[lbo-talk] Who knew? John McCain on disability, gets checks

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Jun 15 17:56:13 PDT 2008


moominek at aol.com wrote:
>
> Carrol wrote:
>
> It would of course have been politically unthinkable, but in purely
> judicial terms the Vietnamese would have been justified in executing all
> captured pilots.
>
> Why?
> In the not so communist, but eastern?block eastgerman Army the?dealing with POWs was only a theoretical question.
> But we?have been told never ever to touch a POW.?The Hague convention is quite clear in such issues and the Penal Code of the not so communist, but eastern block east Germany had a special article (280) against the mistreatment of POWs.

Sure. It was correct/necessary/humane/etx to treat U.S. pilots as POWs. But juridcally they weren't. The U.S. had not declared war on Vietnamj -- the bombing raids were no more valid than was 9/11. The U.S. wants to execute someone only marginally connected to that bombing. Incidentally, those raids included bombs deliberately set not to go off on landing. That is why a young Vietnamese woman my daughter met in Cuba was the only surviving member of a bomb disposal squad in Hanoi: unexploded bombs lying about the city, which would explode under unpredictable circumstances, made a nice terrorist weapon. She gave my daughter a pin, still around the house someplace, a DRV flag: the pin was made from the aluminum of a B-52 that had been shot down.

Carrol

"POW/MIA"

I. In the jungle of years,

lost voices are calling. Long

are the memories,

bitterly long the waiting,

and the names of the missing and dead

wander

disembodied

through a green tangle

of rumors and lies,

gliding like shadows among vines.

II. Somewhere, the rumors go,

men still live in jungle prisons.

Somewhere in Hanoi, the true believers

know,

the bodies of four hundred servicemen

lie on slabs of cold

communist hate.

III. Mothers, fathers,

wives and lovers,

sons and daughters,

touch your empty fingers to your lips

and rejoice

in your sacrifice and pain:

your loved ones' cause

was noble,

says the state.

IV. In March of 1985, the wreckage

of a plane was found in Laos.

Little remained of the dead:

rings, bone chips, burned

bits of leather and cloth;

for thirteen families,

twenty years of hope

and rumors

turned acid on the soul

by a single chance discovery.

V. Our enemies are legion,

says the state;

let bugles blare

and bang the drum slowly,

bang the drum.

VI. God forgive me, but I've seen

that triple-canopied green

nightmare of a jungle

where a man in a plane could go down

unseen, and never be found

by anyone.

Not ever.

There are facts,

and there are facts;

when the first missing man

walks alive out of that green tangle

of rumors and lies,

I shall lie

down silent as a jungle shadow,

and dream the sound of insects

gnawing bones.

W.D. Ehrhart



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