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(c)I travelled to Viet Nam to volunteer in a rehabilitation hospital for 3 weeks, spending 3-5 days in Bangkok before and after. I also spent a week in and with my old haunts on Guam Island, then returning on the 14 hour "island hopper"-Micronesia route(Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae, Kwajelin Islands) to Hawai'i.
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Being in Vietnam and SEAsia as an American, one can't help but Muse-ing on 'The American War' and Pacificism and parallels with the present 'war'.
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Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
--Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, NYC, on Viet Nam

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
--General Dwight D.Eisenhower

Wayne Morse - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"In 1964, he was one of only two United States Senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (Alaska U.S. Senator Ernest Gruening was the other), which authorized further United States involvement in the Vietnam War."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Morse


"The Lao civilian death count was astronomical. US B52 bombers could drop a hundred bombs at a time, and 580,000 bombing missions were conducted. The US dropped a planeload of bombs on Laos every eight minutes, day and night, for nine years from 1964 to 1973. That’s nearly two million tonnes of bombs – over half a tonne of bombs for every man, woman and child living in Laos.
Around a third of the population of Laos was killed, injured or made homeless by the air war – approximately a million people."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_Harvest