A Nurse Encounters a Soldier

Jeannine, shown visiting with family
 on Lake Winnipesaukee, NH.
(Bergeron Image.)

Yesterday, our family received this e-mail from Priscille’s sister Jeannine, who lives in Florida.  Although J. is now retired, she has had a long career in nursing, most of it with the VNA in Connecticut.  Always helpful, always cheerful, J. will go out of her way, always offering kindness and hospitality to others.

Below is J’s unedited account of her serendipitous encounter on Friday with one of America’s heroes, an Afghanistan veteran.  It is presented below in its entirety and with her permission.

"Good morning to all:  Would like to share a little story which shows how paying it forward can be rewarding to all of us.

Yesterday afternoon on my way back from running errands, I decided to stop at Five Guys to use the rest of a gift card.  In line in front of me, was a young man with a Vietnam emblem on a vest and on a cap as well.  He had 2 leg braces, 2 arm braces and crutches and was struggling to get to his wallet.

A Symbol with Impact

Tonight the President will lay out his case for more U.S. troops to be deployed in Afghanistan. He will deliver his speech from the United States Military Academy at West Point, in New York State.

It’s a first, because modern presidents have delivered such addresses to the nation from the Oval Office. I don’t know why he has chosen that venue. Presumably he will explain it this evening.

But I firmly believe that if he wanted a symbol for expanding the war, then he could have chosen a location that depicts much more graphically the results of warfare – our dead and wounded – like, for example, the site of the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial.

I was there Sunday, and I assure you, my respected readers, that The Wall and the statues underscore the carnage of that conflict much more realistically than the one the President chose to rationalize what he is about to do. But if he delivered that address near The Wall, what impact would it have on his credibility?

Photo by Dick Bergeron:  Vietnam Nurses War Memorial, Washington, D.C.

An Afternoon of Reflection in Washington, D.C.

With the Thanksgiving holiday coming to an end this Sunday and the good weather making it feel more like early spring, Priscille and I, as guests of the Potomac, Maryland branch of the family, decided to drive into our nation’s Capital. Destination: the war memorials, all within easy walking distance of each other.

I wanted very much to visit those places of reverence again, because America is now at a critical juncture in its multi-front struggle against the extreme elements of worldwide, violent Jihadist terrorism.

Early in the afternoon, we paid our respects at The Vietnam War Nurses Memorial; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall; the statues of The Three Soldiers; the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the World War II Memorial.

It was my second visit to those shrines, and the one which has always tugged at me most is The Vietnam Wall: It’s all those seemingly endless names etched on black stone remembering Americans who never returned home. And the whispered silence of visitors as they walk slowly along the rise and fall of that great stone wall, stopping randomly, touching the stone at times, staring at those names, and waiting for an explanation. “Why?”

Vietnam cost America dearly in blood, money and spirit. The war against Jihadist extremists, a very real threat to the West, will cost us just as dearly if it is as badly directed from Washington as was that long-ago conflict in the rice paddies, jungles and tunnels of Vietnam.

AIG, Obama & the Domino Theory

Last year, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson of the Bush Administration gave us a single untested reason why the federal government should pump billions into AIG. Under President Obama, current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner continues to endorse that policy: It is that AIG is too big to fail. The theory holds that because of its size, an AIG failure poses “a systemic risk” which would spread throughout the financial system.

This is like telling us that the financial system resembles a set of dominoes all lined up half an inch from each other. AIG, it’s implied, is the first domino in the string and, if that one is knocked down, all the others will collapse in succession. We are presented with no other options. In the 1960’s the nation fell for that line of reasoning and paid dearly for it.

Those of you who are old enough to remember the months preceding the Vietnam War (and you young ones who should have been taught the causes of that war in school) may remember that Americans were told the same thing.

The rationale for war was officially called “the domino theory.” The United States could not afford to let Vietnam fall to the communists. To do so would result in other Southeast Asian countries to be overrun by communism.

To assure that this would not happen, the U.S. dispatched thousands of young American soldiers to Vietnam; failed to support them in a bungled military operation; spent billions; and lost the war. All that and, after a disorderly American retreat, Communist North Vietnam took over the entire country.

The infamous domino theory used to justify the Vietnam War was a feckless assumption. The other dominoes did not fall.

See the connection? We are now being sold a similar financial domino theory that if AIG is allowed to go down, the other firms in the financial world will go under. Perhaps. But Americans have not been presented with alternative, less costly and more market-oriented alternatives.

Like the Vietnam era domino theory, we are expected to blindly follow the “experts,” just like those Johnson era presidential advisors, Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy who kept President Lyndon Johnson in that war to its bitter end, and ruined his chances for re-election.