitigated gall, to belittle this soldier? When the call came, he went. Trump hid behind his daddy's money.

Now Trump wants us to make him the commander in chief of our military again. ❓ If that wasn't such an insult to every serviceman and woman, it would almost be funny. Almost. 😓

— Michael Cariker, in Bakersfield California

A complete list of the former guy's Twitter insults published in The New York Times is at this link here.

Thank you to Vietnam veterans- Welcome home!

If you know someone who served, thank them for it.

(Maine Writer-  My husband is a Navy veteran who served with Mobile Construction Battalion 71 (MCB71) in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Thank you!)  In my opinion, Vietnam veterans need to hear what they did not receive after surviving their tour- "Welcome Home!"

We can debate whether Vietnam was folly and a fool's errand, and in doing so, diminish the impact it had upon those who served in good faith.

Richard L'Heureux MCB 71 Chu Lai, Vietnam

We can pretend that teenagers sent a half a world away to fight for a country they never heard of, who struggled for their very lives in jungles and rice paddies, didn't return as three-dimensional ghosts.

‘Remembrance is vital for our society’: Honoring 40 years of the Vietnam wall. Echo report published in The Repository newspaper by Thuan Le Elston:

A co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund describes how it has played a pivotal role in the cultural shift America has made in separating the war from the warrior.

How do you feel about the Vietnam wall now?

I first saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial three decades ago, on my first trip to Washington, D.C. 

As a war refugee whose family escaped the fall of Saigon in 1975 when I was 8, I wanted to see and touch the wall, but I can't say I had been looking forward to it.

The people whose names are engraved onto the granite wall died fighting a conflict over my birthplace, even as their fellow Americans protested to end the war and bring them home. My father and uncles fought in the same war, to save Vietnam from communism. We failed, we fled, and now we're U.S. citizens.

What a heavy mental trip. 

As soon as I stepped onto the descending path leading to the shiny black wall on the National Mall and saw the U.S. military veterans and their families among the tourists, I fought the feeling that everyone was staring at me. Irrationally or not, I felt guilty. I also saw my reflection in the wall among all those names and I mourned – a mourning for all the dead as well as the living, just as the memorial's designer, Maya Lin, had intended.

Since my first trip there, I've married and moved my family to Northern Virginia. My father-in-law, Bob Elston Sr., was an Army first lieutenant posted in South Vietnam in 1968, when he learned his first son had been born in New Jersey. That son, Bob Jr., ended up marrying a Vietnamese American: me.

We've been to the wall many times with our kids as well as visiting family and friends. I now find comfort and purpose whenever I walk the beautiful wall – the most popular memorial on the National Mall, attracting more than 5 million people each year – and see our reflections among the names.

Richard L'Heureux, a Maine native, Vietnam Veteran in the Lewiston Maine Veterans Memorial Park

As Robert Doubek, a co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), tells me, "Remembrance is vital for our society because freedom does not come for free."

I spoke with Doubek, an Air Force veteran, about how he got involved with the memorial and what he wants you to know about the wall. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

My tour in Vietnam lasted one year, ending on Thanksgiving Day 1969. As a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, I had the unusual assignment of interrogating North Vietnamese prisoners of war for information about U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam, the effectiveness of U.S. airstrikes and infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 

I reality, the majority of prisoners were 19-year-old rice farmers with only six years of education who could provide little that was useful.

As an interrogator, I was authorized to wear civilian clothes, so I wasn’t identifiable as a Vietnam War veteran when I arrived home. I was then based in Texas, where people were still basically favorable toward the military. But when I came to Washington, D.C., for law school in 1971, I seldom mentioned that I had served in Vietnam. The dominant attitude among the young professionals there was that anyone who did military service – especially in Vietnam – had to be stupid.

How did you get involved in the memorial project, and how long did it take to complete?

I graduated law school in 1974, but found work as a lawyer to be unfulfilling. I began to hear that many Vietnam War veterans were having trouble readjusting to civilian life, so I thought I might volunteer my legal skills to help some of them. 

Consequently, I was invited to a meeting in April 1979, called to generate publicity for the needs of the veterans, such as treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. At the meeting one veteran, Jan Scruggs, stood up and asked, “What about a memorial?” The general response was that Vietnam veterans needed more benefits, not a memorial. I, however, thought it was a good idea, so I advised him that he needed to form a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation to carry out such a project. He asked me to do the legal work to set up the corporation and to be one of the founding directors. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund was incorporated on April 27, 1979.

After working as a volunteer for six months, I became so fascinated by the prospect of creating a national memorial from scratch that I left my legal career to become the first VVMF employee – the executive director. Formal groundbreaking took place on March 26, 1982, and the memorial was dedicated on Nov. 11, 1982.

Afghanistan is another Donald Trump failed foriegn policy

Opinion echo published in The Week, March 13, 2020, by Theunis Bates, the managing editor.

This particular echo opinion is personal in my family because my husband Richard is a Vietnam War Veteran. 

During the war, he was in Chu Lai, Vietnam with Mobile Construction Batallion 71, in 1967, as described by photojournalist and author David Lyman in his book "Seabee 71 in Chu Lai: Memoir of a Navy Journalist".

Afghanistan in 2020, is starting to look a lot like Vietnam in 1973.  

(Maine Writer- my family was living in Subic Bay, Philippines during the fall of Saigon. My husband was stationed at Subic at the time and we lived on the Navy Base with our family. We witnessed the waves of Vietnamese refugees who arrived by the thousands at the Cubi Naval Air Station and those who came in boats, called "the boat people". We participated in humanitarian efforts to count and process the refugees who flew into Subic.)

In 1973, with no input from South Vietnam's pro-U.S.  government, President Richard Nixon signed a deal with North Vietnam to speed America's exit from a deeply unpopular "forever war".

The Trump administration struck a similar accord with the Afghan Taliban this week, also with minimal buy-in from our local allies.  In return for vague Taliban promises to shun al-Qada and talk poer sharing with the government in Kabul, the U.S. will withdraw its 12,000 troops over the next 14 months.  History tells us what's likely to happen next.  Two years after Nixon inked his accord, the North Vietnamese overran Saigon and sent hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to re-education camps. Should the U.S. quit Afghanistan, the Taliban may take Kabul not long after. If they do, bloody reprisals are certain and the women in the U.S. encouraged to leave their homes, attend schools and work will be forced back into the Middle Ages.

Many Afghans will rightly feel betrayed by our departure.  Yet, by most measures, America's nearly 20-year-old war there is a failure. We did annihilate the al Qaida terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks and toppled the Taliban government that sheltered them. But, the Taliban- which have a strong base of support among the country's ethnic Pashtuns- have surged back and now control 50 percent of the country.  Our efforts to create a thriving democracy have also amounted to nothing.  

In fact, the Kabul government is riddled with corruption and hugely unpopular, and much of the territory it supposedly controls is dominated by warlords, deeply involved in opium trafficking. 

Moreover, Afghanistan has already cost us $2 trillion and the lives of 2,300 American troops, so, obviously, more blood and treasure won't buy victory.  Nixon once promised that he would deliver "peace with honor" in Vietnam. We should know that no such thing is possible in Afghanistan.

Donald Trump had no stamina to enlist in the military #bonespurs

Vietnam veteran doesn’t think highly of Trump

My husband Richard in Chu Lai Vietnam 1967 MCB 71

#bonespurs tRump did not serve!

Trump doesn’t deserve the credit given to him after avoiding military service.



I too am a Vietnam veteran. (Also, Maine Writer- my husband is a Vietnam War veteran....and we agree with this opinion letter) an echo published in GoErie.com

Once I read the recent letter from Joe Kupniewski, it lit a fire in my soul. He (wrongminded!) said Donald Trump “praises our troops, military, police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” 

Well,  this is typical tRumpzi cult reasoning.

You do know how he got out of going to Vietnam with so-called “heel spurs” from a doctor whom he rented from Trump’s dad? 

Now I want you to think about 911 and two Americans, one of whom was born to money and was 24 years old and the other a NFL football player who left a lucrative sports career to enlist in the U.S. Army while Trump’s son, Jr., did not. 

He could have, but chose to earn money. Google Don Jr.’s image with an AR-15. He is a wannabe, but not a doer.

What an amazing insight on immigration. What if Trump was around during Herod’s time but was an Egyptian leader and closed the border so that a particular family and their newborn were denied entry? Think about that!

Just remember that immigrants, legal and illegal (hired by farmers and ranchers), made this country great, even when we sent the Chinese railroad laborers home and rounded up Japanese Americans in the 1940s to lose their businesses and homes.

So when you see Trump hug a flag, remember he had no stamina to enlist and serve like you and me.

– Louis Cioccio, Erie

Trump's lost "winning record" must be hidden with his tax returns

If Trump supporters are tired of "winning", they must also be weary about waiting for anything to become fatigued about, because, frankly, absolutely nothing is happening (yawn).  

All the 'winning' we're doing is delusional Donald Trump- an echo opinion letter, published in the Carroll County Times, a Maryland newspaper.

Tired of winning yet, Trumpzi supporters?

In 2016, Donald Trump told his delusional supporters that they would get tired of winning. 

So, are you tired of winning yet? Are you tired of getting those huge tax refunds? Are you tired of those big employer bonuses Trump promised? Are you tired of that big pay raise Trump said you would get? How about Trump's promise he would give you great health care coverage at a lower cost?

Trump filed a lawsuit through the Department of Justice proposing that the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA) be thrown out including protection for preexisting conditions with no plans to replace it. If his lawsuit succeeds, over 20 million Americans will lose their health insurance and everyone else will lose protections under the ACA. He's telling his supporters to wait until after the 2020 election to see his plan. Right....just like President Nixon's secret (treasonous) plan to get us out of Vietnam after you reelected him. 

There was no "secret" plan to pull out of Vietnam and tens of thousands of additional Americans died as a result. 

Trump and his Republican puppets have no health care plan either and many Americans will die for lack of affordable health care. A very pro-birth (not pro-child) position Maryland Republican delegates like Haven Shoemaker can get behind.

How about Trump's 25 percent tariffs on China and possible tariffs on Mexico? Guess who pays — American consumers and businesses. You will be paying up to 25 percent more for products you buy from China and Mexico. Chances are you will buy less. This hurts American businesses who will cut American workers because of lower demand for higher-priced products. There goes your tax refund, bonus and pay raise.

American farmers are getting hammered by Trump's China tariffs. Trump's answer is to give farmers welfare/bailout payments until China gives in. It's what Republicans like to call “socialism.” Guess what? China now buys much of its soybeans from Brazil and Argentina. So there is no real pressure on China to give in to Trump's tariffs. Farmers want free market trade and work, not welfare handouts

The guy who talks about getting tired of winning is really a loser. From 1985-1994, Trump tax records show that he lost $1.17 billion. [Because he lost so much] he didn't pay taxes in eight of the 10 years. Maybe this is why Trump doesn't want us to see his more recent tax returns.

They say fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me a third time, you're just plain stupid. Tired of winning yet?

David J. Iacono,  Westminster, Maryland

P.S. MaineWriter- Maybe archaeologists will discover all those "winning" Trump plans when they eventually unearth the Trumpzi's hidden tax returns.

Oklahoma military spouse opinion- Stay the course in Syria

"Donald Trump ignores our allies, some of whom are there fighting with us."  - Kathy Larsen

An echo opinion published in the Oklahoma newspaper Tulsa World. 

No Syria withdrawal

To the Editor: About the alarming events regarding our withdrawal from Syria, President Trump says we won and our troops are coming home.

I don’t think that he and his supporters have any idea what could happen if we withdraw.

We are a military family, and my husband served with distinction for 20 years including three tours in Korea and Vietnam. I would have been ecstatic if he had been able to come home early, but that was not his mission.

We were forced out of Vietnam because our troops were fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. Vietnam is now communist, supported by China, which is not our friend.

We were able to contain the communists with China helping in North Korea. Think about what that peninsula would be like if they had prevailed.

We are still there and will be for the foreseeable future — to keep the peace.

Trump ignores our allies, some of whom are there fighting with us. If he does this regardless of our allies’ support, he further isolates us, giving enemies an opportunity to move in and undo everything we tried to do.

It also devalues the extreme sacrifice our dead and injured made there. If we have another 9/11 who would support us? I wonder if that is the point.

We are becoming more isolated. If that were to happen, we would be standing alone. People need to look at the wider picture and consider the future.

This president serves at this country’s peril.

From Kathy Larsen, Collinsville, Oklahoma

Update research about war and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

From Shell Shock to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome - a century of invisible war trauma

An echo essay published in The Conversation*

In the wake of World War I, some veterans returned wounded, but not with obvious physical injuries. Instead, their symptoms were similar to those that had previously been associated with hysterical women – most commonly amnesia, or some kind of paralysis or inability to communicate with no clear physical cause.

English physician Charles Myers, who wrote the first paper on “shell-shock” in 1915, theorized that these symptoms actually did stem from a physical injury. He posited that repetitive exposure to concussive blasts caused brain trauma that resulted in this strange grouping of symptoms. But once put to the test, his hypothesis didn’t hold up. There were plenty of veterans who had not been exposed to the concussive blasts of trench warfare, for example, who were still experiencing the symptoms of shell-shock. (And certainly not all veterans who had seen this kind of battle returned with symptoms.)

We now know that what these combat veterans were facing was likely what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. We are now better able to recognize it, and treatments have certainly advanced, but we still don’t have a full understanding of just what PTSD is.

The medical community and society at large are accustomed to looking for the most simple cause and cure for any given ailment. This results in a system where symptoms are discovered and cataloged and then matched with therapies that will alleviate them. Though this method works in many cases, for the past 100 years, PTSD has been resisting.

Three scholars in the humanities have individually studied PTSD – the framework through which people conceptualize it, the ways researchers investigate it, the therapies the medical community devises for it. Through our research, each of us has seen how the medical model alone fails to adequately account for the ever-changing nature of PTSD.

What’s been missing is a cohesive explanation of trauma that allows us to explain the various ways its symptoms have manifested over time and can differ in different people.
Nonphysical repercussions of the Great War

Once it became clear that not everyone who suffered from shell-shock in the wake of WWI had experienced brain injuries, the British Medical Journal provided alternate nonphysical explanations for its prevalence.

A poor morale and a defective training are among the most important, if not the most important, etiological factors: also that shell-shock was a “catching” complaint. – (The British Medical Journal, 1922)

Shell-shock went from being considered a legitimate physical injury to being a sign of weakness, of both the battalion and the soldiers within it. One historian estimates at least 20 percent of men developed shell-shock, though the figures are murky due to physician reluctance at the time to brand veterans with a psychological diagnosis that could affect disability compensation.

Soldiers were archetypically heroic and strong. When they came home unable to speak, walk or remember, with no physical reason for those shortcomings, the only possible explanation was personal weakness. Treatment methods were based on the idea that the soldier who had entered into war as a hero was now behaving as a coward and needed to be snapped out of it.

Lewis Yealland, a British clinician, described in his 1918 “Hysterical Disorders of Warfare” the kind of brutal treatment that follows from thinking about shell-shock as a personal failure. 

After nine months of unsuccessfully treating patient A1, including electric shocks to the neck, cigarettes put out on his tongue and hot plates placed at the back of his throat, Yealland boasted of telling the patient, “You will not leave this room until you are talking as well as you ever did; no, not before… you must behave as the hero I expect you to be.”

Yealland then applied an electric shock to the throat so strong that it sent the patient reeling backwards, unhooking the battery from the machine. Undeterred, Yealland strapped the patient down to avoid the battery problem and continued to apply shock for an hour, at which point patient A1 finally whispered “Ah.” After another hour, the patient began to cry and whispered, “I want a drink of water.”

Yealland reported this encounter triumphantly – the breakthrough meant his theory was correct and his method worked. Shell-shock was a disease of manhood rather than an illness that came from witnessing, being subjected to and partaking in incredible violence.

Evolution away from shell-shock

The next wave of the study of trauma came when the Second World War saw another influx of soldiers dealing with similar symptoms.

It was Abram Kardiner, a clinician working in the psychiatric clinic of the United States Veterans’ Bureau, who rethought combat trauma in a much more empathetic light. In his influential book, “The Traumatic Neuroses of War,” Kardiner speculated that these symptoms stemmed from psychological injury, rather than a soldier’s flawed character.

Work from other clinicians after WWII and the Korean War suggested that post-war symptoms could be lasting. Longitudinal studies showed that symptoms could persist anywhere from six to 20 years, if they disappeared at all. These studies returned some legitimacy to the concept of combat trauma that had been stripped away after the First World War.

Vietnam was another watershed moment for combat-related PTSD because veterans began to advocate for themselves in an unprecedented way. 

Beginning with a small march in New York in the summer of 1967, veterans themselves began to become activists for their own mental health care. They worked to redefine “post-Vietnam syndrome” not as a sign of weakness, but rather a normal response to the experience of atrocity. Public understanding of war itself had begun to shift, too, as the widely televised accounts of the My Lai massacre brought the horror of war into American living rooms for the first time. The veterans’ campaign helped get PTSD included in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-III), the major American diagnostic resource for psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians.

The authors of the DSM-III deliberately avoided talking about the causes of mental disorders. Their aim was to develop a manual that could simultaneously be used by psychiatrists adhering to radically different theories, including Freudian approaches and what is now known as “biological psychiatry.” These groups of psychiatrists would not agree on how to explain disorders, but they could – and did – come to agree on which patients had similar symptoms. So the DSM-III defined disorders, including PTSD, solely on the basis of clusters of symptoms, an approach that has been retained ever since.

This tendency to agnosticism about the physiology of PTSD is also reflected in contemporary evidence-based approaches to medicine. Modern medicine focuses on using clinical trials to demonstrate that a therapy works, but is skeptical about attempts to link treatment effectiveness to the biology underlying a disease.

Today’s medicalized PTSD

People can develop PTSD for a number of different reasons, not just in combat. Sexual assault, a traumatic loss, a terrible accident – each might lead to PTSD. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates about 13.8 percent of the veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan currently have PTSD. For comparison, a male veteran of those wars is four times more likely to develop PTSD than a man in the civilian population is. PTSD is probably at least partially at the root of an even more alarming statistic: Upwards of 22 veterans commit suicideevery day.

Therapies for PTSD today tend to be a mixed bag. Practically speaking, when veterans seek PTSD treatment in the VA system, policy requires they be offered either exposure or cognitive therapy. 

Exposure therapies are based on the idea that the fear response that gives rise to many of the traumatic symptoms can be dampened through repeated exposures to the traumatic event. 

Cognitive therapies work on developing personal coping methods and slowly changing unhelpful or destructive thought patterns that are contributing to symptoms (for example, the shame one might feel at not successfully completing a mission or saving a comrade). The most common treatment a veteran will likely receive will include psychopharmaceuticals – especially the class of drugs called SSRIs.

Mindfulness therapies, based on becoming aware of mental states, thoughts and feelings and accepting them rather than trying to fight them or push them away, are another option. 

There are also more alternative methods being studied such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing or EMDR therapy, therapies using controlled doses of MDMA (Ecstasy), virtual reality-graded exposure therapy, hypnosis and creative therapies. The military funds a wealth of research on new technologies to address PTSD; these include neurotechnological innovations like transcranial stimulation and neural chips as well as novel drugs.

Several studies have shown that patients improve most when they’ve chosen their own therapy. But even if they narrow their choices to the ones backed by the weight of the National Center for PTSD by using the center’s online Treatment Decision Aid, patients would still find themselves weighing five options, each of which is evidence-based but entails a different psychomedical model of trauma and healing.

This buffet of treatment options lets us set aside our lack of understanding of why people experience trauma and respond to interventions so differently. It also relieves the pressure for psychomedicine to develop a complete model of PTSD. We reframe the problem as a consumer issue instead of a scientific one.

Thus, while WWI was about soldiers and punishing them for their weakness, in the contemporary era, the ideal veteran PTSD patient is a health care consumer who has an obligation to play an active role in figuring out and optimizing his own therapy.

As we now have the strange benefit of the hindsight that comes with 100 years of studying combat-related trauma, we must be careful in celebrating our progress. 

What is still missing is an explanation of why people have different responses to trauma, and why different responses occur in different historical periods. For instance, the paraylsis and amnesia that epitomized WWI shell-shock cases are now so rare that they don’t even appear as symptoms in the DSM entry for PTSD. We still don’t know enough about how soldiers’ own experiences and understandings of PTSD are shaped by the broader social and cultural views of trauma, war and gender. Though we have made incredible strides in the century since World War I, PTSD remains a chameleon, and demands our continued study.

*Authored by:
MaryCatherine McDonald, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Old Dominion University, VA

Marisa Brandt, Assistant Professor of Practice, Michigan State University

Robyn Bluhm, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Michigan State University