Who is Online

We have 69 guests and no members online

Recollections

The U-2 Incident - Powers and the Vietnam War

Details
Parent Category: History
Category: Recollections
Hits: 23306

Article Index

Page 5 of 7

Powers and the Vietnam War

But for Gary Powers Kennedy would undoubtedly have lost the extremely close 1960 Presidential Election to Nixon.  Then JFK and his brother would not have been assassinated.  What about Martin Luther King Jnr?

In particular it's unlikely that the Vietnam War would have escalated.  After the Berlin Wall;  the Bay of Pigs; and the Cuban Missile Crisis; Kennedy was said to be determined to 'draw a line in the sand' - for freedom.  The Eisenhower/Nixon White House is reported to have been more interested in Laos.

After the disasters of 1961 Kennedy is reported as telling the New York Times: "Now we have a problem making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place."  This choice had the added benefit helping out President Ngô Đình Diệm, the Vatican endorsed: 'Saviour of Vietnam', a fellow Roman Catholic who'd pleaded for US (and Australian) help to prevent the country falling to the Communists. 

Since the defeat of the French in Vietnam there had been US military advisers supporting the fragile government of South Vietnam that had been 'elected to power' by violently suppressing the opposition.  The governing Cần Lao Party thereafter claimed to be democratically elected but to be unable to hold further elections due to a state of martial law.  The leaders were a Roman Catholic elite in a country that was predominantly Buddhist.

Eventually even Kennedy would grow sick of the excesses of the poisonous Diệm Regime; temporally terminate diplomatic relations; and agree to a CIA supported coup in which two of the Diệm brothers were murdered.  See Vietnam on this website - scroll down and read more below the image of Notre Dame Cathedral Saigon. 

Nevertheless, by the time of Kennedy's own assassination there were over 15,000 US 'advisors' and around a hundred Australian 'advisors' and support people in Vietnam. His successor President Johnson (LBJ) would drop the pretence that these were non-combatants and  increase the number to 550,000; Australian personnel would rise to a peak of 7,672.  This commitment would only begin to decline after Nixon, eventually, won the 1968 Presidential election.

 

The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC
The names of 58,307 US fighting men and women who died in action and a further 1,626 missing in action
426 Australians also died in action and more later from the repercussions, including some I knew
Over two million Vietnamese: combatants (on both sides) and civilians also died
The communists won in the end but to what end?  See Vietnam on this website

 

 

 

No comments

Travel

Canada and the United States - Part1

 

 

In July and August 2023 Wendy and I travelled to the United States again after a six-year gap. Back in 2007 we visited the east coast and west coast and in 2017 we visited 'the middle bits', travelling down from Chicago via Memphis to New Orleans then west across Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and California on our way home.

So, this time we went north from Los Angeles to Seattle, Washington, and then into Canada. From Vancouver we travelled by car, over the Rockies, then flew east to Toronto where we hired a car to travel to Ottawa and Montreal. Our next flight was all the way down to Miami, Florida, then to Fort Lauderdale, where we joined a western Caribbean cruise.  At the end of the cruise, we flew all the way back up to Boston.

Seems crazy but that was the most economical option.  From Boston we hired another car to drive, down the coast, to New York. After New York we flew to Salt Lake City then on to Los Angeles, before returning to OZ.

As usual, save for a couple of hotels and the cars, Wendy did all the booking.

Breakfast in the Qantas lounge on our way to Seattle
Wendy likes to use two devices at once

Read more: Canada and the United States - Part1

Fiction, Recollections & News

The Meaning of Death

 

 

 

 

 

 

'I was recently restored to life after being dead for several hours' 

The truth of this statement depends on the changing and surprisingly imprecise meaning of the word: 'dead'. 

Until the middle of last century a medical person may well have declared me dead.  I was definitely dead by the rules of the day.  I lacked most of the essential 'vital signs' of a living person and the technology that sustained me in their absence was not yet perfected. 

I was no longer breathing; I had no heartbeat; I was limp and unconscious; and I failed to respond to stimuli, like being cut open (as in a post mortem examination) and having my heart sliced into.  Until the middle of the 20th century the next course would have been to call an undertaker; say some comforting words then dispose of my corpse: perhaps at sea if I was travelling (that might be nice); or it in a box in the ground; or by feeding my low-ash coffin into a furnace then collect the dust to deposit or scatter somewhere.

But today we set little store by a pulse or breathing as arbiters of life.  No more listening for a heartbeat or holding a feather to the nose. Now we need to know about the state of the brain and central nervous system.  According to the BMA: '{death} is generally taken to mean the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness combined with the irreversible loss of capacity to breathe'.  In other words, returning from death depends on the potential of our brain and central nervous system to recover from whatever trauma or disease assails us.

Read more: The Meaning of Death

Opinions and Philosophy

Jihad

  

 

In my novella The Cloud I have given one of the characters an opinion about 'goodness' in which he dismisses 'original sin' as a cause of evil and suffering and proposes instead 'original goodness'.

Most sane people want to 'do good', in other words to follow that ethical system they were taught at their proverbial 'mother's knee' (all those family and extended influences that form our childhood world view).

That's the reason we now have jihadists raging, seemingly out of control, across areas of Syria and Iraq and threatening the entire Middle East with their version of 'goodness'. 

Read more: Jihad

Terms of Use

Terms of Use                                                                    Copyright