[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s a Vietnam war criminal I never know what to say when someone thanks me for my service. Sometimes I ask "What service". Now I think I will just say "Why"---and look at the expression on their face and listen for their response.

[I use the Veterans Heathcare Administration (VA or VHA). THEY ARE THE BEST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IN THE US, and every study shows that they have the best outcomes at the lowest cost. I can testify that I have never had any of the problems that the propaganda machine and Trump are spewing out. Nor do I know anybody else that has. They always treat me with the utmost respect and courtesy that should be a model for all healthcare.]

They never fail to call me "sir" and they always thank me for my service. Not being one to bite the hand that heals me, I respond politely, but inside I know that I did not perform any service worthy of thanks.

While I am a war criminal and deserve to be hung, there were a lot of people smarter than me that got fooled by the Cold War propaganda too, e.g., watch The Real News Network series about Daniel Elsberg's new book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner":

https://therealnews.com/sto...

I joined Special Forces which was then being expanded by JFK as the new military approach to defeating communism. JFK's ideology of "winning the hearts and minds" through a new kind of soldier was taken from the book "The Ugly American". The idea was that by training soldiers to know the culture, language, and customs of the people, the US could win them over to capitalism instead of communism.

The idea was that Special Forces was to be an "extension of the peace corps, only we carried guns" (my description) and conducted counter-insurgency as well as digging wells, improving sanitation and bringing medical care to remote backward villages. SF worshiped Kennedy and even named their training facilities at Fort Bragg after him: The John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare. It was all very naive.

The book The Ugly American was a sensation when it came out. Kennedy even sent a copy to every US ambassador and it was required reading for foreign service officers. I have since re-read the book recently, now that the scales have fallen from my eyes.

It is a horrible chauvinistic book, which portrays indigenous people as backward, ignorant, inept and in need of the Westerner to bring them knowledge, understanding, and modernization at a pace that they can absorb. It is a paternalistic racist book, dripping with the virtues of capitalism and the evil of communism. It assumes that given an intelligent choice that post colonial countries would choose capitalism and welcome Americans with loving open arms. This is the propaganda that many of us grew up with and that many Americans believed. [Most still do.]

Even Daniel Elsberg admits that he came to believe that Joseph Stalin was as evil as Hitler (sic), and that the US, Europe and the rest of the world were in a life and death struggle against communism.

It seems that the media was less corrupt then, but now we know that it was deeply infiltrated by the CIA, and even the trusted Walter Cronkite was tainted by Operation Mockingbird. The mainstream media was for the Vietnam war before it was against it.

"And that's the way it is", is how Cronkite signed off every evening and we believed him.

Maybe this sounds like I am just making excuses for myself. Usually I do not discuss my military experience, although I do put it on my bio. It is part of who I am. I suspect that even now without the draft (I was not drafted) there are people who join the military because they have been brainwashed that they are joining an honorable profession to do an honorable service. The military changes people and they are never the same again.

—David W. Pear