Morning Thoughts: November 22, 2017

Got word of another brother's dying last week. I didn’t know him that well.  He was a good friend of a good friend, a year younger than I. He was a strapping, handsome man as a youth. He joined up, became a Green Beret, and came home with a Bronze Star, hardly a sickly specimen.

I always wonder, when men like that die before they might have, if he might have also come home with a little Agent Orange working on them as well, slowly, cruelly, and inexorably.

The obit didn’t say. Maybe so. Maybe not. But it was one more potential cost of war that my generation still faces. I know some that do, or have.

Agent Orange was a herbicide and defoliant chemical used to clear foliage in Vietnam so our forces could bomb more efficiently whomever happened to be below. It was clear and came in orange containers, hence the name.

It proved a hard substance to contain, and some say that any U.S. serviceman who served in-country from 1961 to 1971 may have been exposed. I seem to have been one of the lucky ones, as they unloaded the poison at piers that I guarded. I have walked within spitting distance of pallets of it stacked beside rows of coffins waiting to be shipped home.

Maybe 2,000 GIs have been treated for its damage. Reports seldom mention the 4 million Vietnamese who were exposed or the 3 million that reportedly suffered from its use.

One may imagine that its manufacturers, including Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and Diamond Shamrock, among others, made good profits from its use.

It seems that Americans, particularly some politicians such as my state’s junior senator, increasingly see gun use, other violence, and even war as the solution to all political, and many social, issues. It is a fairly easy sell, since I think I read this week that the VA estimates that only 7.3 percent of living Americans have served, or do serve, in the military. That includes the ones who wake up each morning of their lives fearing symptoms of an ancient and invisible enemy.

Only about 0.4 percent of us currently serve, and practically none with political influence. The profiteers and war hawks will win. Everyone else will lose, and more obituaries will feature lives that might have lasted much longer than they did.

And they say the Galilean called “The Peacemakers” blessed.