“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
The Associated Press Posted: 07/22/2010 11:35:55 AM PDT
CLOVIS, Calif.—An Army staff sergeant from Clovis who was just weeks away from finishing his second tour in Afghanistan has died.
The Department of Defense says 27-year-old Brian Piercy was killed on Monday in Afghanistan's Arghandab River Valley when insurgents attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
David Piercy said his brother was planning to move back to California from North Carolina with his wife, Christina, at the end of his second tour in the country. Although he came back with minor shrapnel wounds after his first stint, David said he still believed in his mission.
Friends say Brian was a gifted student who could be shy until you got to know him. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion out of Fort Bragg, N.C.
Oh yes, the genius of the community organizer, more regulations that will assuredly create more jobs, at least for the IRS. This little clinker stuffed into the legislation unread by the Democrats and signed unread by Obama between vacations and soul music concerts is so bad that it can't possibly last.
This stupidity and burden will not go unnoticed by millions of voters if this is not withdrawn. Let's keep it in till 2012.
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Lost in Taxation The IRS's vast new ObamaCare powers.
If it seems as if the tax code was conceived by graphic artist M.C. Escher, wait until you meet the new and not improved Internal Revenue Service created by ObamaCare. What, you're not already on a first-name basis with your local IRS agent?
President Barack Obama drives home the importance of passing the unemployment insurance extension.
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates inside the IRS, highlighted the agency's new mission in her annual report to Congress last week. Look out below. She notes that the IRS is already "greatly taxed"—pun intended?—"by the additional role it is playing in delivering social benefits and programs to the American public," like tax credits for first-time homebuyers or purchasing electric cars. Yet with ObamaCare, the agency is now responsible for "the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history." And without "sufficient funding" it won't be able to discharge these new duties.
That wouldn't be tragic, given that those new duties include audits to determine who has the insurance "as required by law" and collecting penalties from Americans who don't. Companies that don't sponsor health plans will also be punished. This crackdown will "involve nearly every division and function of the IRS," Ms. Olson reports.
Well, well. Republicans argued during the health debate that the IRS would have to hire hundreds of new agents and staff to enforce ObamaCare. They were brushed off by Democrats and the press corps as if they believed the President was born on the moon. The IRS says it hasn't figured out how much extra money and manpower it will need but admits that both numbers are greater than zero.
Ms. Olson also exposed a damaging provision that she estimates will hit some 30 million sole proprietorships and subchapter S corporations, two million farms and one million charities and other tax-exempt organizations. Prior to ObamaCare, businesses only had to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase. But starting in 2013 they will also have to report the value of goods they buy from a single vendor that total more than $600 annually—including office supplies and the like.
Democrats snuck in this obligation to narrow the mythical "tax gap" of unreported business income, but Ms. Olson says that the tracking costs for small businesses will be "disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance." Job creation, here we come . . . at least for the accountants who will attempt to comply with a vast new 1099 reporting burden.
In a Monday letter, even Democratic Senators Mark Begich (Alaska), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) and Evan Bayh (Indiana) denounce this new "burden" on small businesses and insist that the IRS use its discretion to find "better ways to structure this reporting requirement." In other words, they want regulators to fix one problem among many that all four Senators created by voting for ObamaCare.
We never thought anyone would be nostalgic for the tax system of a few months ago, but post-ObamaCare, here we are.
I pledge allegiance to the government Of the United States of America And to the bureaucracy for which it stands One nation under lawyers and regulators With more laws and more regulations for all
The Technocracy Boom By DAVID BROOKS Published: July 19, 2010 NY Times
When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.
During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. In their series in The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin detail the size of this apparatus. More than 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence programs at around 10,000 sites across the country. An estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearance. These analysts produce 50,000 reports a year — a flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.
In the second part of the period, Democrats were in control. They augmented the national security bureaucracy but spent the bulk of their energies expanding bureaucracies in domestic spheres.
First, they passed a health care law. This law created 183 new agencies, commissions, panels and other bodies, according to an analysis by Robert E. Moffit of the Heritage Foundation. These include things like the Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement Program, an Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee and a Cures Acceleration Network Review Board.
The purpose of the new apparatus was simple: to give government experts the power to analyze and rationalize the nation’s health care system. A team of experts on the newly created Independent Medicare Advisory Council was ordered to review and streamline Medicare. A team of experts within the Office of Personnel Management was directed to help set standards for insurance companies in the health care exchanges. Teams of experts serving on comparative effectiveness boards were told to survey data and determine which medical treatments work best and most efficiently.
Democrats also passed a financial reform law. The law that originally created the Federal Reserve was a mere 31 pages. The Sarbanes-Oxley banking reform act, passed in 2002, was only 66 pages. But the 2010 financial reform law was 2,319 pages, an intricately engineered technocratic apparatus. As Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute noted, the financial reform law is seven times longer than the last five pieces of banking legislation combined.
Once again, government experts were told to take a complex, decentralized system — in this case the financial markets — and impose rules, rationality and order. The law creates one über-panel, the Financial Stability Oversight Council. It directs government experts to write rules in 243 separate areas.
The law also calls upon government experts to make some heroic judgments. For example, it calls upon regulators to break up banks that might be about to pose a risk to the country’s economy. That is to say, investors may believe a bank is stable. The executives of the bank may believe it is stable. But the regulators are called upon to exercise their superior vision and determine which banks are stable and which are not.
When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.
This progressive era is being promulgated without much popular support. It’s being led by a large class of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have constructed ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts.
Already this effort is generating a fierce, almost culture-war-style backlash. It is generating a backlash among people who do not have faith in Washington, who do not have faith that trained experts have superior abilities to organize society, who do not believe national rules can successfully contend with the intricacies of local contexts and cultures.
This progressive era amounts to a high-stakes test. If the country remains safe and the health care and financial reforms work, then we will have witnessed a life-altering event. We’ll have received powerful evidence that central regulations can successfully organize fast-moving information-age societies.
If the reforms fail — if they kick off devastating unintended consequences or saddle the country with a maze of sclerotic regulations — then the popular backlash will be ferocious. Large sectors of the population will feel as if they were subjected to a doomed experiment they did not consent to. They will feel as if their country has been hijacked by a self-serving professional class mostly interested in providing for themselves.
If that backlash gains strength, well, what’s the 21st-century version of the guillotine?
We don't have permanent enemies, who we will hate forever and will always be adversarial to us do we? Germany, Japan, Russia, China, are but a few recent examples. We slaughtered German and Japanese by the millions, fire bombed and nuked their cities and did so within the living memory of many.
Today both countries are close allies of the United States.
The rapprochement with Germany started within months of the ending of WW II.
Our wartime ally, Stalin's Russia, became an almost immediate enemy.
Talk and rhetorical claptrap about special relationships, undying friendship and indivisible bonds is fatuous nonsense. Nation states and great and lesser powers are not lovesick teenagers carving their initials into perpetuity.
A healthy national relationship is always in need of examination and reevaluation. A true ally is so in a time and in a place. Sentimentality in statecraft is both silly and dangerous. Ending the concept of special relationships is well past due.
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Rupert Cornwell: PM must not be blinded by the might of America Wednesday, 21 July 2010 Independent
In his article in The Wall Street Journal, previewing his first meeting here with President Obama yesterday, the Prime Minister said all the right things.
Relations between Britain and the US, David Cameron correctly observed, were absurdly over-scrutinised, picked over by analysts with a zeal once reserved for decoding the mysteries of the Kremlin. The two countries were bound to have their differences. They were natural and battle-tested allies, he noted, but Britain obviously was the junior partner.
The question is, can he put this "hard-headed and realistic" approach into practice? In other words, can he resist the White House dazzle?
During his Washington visits, Tony Blair was always visibly thrilled to share the stage with the most powerful man in the world. Alas, his determination to march in lockstep with the US led Britain into the utterly avoidable disaster of Iraq, earning him the label of "Bush's poodle". Mr Blair, of course, was not the first British Prime Minister to find it more agreeable to discuss the great issues of war and peace in the Oval Office than to haggle with French, Germans, Poles and Greeks into the early hours in Brussels over the minutiae of some arcane EU issue. Just ask Margaret Thatcher.
But if ever there was a moment to put Mr Cameron's avowed philosophy into practice, it is now. Although recent British ambassadors here have banned staff from using the term, the official demythologising of the "special relationship" began in earnest in March, when the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that the phrase was "potentially misleading" and "its use should be avoided".
Amen to that. The problem is that the "special relationship" has been verbally resurrected by Mr Obama himself, even though he has fewer sentimental ties to Britain than his predecessors and removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office (a sin for which the Tory press in London has never forgiven him).
But Mr Cameron should not take the bait. This doesn't mean he should keep Mr Obama at arms length. If they strike up a close personal relationship, so much the better. Leaders who trust and like each other can do business more quickly and effectively than those who do not. But Mr Cameron must not be blinded by the reflected might of the American presidency.
Right now, that should not be too difficult. Mr Obama is preoccupied by domestic issues and is not seeking sidekicks for a new international adventure. His concern is to pull US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and rebuild the economy at home. Even on Iran, the most dangerous challenge he faces, his instincts are cautious. Mr Cameron, therefore, faces no litmus test of loyalty.
His visit is overshadowed by the two BP controversies: the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and allegations BP lobbied for the transfer to Libya of the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Washington and London also disagree on the urgency of tackling budget deficits. But BP and economic policy differences are reminders that the countries can be close allies without being joined at the hip.
View from the US: 'He's no Gordon Brown, but there's a long way to go'
Lloyd Grove The Daily Beast
Cameron and Obama might want a family therapist, if sovereign nations can make use of such services... The long-vaunted "special relationship" between the United Kingdom and the United States has seldom been more tetchy and irritable. The new prime minister, of course, is no Gordon Brown — a dour Scot with no gift for small talk. Cameron is young and charming, and on several previous meetings, he and Obama were very simpatico... but there is a litany of substantive sore points.
Nile Gardiner The National Review
David Cameron has the skill and charisma to build up a powerful partnership with Washington, but must be careful to maintain British interests while doing so... Cameron should be under no illusions that the current US president is pro-British in outlook, or has much empathy at all for the Anglo-American alliance. While building ties with the White House, he must look beyond the current administration in his meetings on Capitol Hill, and seek to engage with conservative leaders in Congress, who may hold the balance of power in Washington after this November.
Matt Browne Politico
The Obama-Cameron relationship is not a special partnership in the mold of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan or Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. True, the Cameron-Obama friendly scenes do mark a dramatic shift in the two nations' public relations strategies. Consider that Obama's advisers never afforded photo ops like these to Britain's former prime minister, Gordon Brown. Unfortunately, this is little more than stagecraft... On closer inspection, the forced bonhomie between the two looks more like the declarations of love that elderly married couples give publicly to friends and family after a turbulent spell in their relationship. All while they privately negotiate an amicable divorce
I just found out that the tape featured above was edited unfairly and does not represent how Shirley Sherrod conducts herself today. That is unfair. I do not know all that happened, but the wife of the white farmer claims that Ms. Sherrod helped save their farm. That is enough for me.
I have erased my post because it is unfair that they should stay on the internet forever. I apologize for any hurt that my words have caused Ms. Sherrod and her family. I will leave my comments stand as a lesson to myself.
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Shirley Sherrod, an official at the United States Department of Agriculture has resigned after a speech she gave at an NAACP function in March was aired on Breitbart News and other conservative news outlets. In the speech, Sherrod, whose job it was to help farmers facing foreclosure of their farms, regaled a sympathetic audience with a story of how she had held back from helping a white farmer for reasons that she openly admitted on tape were racial in nature. The Dakota Voice quotes the video of Sherrod’s speech as follows:
The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm. He took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing. But he had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was talking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farm land, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land.
So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do.
Sherrod concluded her anecdote by saying that she sent the farmer to one of “his own kind” to get appropriate help. By “his own kind” Sherrod meant a white lawyer. The furor attending this speech led Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack To accept Sherrod’s resignation, according to CNN News.
Please say it ain't so. This report is stupefyingly depressing. How do you unwind this? Instead of killing the terrorist camps, punishing Saudi Arabia and baking Ramadan cookies, the federal government under George Bush went out of control in a disproportionate and mostly ineffective reaction to a sucker punch.
The terrorists in affect are winning by destroying the very fabric of American freedoms.
How does anyone unwind this, because if it is not unwound it will destroy liberty.
No wonder Obama hardly knows what to do or where to start. If he tries to rationalize this insanity, the politics will kill him. Good God Almighty!
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
The investigation's other findings include:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space. * Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Obama refused to accept the argument that a federal mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax. Look at the video and listen to the smug denial.
Now that the states are suing the government over the bill, Obama is claiming the right to impose the buying of insurance based on the argument that it is a tax and Congress has the right to tax.
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Changing Stance, Administration Now Defends Insurance Mandate as a Tax By ROBERT PEAR Published: July 16, 2010 NY Times
WASHINGTON — When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”
And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.
Under the legislation signed by President Obama in March, most Americans will have to maintain “minimum essential coverage” starting in 2014. Many people will be eligible for federal subsidies to help them pay premiums.
In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes.
Congress can use its taxing power “even for purposes that would exceed its powers under other provisions” of the Constitution, the department said. For more than a century, it added, the Supreme Court has held that Congress can tax activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.
While Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.
I have pancreatic cancer. If it is Agent Orange, it's not the first time this damned war has tried to kill me.
Let me tell you about the first time. In fact, the whole and true story of my journey home from Vietnam. But before I do, let me set the scene for you.
It is November 1965. The Ia Drang Valley. The nearest town, Pleiku, a remote Vietnamese province capital. And west of town, beyond the stilted long-huts of the Montagnards, flat scrub jungle cover the hills by the Cambodian border. A smugglers' haven, and now the infiltration route for the first North Vietnamese regulars to invade South Vietnam.
American regular infantry, the first sent to Vietnam as the war escalates, have come to this border country to hunt the People's Army of Vietnam. They are the men of the First Air Cav, the first Army infantry division to ride into war in helicopters. The leading unit is Lt. Col. Hal Moore's 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment. Driving their choppers into a landing zone designated X-ray, a few miles from the Cambodian border, on the 14th of November, 1965, they land on top of a North Vietnamese Army base. A ferocious battle ensues that lasts three whole days. Hal Moore's battalion several times comes within inches of being overrun. In the end, reinforced to brigade strength, the U.S. troops destroy the better part of a North Vietnamese division at X-ray. Seventy-nine Americans are killed, 121 wounded, a total of 200 U.S. casualties, the highest toll of the war till then...but there are roughly two thousand North Vietnamese casualties.
I came in on the last day of the battle. I remember the NVA bodies were piled so thick around the foxholes you could walk on them for 100 feet in some places. The American GIs were the same color as the dirt and all had that thousand-yard stare of those newly initiated to combat.
The next day, after a restless night, my battalion, the 2/7, walked away from X-ray toward another clearing called LZ Albany. Around lunchtime, we were jumped by a North Vietnamese formation. Like us, about 500-strong.
The fighting was hand-to-hand. I was lying so close to a North Vietnamese machine-gunner that I simply stuck out my rifle and blew off his head. It was, I think, the only time during the war that a U.S. battalion was ever overrun. The U.S. casualties for this fourth day of battle: 155 killed, 121 wounded. More dead than wounded. The North Vietnamese suffered a couple of hundred casualties.
The fight at LZ Albany was largely overlooked as an aberration- poor leadership, green troops. In this first encounter between their main force regulars, the two sides focused instead on X-ray. Interestingly, both drew the same conclusion: that each could win using the tactics of attrition.
The ferocity of the fighting during those four days was appalling. At one point in the awful afternoon at Albany, as my battalion was being cut to pieces, a small group of enemy came upon me, and thinking I had been killed (I was covered in other people's blood), proceeded to use me as a sandbag for their machine gun. I pretended to be dead. I remember the gunner had bony knees that pressed against my sides. He didn't discover I was alive because he was trembling more than I was. He was, like me, just a teenager.
The gunner began firing into the remnants of my company. My buddies began firing back with rifle grenades, M-79s, to those of you who know about them. I remember thinking, "Oh, my God. If I stand up, the North Vietnamese will kill me; and if I stay lying down, my buddies will get me." Before I went completely mad, a volley of grenades exploded on top of me, killing the enemy boy and injuring me.
It went on like this all day and much of the night. I was wounded twice and thought myself dead. My company suffered about 93 percent casualties--93 percent.
This sort of experience leaves scars. I had nightmares. For years afterwards I was sour on life, by turns angry, cynical, and alienated.
Then one day I woke up and saw the world as I believe it really is, a bright and warm place. I looked afresh at my scars and marveled, not at the frailty of human flesh, but at the indomitable strength of the human spirit. This is the miracle of life. Like other Vietnam veterans, I began to put the personal hurt behind me, and I started to examine the war itself and to make sense of it.
When I went back to Vietnam a few years ago, I met Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the man who engineered the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu and then commanded North Vietnamese forces in the war with South Vietnam and us. He conceded that because of the Ia Drang his plans to cut Vietnam in half and take the capital had been delayed ten years. But then, he chuckled, it didn't make a difference, did it?
We won every battle, but the North Vietnamese in the end took Saigon. What on earth had we been doing there? Was all that pain and suffering worth it, or was it just a terrible waste? This is why Vietnam veterans often have so much trouble letting go, what sets them apart from veterans of other wars.
Nothing is so precious to a nation as its youth. And so, to squander the lives of the young in a war that, depending on one's point of view, either should never have been fought or we were never prepared to win, seems crazy. Yet, that's exactly what happened in Vietnam. However justified the war seemed in 1964 and 1965, and, remember, almost all Americans then thought it was, it no longer seemed that way after Tet in 1968. And no matter what you may remember of the war, we never really fought it to win.
When I was wounded it caused a minor sensation at home. My father was Howard K. Smith, the anchorman and TV news commentator, who was then at the peak of his career. That the son of a famous person should get shot in Vietnam was, in 1965, news. When I returned to the United States after my tour in Vietnam, President Johnson, who was a friend of my dad's, invited me to a dinner party at the White House. I remember a tall, smiling man who thanked me for my service and sacrifice. I liked him then; I still do today. Yet no one bears as much responsibility for the conduct of the war as he does.
In the Gulf War we took six months to put half a million troops into the war zone. In Vietnam, it took more than six years. We were too timid to carry the fight to the enemy until the end, and we tried, impossibly, to keep the war contained to South Vietnam.
The result was that our enemy, a small country waging total war, that is, using all its resources, saw a super power fighting a limited war and concluded that if it could just sustain the 10-to-1 casualties we were inflicting for a while, then we would tire and leave, and it would win. Of course, Ho Chi Minh was right. The war also changed character. The Sino-Soviet split made it seem less like a war of national liberation and more like a civil war - an internal squabble. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, we quit and began the longest and bloodiest retreat in U.S. history. Dean Rusk, then-Secretary of State, many years later ruefully told me, “They outlasted us.”
The fact is, democracies don't fight inconclusive wars for remote goals in distant places for very long. Pham Van Dong, Ho's successor, said that.
Whether the war was right or whether it was wrong, it was fought in such a way it could never really have been brought to a conclusion. That now seems clear with time. What a waste. It's why so many veterans of Vietnam feel bitter.
Well, we finally did get our parades and we finally did build our memorial on the Mall in Washington. These helped. But so many veterans were still haunted by the war, and I was, too.
Fourteen years ago, I watched the Berlin Wall come down and, as an ABC News correspondent, I witnessed first hand the collapse of communism. I remember thinking, “My God, containment worked. We won the Cold War.” And however meaningless Vietnam seemed at the time, it contributed to the fall of communism. Hardly justification for what we went through in Vietnam, but at least it was something.
Then ten years ago, an event changed me. An opportunity to go back to Vietnam. With ten other Ia Drang veterans, I traveled back to the jungle in the Central Highlands and for several days walked the battlefield. Did I find the answer to my question? No, I don't know if what we did in the war ultimately was worth it. But what I did find surprised me.
North Vietnam may have conquered the South, but it is losing the peace. A country that three decades ago had the fourth strongest army in the world has squandered its wealth on fighting its neighbors and is poor and bankrupt. You look at Vietnam today and you wonder why they fought the war. Many North Vietnamese wonder, too.
What struck me was the overwhelming peacefulness of the place, even in the clearing where I fought, LZ Albany. I broke down several times. I wanted to bring back some shell casings - some physical manifestation of the battle - to lay at the foot of The Wall here in Washington. But, do you know, search as I did, I could not find any. The forces of nature had simply erased it. And where once the grass had been slippery with blood, there were flowers blooming in that place of death. So I pressed some and brought them back. Flowers...that's all that I could find in that jungle clearing that once held terror and now held beauty.
What I discovered with time may seem obvious, but it had really escaped me all those years on my journey home from Vietnam: The war is over. It certainly is for Vietnam and the Vietnamese. As I said on a Nightline broadcast when I came back, “This land is at peace, and so should we be.” For me, Vietnam has become a place again, not a war, and I have begun letting go.
I have discovered that wounds heal. That the friendship of old comrades breathes meaning into life. And that even the most disjointed events can begin to make sense with the passage of time.
This has allowed me, on evenings like this, to step forward and take pride in the service I gave my country. But never to forget what was, and will always be, the worst day of my life. The day I escaped death in the tall grass of the Ia Drang Valley. Thank you.
Thanks to Ron Sleeis (Saigon Ron) for providing this web site with the text of Jack’s speech.
