The night in 2003 that American troops went into Iraq, I was a 59-year-old Vietnam-era veteran working out my last useful years at CNBC in New Jersey. All around me were young colleagues in their 20s and 30s, too young to remember the awful mistake of Vietnam, and middle-aged colleagues who had escaped Vietnam service with Trumped-up medical
deferments and graduate schools. They were all cheering: “Go, get ’em!” “Make ’em pay for 9/11!” “Get those weapons of mass destruction!” I was a lot more skeptical: “I just hope to hell they know what they’re doing this time.” Of course, they didn’t, and we’re still trying to extract ourselves from that night. The sad fact is, we haven’t learned anything; old men are still sending young men to fight and die in pointless pursuits. Although I’ve given a lot of money to build and maintain it, I can’t bring myself to visit the Vietnam memorial in Washington. Any one of those 58,000+ names could have been mine.
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“We do what we must, and call it by the best names.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
The night in 2003 that American troops went into Iraq, I was a 59-year-old Vietnam-era veteran working out my last useful years at CNBC in New Jersey. All around me were young colleagues in their 20s and 30s, too young to remember the awful mistake of Vietnam, and middle-aged colleagues who had escaped Vietnam service with Trumped-up medical
deferments and graduate schools. They were all cheering: “Go, get ’em!” “Make ’em pay for 9/11!” “Get those weapons of mass destruction!” I was a lot more skeptical: “I just hope to hell they know what they’re doing this time.” Of course, they didn’t, and we’re still trying to extract ourselves from that night. The sad fact is, we haven’t learned anything; old men are still sending young men to fight and die in pointless pursuits. Although I’ve given a lot of money to build and maintain it, I can’t bring myself to visit the Vietnam memorial in Washington. Any one of those 58,000+ names could have been mine.