Ducking Into a Catering Truck

Ducking Into a Catering Truck

It looks as if the Bone Spur-In-Chief, Donald Trump, is up to his old ways of avoiding responsibility in war. Ducking into a catering truck is hardly behavior becoming to anyone, save those who operate catering trucks or those seeking refuge from the weather.

Trump was in Turkey for a NATO meeting when he likely fell into a ruse of Israeli intelligence. He left others on the tarmac to suffer the unlikely consequences of that ruse.

Mr. Trump is good at ducking responsibility, as he did that during the Vietnam War with a diagnosis of bone spurs. He was one of hundreds of thousands who sought to avoid that hideous war of aggression against nations with which the US had no strategic interests. The domino theory was built on sand and a quagmire; massive bombing in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and a genocide in Cambodia resulted.

As a war resister and veteran from that era, but not of that war, I paid close attention to fellow resister and journalist, the late David Harris, in his book Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us (1996). I paid particular attention to another draft resister or avoider, Bill Clinton, depending on your particular view, and the machinations he brought to that war as another draft and military avoider.

Much has been written about those who got out of that war, like Trump and Clinton, and some other warmongering Republicans in the George W. Bush administration, and whether or not avoidance without a personal price achieved much. Although the dictates of social class (working-class and lower middle-class soldiers paid the highest price in Vietnam) catapulted draft resisters above military resisters, it was within the military that resistance made its greatest impact. Many soldiers refused commanders’ orders as the war went on and on and on with catastrophic tolls on the people of Southeast Asia and US GIs. While getting out of the draft at any cost may have had short-term effects on the US war-fighting capability, the war only ended when no plausible reason for continuing could be raised and so many resisted from within the ranks of the military. The communist dominoes did not fall and Southeast Asia was left in tatters. Right into the present, unexploded ordinance kills and maims people, including children.