differing perspectives

This item was written in 2002 as a response to an item an acquaintance had cited as "thought-provoking."

If anyone is interested, just Google "Ed Evans, MGySgt., USMC (Ret.)" to see what provoked the thoughts that follow.

Who is “Ed Evans, MGySgt., USMC (Ret.)?” He says he served 27 years in peace and combat and seems to have something to do with the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Division Association. His web site seems to indicate that he might have spent much of that time in the Public Affairs career field. He also seems to be the Public Affairs spokesman for the Nashville Corps of Engineers District.

It may well be that he was not the actual author at all.

However, taking him at his word that he was a combat vet (possibly Korea, possibly Vietnam), one wonders how reassured he is that the loudest voices calling for renewed combat (and more resultant Gold Star Mothers) are mostly those folks who hid out from serving when their country needed them in the 60s. One might consider some background information when judging the moral fibre of many of our current loudest voices. If one wonders about the loyal opposition, it’s an interesting story too. One wonders how he felt when Saxby Chambliss, a then a Member of the House from Georgia who avoided service with “bad knees,” implied that Max Cleland, then the Senator from Georgia who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam was somehow not strong on defense. I guess not much has changed. Remember the pasting George McGovern got about being a pacifist. Maybe George knew something about war since he flew B-24s against the Ploesti Oil Fields in Romania during WWII (read Stephen Ambrose’s The Wild Blue).

Frankly, I could care less who wimped out when they had the chance to be men and who avoided serving their country when others did. They had their chance to be solid citizens and they decided to put their safety first. Now these same paragons of strong character are loudly asserting that they “will not shrink” from casualties or sacrifice. Maybe they have matured and now wish they had behaved otherwise in the past. Consider what Colin Powell said in his autobiography, My American Journey, p. 148:

I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed... managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units...Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.

While the cheerleaders and people with “other priorities” worked on their career paths toward the Harkens, Halliburtons, and Enrons of today, a lot of other people went in their place.  Consider these names. I count seven people from Midland who died in Vietnam in 1969-70. Which of these seven families sacrificed their son, father, or brother so that a prep-school cheerleader could have a chance to start a “business” career? One might also wonder if the voices calling loudly for war now ever think that a graduate of Southwest Texas State University went down in his C-130 near Nha Trang on 23 June 1969 so that they could have soft and comfortable lives. I liked one of the members of that crew and think he would have been a great American. But he did his duty when it was his turn. Not everyone did.

My biggest beef with Ed Evans, MGySgt., USMC (Ret.) is that he’s like too many people. He is afraid, he doesn’t know why, he isn’t curious enough to learn, and is wallowing in his fears. In fact, if one reads closely his words, it becomes clear that many, if not all, of his images were created by the movies. He seems to have spent a lot of time in the movies and seems to have his outlook framed there.

There are things to learn and things to do, but we won’t do the right things and won’t escape the darkness of our souls if we continue to remain ignorant, shivering in our suburban sterility, and being willing to be spoonfed our opinions by loud voices, voices who are able to be loud because they were too smart to have shouldered the load of citizenry back when it was unpopular and risky to do. It doesn’t take too much research to notice that we have been down these paths before.

In an eerily prescient book published in 1999, Fredrick Logevall commented on LBJ in 1964. (pp. 78-9 in Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam ).

His mind was excellent, fast and resourceful, but he had no interest in, or patience with, intellectual give and take. He sought only solutions to problems and tried whenever possible to avoid listening to the underlying rationales. …

In foreign policy matters, especially, Johnson lacked a detached critical perspective, which left him vulnerable to clichés and stereotypes about world affairs. Neither diplomatic history nor current international politics interested him (as more than a few visiting diplomats were quick to notice), and he was deeply insecure about his abilities as a statesman. …

This insecurity, well documented in the reflections of those who knew him well, helps explain two closely related tendencies in Johnson’s approach to Vietnam that were evident early and would prove highly important to policy making as time went on. One was his aversion to meeting with foreign diplomats or consulting with allied governments. …

In the years that followed, Johnson would seldom welcome, much less seek out, the opinions of allied government leaders on what should happen in Southeast Asia. As more and more of them came to oppose his Vietnam policy he looked for ways to avoid even speaking to them. Second, Johnson’s lack of confidence in foreign policy helped fuel his well-documented dislike of dissension on Vietnam policy, even among his closest advisors. …

Johnson, these advisers knew, would want various policy options articulated but, given both his temperament and his unambiguous exhortations in those first days, would not want deep and wide-ranging discussion of those options. Johnson’s craving for internal consensus led him to try to limit Vietnam policy formulation to a small group of advisers (the SecDef, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Advisor). All three had helped shape the policy under Kennedy and thus had a stake in making sure the policy succeeded.

They got their way and the country lost its way.

Not a good model to follow. I hope our current SecDef, SecState, and National Security Advisor would have read the book. I’m not sure the President has enough time in his schedule to be able to spend the time reading, but his staff should.

Back to the letter attributed to Ed Evans, MGySgt., USMC (Ret.). My dad was a retired Chief Master Sergeant who earned two Distinguished Flying Crosses in New Guinea in 1942-1944 and a Bronze Star in Vietnam in 1967-1968. I learned a lot about leadership from him and I learned a lot about thinking as well.

It would seem that one can learn as much from the library as from the movies, Ed. One would do well to develop some critical thinking about things that are important.