On Saturday, I visited a mass grave site in the tiny town of An Loc where my host told me 3,000 Vietnamese were buried (with bulldozers) after an unimaginable bombing campaign in the summer of 1972.
The Southern Liberation Army basically controlled the entire area around the 15,000 person town, but a small, sad band of about 6,000 ARVN soldiers (aided by a shitload of American bombs) managed to “hold it” by reducing the place to utter rubble.
My host and I visited a badly damaged school that they left standing where he told me that his mother-in-law, who was giving birth in town at the time, recalled that the streets literally ran red with blood.
I know I ramble on about these things, but they are worth remembering. Because to not remember them allows weasels to get up and suggest that we need to keep on killing people in Afghanistan or Iraq so that no one can accuse us of pulling another Vietnam.
Later that day, I was reminded of just such a weasel when I read a stupefying NY Times piece about the retirement of Senator Joe Lieberman.
It seems that Lieberman’s long-overdue departure could (gasp) “remove the veneer of bipartisanship” from John McCain and Lindsey Graham’s hawkish international agenda.
The whole thing is written like a cheerleader’s inscription in her prom date’s senior yearbook.
Lieberman was the ultimate whore, a man whose own dickless party finally turned on him after he spent nearly a decade jacking neocons off on the senate floor.
I’m still trying to figure out if whether this bizarre homage (framed as the departure of the third amigo) is a work of pure satirical genius or insensate dumbness.
Are we supposed to laugh? Cry? Throw up a little in our mouths? Or all of the above?
I leave you, dear reader, to decide:
“The amigos say they will miss their travels, watching Borat films, walking together after dark on Friday nights instead of driving so Mr. Lieberman could observe the Sabbath and visiting with troops.
Mr. Lieberman remembers going to Vietnam with Mr. McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war there after his plane was shot down over Hanoi. ‘Going with McCain to the Hanoi Hilton for me was quite an emotional experience,’ Mr. Lieberman said, noting that there is a statue of Mr. McCain where his plane was shot down.
‘We complained to our Vietnamese hosts that the statue was much too small and not at all grand enough,’ he said. ‘They claimed they would replace it.”
![I took down the following monologue during breakfast at my hotel in Hanoi. The speaker was a middle-aged German tourist traveling with his aged mother:
[Summoning manager] Boss, boss!
Today is a sad day because we are leaving your hotel.
We must go to Huế and learn more about your country. I want to congratulate you on being such a fine Vietnamese person. I really like the way you treat people.Just like in Thailand—better than in Thailand! Most Vietnamese people are worse than in Thailand.
But not you.
I think you should open an academy to train people to be more like you. We could make a lot of money!
Shortly after he finished, I was arrested for putting him in a headlock and pouring fish sauce up his nostrils.
Just kidding.
When the cops arrived and I told them what the guy had said they all gave me high-fives.
Just kidding.
I quietly took down what he said and muttered about it for a week afterwards like a giant pussy.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5uua41ca01qbnzxeo1_1280.jpg)
