James Webb, Memoriam, and Clear and Present Danger

James Webb and I had a two-minute talk about our experiences in Vietnam in a DC lavatory [!?] during a colloquium long ago where he was a speaker and I was attending to listen. Always of conservative bent, he is very much a maverick and I believe very outspoken on the Iraq War---chiefly about the Pentagon's monumental mess-up and the apparent lack of accountability going to the very top.

I can recall taking "Hell in a Very Small Place" by Bernard Fall out of a library, but nothing of the book. I believe he wrote a biography of Ho Chi Minh which I did read. I always reflect with sadness on the early days of Vietnam, and think of my Stanford grad predecessor, a young man named Fred Abramson, whose library I inherited when I got to the small district named Minh Duc in Vinh Long Province where we both had worked. I read and still somewhere may possess his copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I believe he is on the wall of the State Department KIA honor roll in the vast lobby. He was killed around the time Fall died, I believe, or a little later. What a waste!

However, upon reflection, the Vietnam American soldiers may not have died in vain. In the movie The Year of Living Dangerously, nowhere does one learn that 1974 was a time when the Communist Party in Indonesia may have been ready to mount a takeover from the Sukarno regime. The attempt, such as it was, was crushed with terrible bloodshed and perhaps half a million Indonesian Chinese immigrants who formed the backbone of the CPIndonesia were slaughtered. My thesis would be that if the USA had not been in Vietnam for years before that time, the coup attempt might have been supported and encouraged and enabled by a still expansionist Communist International, especially the segment controlled by Mao Tse-Tung.

Now the American ultra-left is preoccupied with aiding and abetting a vast illegal immigration INTO THE USA which could serve eventually as a base for the kind of political insanity which prevails as normalcy south of our Border. And both fuels reconquista dreams and facilitates the entry of terrorists into the USA.

But I wish to commemorate friends of mine like Lt. Alsever and my predecessor Abramson who died far away for a cause that continues to excite fear and envy around the world---American democracy.