There have been a number of genocides in the last 100 years.  Some we know about, some are known to historians.  Unfortunately some are downplayed because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

The world has been forced to acknowledge the Holocaust.  At least six million Jews were murdered as well as a couple of million other undesirables.  The first step in the process was to make sure that everybody knew that they were not you.

If a politician stands up and screams his hate of everybody, he gets ignore.  Since you are part of “everybody” you know his target includes you.

But if the same politician screams his hate of those people and you are not part of those people then it isn’t your problem.

This is the first step in successful propaganda.  To separate “you” from “them.”

In a recent post we talked about how the first gun control laws were targeted at blacks.  Because most of the people of power in the places where Jim Crow and Black Code  were being passed were white they knew that the laws did not apply to them.  The powers that be had created a division between the two groups that allowed people to ignore what was being done to “them”.

In war, we use propaganda to dehumanize our enemies.  This is what allows a good man to kill another man.  Sometimes the man he is attempting to kill is himself a good man.

During military trials in the era of the musket, armies would put up cloth targets to represent a group of soldiers.  We are talking of a target yards in length and 2 to 3 yards tall.

To evaluate they used a combat formation (100+ men?) that were arranged in three ranks.  On command the first row would fire a volley.  The two rows behind would march forward and the row that just fired would begin reloading. The new first row would fire.  This would continue in a continuous progression to put rounds on target.

And in most of these trials the firearms were more than capable of putting many rounds through that large target.

But in battle the results were much worse.  At the time it was believed that the stress was causing the soldiers to miss.  Today there is research that strongly suggests that many soldiers were firing to intentionally miss.

It requires propaganda to train a good man to not see another man in his sights, but instead something that isn’t really a human.  A target, the enemy.

During WWI there was an unofficial ceasefire near Christmas and the men in the trenches came out, exchanged rations, played soccer and in short celebrated being alive and it being Christmas.

Afterwards command had to move the troops to other areas because the troops had identified with their enemies to the point where they were no longer combat effective.

Unfortunately there is a step past othering that propaganda can go.  That is the process of dehumanizing the enemy/target.

In Germany the propaganda targeted Jews as non-human. They were depicted as rats, disease carriers.  All of the countries problems could be traced back to the rats.  The rats brought the economic ruin that Germany was seeing.  The rats were taking all the wealth from the country.  The rats were eating fine foods and drinking fine wines while your baby cried from hunger.

Wouldn’t it be better if we just took all the stuff the rats had collected?  It could be put to much better use by the good people of Germany.

So when the brown shirts were destroying Jewish owned businesses, when the Jews were being removed from all public offices, when the Jews were having their life savings confiscated, it was for the good of Germany.  It was just taking from the rats, not people at all.

The next Genocides took place in communist controlled countries.  Since they were good little communists the media hid the horrific results from the people of the US (and Western Europe).

In these communists countries the “rats” were those that were successful.  It was impossible for the successful to have become successful without cheating.  Bosses didn’t add anything to the value of what was produced so they were worthless parasites.

Owning land meant you were wealthy and that meant that you were cheating.  If you weren’t cheating than your neighbors would be as wealthy as you.

Of note is the fact that they took all the land from the land owners and then gave it out equally to all of the peasants.  A few years later the communists came through and took the land away from the successful farmers.  It seems that when people start at a equal point and with a level playing field, some do better than others.

The only way to have equality of outcome is to have everybody fail.

Regardless, the process of treating “them” as less than human allowed the communists to kill well over 100 million people.  The real number is unlikely to ever be known.  And they did it on the cheap.

Having to have propaganda posters that read “Remember, it is wrong to eat your children” (Unverified, I’m unable to find an image of this supposed poster) because they were being starved to death in the Holodomor is an indication of the causal evil that takes place when “they” are no longer “humans”.

The latest known Genocide took place in Rwanda.

(Take the following with a grain of salt.  I’ve read about it and done a little studying of the Rwandan Genocide but I am not an expert)

As the Europeans left africa they left a power vacuum in their place.  Because Europeans like to have nice boundaries between political entities, this vacuum was going to lead to horrible things..  Europeans used things  like rivers for boundaries.  On this side of that river is Germany and on this side is France.  Mountain ranges also worked.  Anything that can be used as a visible boundary worked.

Many societies with lower tech levels don’t use rivers as boundaries but instead claim both sides of the river.  Thus a tribe in Africa, prior to the Europeans taking over, would own a distance up and down a river on both sides.  Their neighboring tribe would own the next river over.  The boundary between the tribes was “just known” and in fact might be very loosely defined.

It didn’t make that much of a difference because there was likely intertribal raiding and fighting going on.

When the Europeans took over they said “Enough of this “just know” crap, that river is the boundary of this colony and that river over there is the other side of the colony.”

In so doing they almost always ended up with multiple tribes living in the colony and each tribe split by the river.

As long as the Europeans were there to rule with an iron fist, the natives were forced to behave in a semi-civilized way toward each other.

Add to that a level of arrogance on the part of the Europeans of “All Blacks look the same” and you suddenly have two tribes being treated the same, not always well, but the same.  And the Europeans being pretty oblivious that they were forcing cultural enemies into close proximity with each other.

While the left talks about the noble native there isn’t any such creature.  While many natives had survival skills that the Europeans didn’t have, in most cases they really were at the lowest of tech levels.

The natives of north America did not use the wheel.  They had other means of transporting goods but they didn’t use the wheel.

The history that was taught in the 1960’s and 70’s said that the natives taught the Pilgrims how to plant and tend crops.  The big one that they taught was “The Europeans were so stupid they didn’t know how to fertilize their crops.  The Indians taught them to plant corn in clumps with fish heads at the base as fertilizer.”

The fact of the matter was that the Pilgrims were pretty ignorant about being first touch colonists.  They had trained in arms.  They were expecting to arrive much further south at one of the established colonies, such as Jamestown, where they expected to hire out as armed guards and to be able to purchase goods and services in exchange for what they brought with them and their skills in arms.

Instead they landed near what is now Boston.  They were totally unprepared to do survival living.  Of course the natives had things to teach them.

This argument is sort of like telling a master cabinet maker that he now has to raise his own crops.  The man could build everything you need in your home but might have a hard time identifying the south end of a mule.

The “noble savage” was busy kidnapping his neighbors, stealing their food, attempting to gather enough food and hunt enough protean to survive.  They weren’t creating great works of civilization.  They didn’t need to.  They were violent, dirty, and short lived.

To put this in perspective, Thomas Sowell points out that the Scottish people in the same time period or a little before were just as savage, just as violent and also struggling to survive.

Digression aside, as the Europeans left Africa, turning the different countries over to the natives, they didn’t pay attention to the fact that they were turning over the country to two or more tribes that had ancient hates for each other.  Think “Hatfields vs. McCoys” of Appalachia fame.

They hated each other with such burning hate for reasons that nobody could really remember.

Add to that, they were often physically different from each other.  Tribes tended to have enough inbreeding that natives of one tribe looked different from all other tribes.

This is the set up for the Genocide of Rwanda.

The germans took control of Rwanda around 1885 and turned it over to Belgium around 1916 as part of the League of Nations.  In 1945 it transitioned into a Belgian/UN trust territory.  They were granted their independence in 1962.

The country had two primary tribes, the Tutsis and the Hutus.  They country switched from being in control of one faction to being in the control of the other faction.  Because of the tribal split, when the Hutus took control the Tutsis were able to go to neighboring Uganda where they joined with the Tutsis living in Uganda and together they attacked Rwanda.

The Tutsis wanted concessions so that they could still live in Rwanda, safely.  The Hutus were scared the Tutsis wanted to take control back.  Sort of like Democrats are scared of Republicans taking control of the country back.

This was a civil war that went on for 4 years.

During that time the Hutus were in control of the government.  They started broadcasting anti-tutsis propaganda.

Whereas the Germans called the Jews “rats”, the Hutus called the Tutsis “cockroaches”.

The government controlled radio station would broadcast this sort of propaganda with a never ending drum beat.  Comedians would make jokes about “cockroaches” and everybody knew what they meant.  They meant Tutsis.

Sort of like when late night comics today make fun of conservatives.  Or those idiots in flyover country.  What?  You can’t take a joke?

Look at the political cartoons in any major publication, you’ll find that the overwhelming percentage is pro left and nasty to the right.

The right is evil.  They right wants to destroy.  The right will force you to be host mothers.  The right will force you back into the closet.

The right doesn’t understand it is simply being polite to give in.  The right is violent.  The right is extreme.

It goes on and on, day after day.  I’ve been called so many nasty names by people that I’ve never meet since Obama was elected that I’ve lost track.  I wear them like a badge.  I don’t remember this level of vitriol from prior to 2008.

The joke was always the Republicans think of Democrats as stupid, Democrats think of Republicans as evil.

Today we are continuing to see that drum beat of dehumanizing language applied to conservatives, gun owners, Republicans and just about anybody to the right of Stalin.

It is starting to seep into the general conscious.

When Sunny Hostin on The View says “I read a poll just yesterday that White Republican suburban women are now going to vote Republican. It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid, right?” she likely isn’t smart enough to know the insult.

She was attempting to say that these women are voting against their best interests.  The problem is that the narrative has perculated around her so much that she is causally racists and thinks nothing of comparing her enemy to cockroaches.

This is the power of Propaganda.

My father was a Republican for all the time I lived with my parents.  They were conservative even when the rest of the family was not.  He and my mother are not Democrats.  They turned into leftists when Obama took office and have stayed that way ever since.  They had full on TDS.

My wife got an email from my father telling her to vote for the democrat for Senate this month because the Republican was an right wing extremists that will destroy our democracy.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?!?! This is the same man that taught me that we are a Republic.  That to be conservative means to think things through.  The lessons he taught me still live within me.  I’m proud of my father.  I can’t stand to talk to him as his TDS has now developed to the point where he considers me to be evil because I don’t sing the praises of Joe Biden (and I own firearms)

Keep an eye on the words they use.  Note how those words and phrases start to seep into other parts of our culture.

Stay armed and vigilant.  It is going to get spicy out there.  I hope it doesn’t happen anytime soon, but it is still wise to keep your head on a swivel.  Stay gray, keep alert.

This article was edited because even AWA couldn’t stand the vast number of grammar errors and wrong words in it.  There is still likely more.

We were hopeful that when the Bruen opinion came out that it would be inline with what the Constitution actually said.  What Thomas did was so much better than what I was hoping for.

It is important to understand how they attack the second amendment.  The words are clear and easy to understand.  Yet somehow they have been able to twist it to mean what they want it to mean.

“A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

I’m sure I didn’t get the capitalization correct, but I did it from memory, just as you should be able to.

For the first hundred plus years everybody knew what it meant and it wasn’t important.  It wasn’t important because nobody was really passing any real infringements.  The first infringements showed up in the “black code” or “jim crow” laws after the civil war.  It was clear that the goal of those laws was to disarm the newly freed blacks.

Nobody that was not black was concerned because they knew those laws did not apply to them.

The first federal infringements happened in 1934.  Congress evaluated the Constitution and decided that the second amendment meant what it said.  Yet congress wanted to stop a certain class of people from getting firearms.  Since they couldn’t ban firearms of any sort they decided to make it to expensive.

Today you can buy a suppressor for $900+ and a $200 tax stamp.  I.e. a 20% tax.  In 1934 you could buy a suppressor for $5-$10.  That makes it a 2000% tax.  It was “only” a 150% tax on a Thompson but these were the sorts of prices that took it out of the reach of normal people.

For perspective, the median home value in 1934 was $4971.  Disposable income per capita was $5,579.  That would mean that the tax stamp would be about 3.6% of yearly disposable income.   The equivalent would be around $3500 today.

What happened after that was two fold “no right is unlimited, you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater” and “It is all about the militia.”

The “all about the militia” came because of a statement in the Miller decision.  “…has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia…”  The justices were talking about a particular weapon, a shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length.  NOT about who was guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms, just that this weapon was of military use.

It is also important to note this phrase in the decision “not within judicial notice”.  This phrase means that the justices know more than what was presented to them but because it was not presented they are not allowed to notice it.  This is why arguing before the Supreme Court is so different than any other type of courtroom interaction.  The justices are intent on getting evidence on the record.  As soon as that evidence is presented the justices can examine more.

This is a positive change in how the court works.

The “there is no unlimited rights” is both true and false.  I am a free speech absolutist. If you want to swear and cuss in your blog go for it.  I do not care.  If you want to say moronic things.  Enjoy your mental masterbation.If you want to spew hate from your soapbox, so be it.

But I do have my limit.  Child pornogrophy.  You can be sick and read and write that sick stuff, I don’t care.  But as soon as you point a camera at a child it is too much.  At that point I want J.Kb. to have a week of uninterrupted time with you to do what he wants to you.

The “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater” was not a part of any supreme court opinion.  It was written as an aside.  The entire case was overturned and is dead as precedence.  It was a horrible case where the justices ruled that it was constitutional for the government to limit the handing out of political pamphlets.

So it is these exclamation words and phrases that are used to “justify” infringements.  The court never said that the second amendment was a collective right.  Until the infringers wanted to infringe everybody knew it was an individual right.  But because of that phrase the lower courts latched on to the 2nd was a collective right and thus no individual had the right to keep and bear arms.  The fact that you got to own any guns was just the government being beneficent.

We saw the same thing happen in 2008.  The court opinion says “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes”.  This makes it absolutely clear that the right is an individual right and that you can use that arm for any lawful purpose.  Pretty darn clear.

The justices went so far as to give an example of a lawful purpose: “such as self-defense within the home.”

The lower courts, instead of accepting “for traditional lawful purposes” instead latched on to the example “self-defense within the home.”

In the Bruen decision the same sort of thing is happening.  First the infringers have latched onto “some infringements are allowed” and “there are some places which can be designated gun free zones(sensitive places)”

And this is what they are doing.  They are doing their best to create so many sensitive places that it isn’t possible to carry without running afoul of a sensitive place with all that entails.

The example I use is the post office.  Currently the post office is considered a gun free zone.  It hasn’t been explicitly declared a sensitive location but I’m sure they will.  Not only did the government declare that the post office is a gun free zone, but so is the parking lot and all post office property.

This means that if I pull through their parking lot to drop a letter into the mailbox without disarming I’m in violation of a federal infringement.

Ignoring the slow walk of cases that are going on, we are starting to see how this is playing out.

A federal district court judge in Alabama has stated that researching the intent of the 2nd amendment in 1791 isn’t possible because so many historians have differing opinions.  He shouldn’t be doing history.  The Supreme court got it wrong because they didn’t take into account that the founding fathers were all white racists.

If the courts are able to bring historians into the court to make the decisions on what is and is not what was going on in 1791 what will happen is that the infringers will have their list of go to “historians” funded by Bloomberg to say that every infringement has a history and tradition at the right time in history.

And the courts will then be back to judging which group is right and we know how that goes.  They won’t be doing their job.

We are also seeing judges attempting to limit what is covered by the 2nd amendment.  To paraphrase one judge in California “The clear reading of the second amendment makes no mention of manufacturing firearms so bans on home manufactured firearms and precursors is constitutional.”

This would allow them to drive firearm manufacturers out of business and ban you from making your own.  We’ve already seen how the government has passed laws limiting what firearms can be imported into the US.

We are seeing some wins but in limited scope.  Whereas when a leftist gets a judge to issue an injection it is for the broadest swarf possible. Under Trump some two bit federal district court in granola land hears a case and issues an injection stopping a presidential executive order, nationwide.  When a judge finds for a conservative we end up with a “hold for the state to appeal” and “only affects the people in the case.”

This is what we are seeing in a case in NY(?) The judge has stated that the ATFs redefinition of frames and receivers is unconstitutional and issued an injunction but that injunction only allows the plaintiffs and their customers to continue to buy unserialized 80%s.  All other sellers of 80% lowers and frames are still restricted from doing so.

It is currently so bad that all the resellers of 80% had to remove instructions from their sites.  Having instructions meant that the ATF declared the 80% hunk-o-aluminum or plastic to be a firearm.

While the limit on the injunction isn’t good, the Judge did tell the state to go pound sand when they asked for a hold while the case was litigated.  The judge said that it was obviously unconstitutional and any right delayed is a right denied.

A fisking we shall go?

About once a day I stumble on an article that is filled with half truths and lies about guns, gun laws and other second amendment issues. Some of those seem to travel far and wide with nobody calling BS on them.

I’ve started fisking one such article.

Let me know if you want more fisking articles.  Feel free to send us articles you’d like us to fisk.

Feel free to let loose below and give us some feedback.

The first firearm reached the New World in 1492

This might be true but is dependent on nobody else having reached the new world.  There are indications of other peoples getting to the new world before the Europeans.  But likely true.  Of course the article leaves out the fact that the Chinese invented gunpowder long before and did have some cannon like things.

While they then put up the old saw that people were only firing 3 rounds per minute.  Even though there were air rifles that fired much faster and a sort of automatic gun based on muzzle loading and black powder.

Record climb in background checks during the COVID-19 pandemic

And the records keep being broken.  The article seems to feel that there was no reason for people arming themselves, because everybody was locked down, socially distancing and businesses were closed.  They just happened to leave out that there were a great deal of “mostly peaceful protests” and that violence seemed to be escalating.

Americans purchased more firearms in 2020 and 2021 than at any point in the nation’s history

Good for them!  And they are buying more this year than last year.  Seems to be a trend.

The Second Amendment is at odds with modern politics

<blockquote>The Constitutional definition regarding “the right to bear arms” is questionable in an age of mass shootings, dividing many Americans whose opinions on gun ownership differ. The Atlantic reports that while the “contextual reading is quite enlightening” in the amendment, its initial and sole purpose was to permit U.S. states to create armed militias legally.</blockquote>

And the not lie lie.  They didn’t say it, <i>The Atlantic</i> reports it.  If they got it wrong, sorry.  Same game as “experts say”.  This particular piece of BS is normal.

Protection cited as a primary reason for ownership

Language is delightfully colored.  “claim to own firearms primarily for protection against crime.”  The word “claim” doesn’t really need to be there. It leaves a subtle hint that it isn’t quite true that it is for protection against crime, they just claim it is.

More Americans want stricter controls

Yep, they do say that.  But most Americans have no idea what the actual gun laws are.  Is the gun law that makes it a felony for my kid to carry a spent case across an imaginary line a couple of miles from us not strict enough?  Do they even know what the gun laws are in their own state?

Most people have never purchased a firearm.  They’ve never seen a 4473 or had to fill one out.  They don’t know so the question is moot.  Most people when they find out what the laws actually are, are not looking for still stricter infringments.

Ban of bump stocks upheld by the Supreme Court

An out and out lie.  The court denied certiorari.  This does not mean that they upload the ban.  It means they didn’t bother to hear it.  That is likely because they wanted a clearer case, such as Bruen, which allowed them to say “if it isn’t in the text and history of the 2nd, around 1791, it is unconstitutional”

The leading cause of death for children in the U.S. is guns

Words have meaning.  When we think of “children” most people think ages 1-12.  They think of 13-17 as teenagers or young adults.  18 and up are adults.  But the term used is “adolescent fatality”.  This means that it includes not just children age 1-12, but also all the gang bangers that ended up dead in very adult activities.

Only certain states require background checks

Another flat out lie. It seems that they don’t think that a NICS check is really a background check and that a more comprehensive “personal history release” is needed.  And they claim that if you buy a gun “online” you don’t have to do a background check.

The blunt of it is that you need to go through a background check for any firearm you purchase that isn’t a person to person sale or FFL to FFL.  And the feds do not take lightly to people making money buying and selling firearms without an FFL.

2016 saw record-breaking gun manufacturing

And it is highly likely that there will be more manufactured this year than last.  Just like there are more of many items manufactured every year.

More guns is not something to be feared.

This is just a start of a debunk of “50 Facts About Guns In America”  A follow up on a reader comment about narratives.

50 facts about guns in America

Stacker gathered information from scientific reports and government and news sites to generate a list of 50 facts related to guns in America.

Our datacenter did a forced upgrade of our infrastructure today.  It was expected to be a few minutes of downtime but due to an error on their part we were unable to connect to our data stores.

This has been resolved.  We are back up and running.

Sorry for the outage,

-AWA

Years ago my daughter and I were discussing the Constitution and I asked her to quote the second amendment.  She picked up her history/social studies text book and read it to me from the back of the book.

“A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms in the militia will not be infringed”.

I freaked.  I knew that was wrong.  So I actually looked in her text book and it indeed had the second like that, but with “[in the militia]” in brackets added.

My daughter, a highschool student, thought that the words in brackets were part of the second amendment.  I had to pull up a real copy of the constitution on my laptop in order to prove to her that somebody had added those words.  That it wasn’t in the original.

The next day I started calling around and finally ended up talking to the superintendent of the school district.  He told me “The students know that brackets indicated words that were added.  We added the words to help clarify the meaning. ”  He went on to indicate that they had added words throughout the constitution.

When I reviewed the text book I found one other added word [of] and it did not change the meaning of the phrase.  But there were multiple words added to the2nd.  The children reading that textbook would have no way of knowing that they were not reading the correct translation.

Most students entering high school today can’t read the constitution.  They do not read cursive.  They have to trust that the version they have is a true copy, just using block or typeset characters. This will become a bigger issue over time. “He who controls the past controls the future.”

[Darcy] Geissler [of Fairfax County, Virginia] told the principal directly in an email, “When I was in law school, our first assignment on persuasive writing – a skill necessary to be a lawyer – was on whether or not a misspelling in a deed was sufficient to pass title. Not exactly a sexy or emotional issue. We were not handed Roe v. Wade, the 2nd Amendment, or climate change, even though we were law students with significant education and life experience.”

“The reason we were not given hot-button issues when first learning to write was because in order to learn persuasive writing, it is imperative that the skill not be clouded by the issue before the skill is learned,”

The problem is that everything in the education industry is geared to messaging.  In some cases this is good.  In k-5 what this means is that a lesson in math is used in reading is used in history and back again.  It is designed to teach basic skills and to help the student learn from those base lessons.

Unfortunately, today there is a different narrative being pushed.  Not to get children to think, to analyze critically the information they are given, but to instead think the way that the industry (and teacher) want the child to think.

In a YAF talk, Michael Knowles spoke about “groomers”.  The point he made was that if a 8 year old boy tells his teacher that he is really a girl and he is going to use the girls bathroom from now on, the teacher/school has to make a choice.  Regardless of the choice they are going to be teaching a narrative.  They can teach the woke narrative that a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy, or they can teach the boy that “no you aren’t a girl, use the correct bathroom.”

For us, it isn’t a difficult choice, for many on the left, it isn’t a difficult choice.  The problem is that we have different answers and the education industry is filled with leftist.

The schools spend many learning hours per year teaching students how to respond if the fire alarm goes off.  Yet somehow they manage to do it without creating soul crushing fear in the students.

Today they spend as much or more time teaching children how to respond to “active shooter”. And they have managed to instill terror in students and parents alike.

At the local high school a student was recently removed by the police during the school day.  The boy had been playing airsoft with some friends.  One of those “friends” snapped a picture of him holding an AR-15 airsoft rifle.  That “friend” then added text to it something like “I can’t stand it, I’m going to bring my rifle to school and see just how many I can kill before they stop me.”

It was a prank.  Yet everybody knows about it and there was panic within the school system.  And kids were scared.  This is not the way to live.

The narrative thus is “guns are bad unless you are a Hollywood Actor shooting up people in the movies”.  Only the cops are good enough to carry guns.  Only the military should have arms.  6 rounds is ok but 7 is a killing machine.  A 10 round magazine is “safe” an eleven round magazine is only for killers.

The cops need 18 round magazines with two reloads but you can do it with just 5 rounds.

Nothing makes any real sense but the narrative goes on and on.  Always evoking fear to get people to give up just one more bit of freedom.

Virginia mother blasts anti-Second Amendment writing sample 5th grade students were assigned to analyze

A Fairfax County, Virginia, mother raised concerns about an assignment that prompted students to analyze an anti-Secondment Amendment persuasive essay sample.

It is the summer in late 60’s. Two kindergarten boys roll down the slope between their houses and come to a stop. They climb back to the top and look up at the beautiful blue sky. They pant from running around the yards playing cowboys and indians.

One of them turns to the other and says “What are you going to do when you are drafted? Are you going to Vietnam or are you going to Canada?”

The other boy thinks hard, “Dad is in the Navy. I’m going to join up and be an officer like him.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might go to Canada.”

War just was. Two young boys discussing what they were going to do in 13 years when they were drafted to go fight in a war that the government refused to call a war. A war that had been going on for decades, even before the US got involved.

The media was peddling the same narratives, the US military was evil. That our soldiers committed atrocities on a regular basis. Just a few years later, in April of 1971, John Kerry, future presidential candidate, testifies in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the horrible atrocities he witnessed.

At every turn the media delivered a story of failure.

Still a young boy was ready to go to war to defend his country. He didn’t understand all those big words, but his father was fighting for his country and he would go do his father and his country proud.

A small truth that is forgotten, an 18 year old man drafted and sent to Vietnam in this time period had a better chance of living than his civilian counterpart back in the states. Car safety was not as good as it is today. Many young men lost their lives on the streets and highways of this country. More per capita than lost their lives in Vietnam.

Please don’t misunderstand me, war is horrible. It does things to the body and mind that most, thankfully, will never experience and few will understand. I still thank those vets when I meet them. I’ve talked to them when the war was still fresh in their minds. I have huge respect for those that fought and continue to fight for our country.

Note also that my respect is for those that fight for our country, not all that are members of the military fight for our country.