4. Holy Wars

CAUTION: SMOKING MAY BE HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH

Meerschaum Pipe w/coral snake Made in early '80s
©2010

That pipe was made for an old fishing buddy in Wisconsin. He lived in a small town and he was angry about the people who drove too fast down his street. Well, I'd been listening to him for years and his answer to most problems ended with "Shoot the Bastards!" He had convinced town hall to hire him as a constable. I wondered how he was gonna do but he surprised me. He had to be certified and he took what he learned in the process very seriously. And his opinions changed. I did two more pipes for him to give to his police buddies.

IT ALWAYS AMAZES ME
How little respect Christians have for their Gods.

First these Christians pretend to be afraid of God. At the same time if they see any sort of slight of their God they rush to his defense. They take it as a given that it is their job to protect the creator of the universe from people who don't believe in him. If God really cared he'd do what he did at the Passover. Kill the bastards. He hasn't done it since, though. Humans have done his dirty work since the Exodus. When I was a young man I was sent off to Vietnam to "kill a commie for Christ." Well, it seems to me that if He could kill all the first born in Egypt, He could kill all the commies in Nam if He really wanted them dead. It was us who wanted God to outsource the job to us.

I remember graduating from high school in the mid '60s with Vietnam staring me in the face. No big deal. I had family in the military back to the Civil War at least. It was my turn. My dad was in the navy during WWII and he didn't have anything bad to say about it. Now it was my turn. I was a believer. Commies were atheists. They had to die. If we didn't kill 'em over there we'd hafta fight 'em over here. That's what it was like.

We're still fighting 'em , for jobs. The Vietnamese refugees who made it here are smart and hardworking, tough competition for lazy white union raised narcissists who didn't pay attention in school, us boomers. The Vietnamese refugees knew from experience with our military that there was lots of money being thrown away around here and they wanted some of it.

I still remember a bumper sticker from that era. "My Country Right or Wrong". I also remember the first time I saw that motto. It was written in German in wrought iron above the gate of a Nazi concentration camp. My favorite bumper sticker from those days was "Grumpy hippies smoke crab grass." But I digress.

I weighed my options. I had a connection in the local reserve band and I might have gotten into that but I decided a two year draftee life was better than the six years you had to do as a reservist. I checked out enlisting in the army band but that was a four year enlistment and I figured two years was plenty. I'd take my chances with the infantry. As it happened, the army at that time was about 90% support troops. I was a clerk in a place called Long Binh, the largest military installation in the world at that time. About a half hour drive from Saigon, the place had acres of just beer.

For more detail click A REMF IN NAM up top of the page.

It took me about two months to come to the conclusion that we weren't the good guys. Remember, us boomers grew up with The Lone Ranger. He shot silver bullets and never to kill, only disarm. We grew up with Victory. We were the good guys. I had come of age in The Golden Age of America.

'Course, I had also read CATCH 22 so I knew about a guy named Milo Minderbinder. (If you don't, google him). I knew he wasn't a good guy, yet there I was in Nam surrounded by vast herds of Milo Minderbinder clones. Apparently after WWII he had opened a business school.

Well, dammit, free enterprise shouldn't be free! If you drove around Saigon the streets were lined with vendors just like the midway at a county fair, all selling items from our supply depots. They weren't stolen by the vendors. They were stolen by American soldiers and sold to them. There were American officers playing the currency black market even though everyone knew Charlie ran that market to help them pay for the war. In late 1969 the Sergeant Major Of The Army and his cronies were busted for graft. That just scratched the surface of the tip of an iceberg of corruption. I'm convinced we played an active, supporting role in our own defeat.

Yet we were doing it all for God. We hated commies because they were atheists. Before I went to Nam my church handed us Vietnam bound boys steel jacketed New Testaments. We were going off to a holy war. If we put those little books near our hearts God would look after us. That is, if we looked after him by killing people who don't believe in him, plus a lot of people who just happened to be in the neighborhood. Collateral damage. Couldn't be helped. Charlie hid among them.

God knows all. Time means nothing to him. He has 20/20 hindsight AND foresight. He knows ahead of time how things will work. He wrote the RULES for cryin' out loud. He knows that the real money was being made by the contractors. We planted that country with more ordnance than was dropped in all of WWII. Flying over it you saw craters to the horizon in all directions. That and mini guns that fired dense streams of bullets from cargo planes. At night you would see them intermittently from a distance, a long glowing, undulating snake that went from the ground to a point in space, followed by a long high pitched note. It could put a bullet in every square foot of a football field in seconds.

That's what we did for God, yet he still lost. By the time I'd been home for a couple of years my old church, along with many others, had changed it's mind and was now saying that Vietnam was an immoral war. Whoa! God is never wrong! Well, the churches just never admitted that they'd changed their minds. The truth is, there were so many church members against the war that they were afraid of losing $$. With friends like Christians, God doesn't need enemies.

Speaking of enemies, the people who can't live with the thought that their ancestry might include some chimpanzee like critters. You're saying that the rest of God's creation is somehow second rate, a minor league to a human major league? Yet you also insist that all humans are sinners, the only species of which that can be said. So, it a truly significant way we are BENEATH all the other fauna of planet Earth. Quite frankly, a puddle filled with algae is if more benefit to the planet than a lot of the people I've worked with over a lifetime. As for divine creation, I don't think the universe was created by someone in order to coerce a single species from a single planet to kiss his ass.

No. Belief in god requires a core belief that coercion is divine. It's more of a hardwired personality disorder, a symptom of paranoia. After spending millions of years clawing our way up from the middle of the food chain it's no wonder we're scared of the dark.

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