07 February 2008

Lies

The commentary is starting to die down a bit, since the prospect of the coming months on the campaign trail is distressing at best. This area has the highest concentration of political commentators in the known universe, and even the local radio is awash with national-level discourse.

The Liberals I listen to were all over John McCain, pointing out the scorn with which Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and the other Talk Radio figures of the right are heaping on the presumptive Republican nominee.

The best analysis I have heard of late is one that betrays something fundamental that we should have known all along. These people are crazy.

The Democrats have their own problem. Since the two Senators essentially agree on everything, and they are supposed to be nice to each other so that they do not polarize the electorate along the obvious fault lines. I am pleased as punch to be able to vote in the Crabcake Primary here next week, when Virginia, the District and Maryland all get our shot to pile on.

I know who I am voting for, and do not have to believe a single lie to do it.

That is the problem with most lies, unless they are so big and so glittering that you can't distinguish them at all. I was getting on the elevator in the lobby when Mardy 2 was buzzed in the front door with Molly, the King Charles Spaniel.

The little breed is very fashionable these days, though Molly does not appear to care. Mardy 2 is flamboyant, always alluring and with the warm hint of summer dishabille about her even in the depths of February.

It is unseasonably warm, almost a record, and no one has mocked the concept of Global Warming in at least a twenty-four hours.

She had the blessing of the day smeared in black ash on her forehead, and she shared some of the residue with me, rubbing it in hard. Mardy 2, that is, not Molly, who just wagged her cute little tail and remained completely secular.

She told me that Old Jack was in the hospital recuperating from a collapse around the time of the Superbowl. Apparently he has not been doing that well, though it is only when the pool is open that any decent gossip gets passed around.

I know from my last Jack sighting that he has been growing increasingly translucent, his skin losing the pinkness and showing the veins and masses of his internal works below. His hair was so thin and fine and white that he had stopped looking like the millionaire character on the Monopoly and looked more like Lyndon Johnson at the end of things. Naturally, we were all concerned.

What was more alarming was that Mardy 2 said he was being nice to people at the convalescent home. That is so unlike him that I knew things had to be serious. He was probably lying about his condition, and we were supposed to believe it.

I have been prepared to believe at least two improbable things before breakfast all my adult life, replacing the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause with the New York Times.

I don't have time to read much else in the print media, but my folks just started taking the Wall Street Journal at their house high above the bay and there was an interesting article in it. Mom said it was about a lie so vast that I just had to see it.

Arthur Herman was the author, and it appeared at mid-week. Arthur has some credibility, unlike most of the people I listen to, being an expert on the end days of the British Empire. He has a new book coming out called "Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age."

I have walked over Mr. Churchill's slab in Westminster, respectfully, or course, and to the Rajghat in Delhi, the Mahatma's resting place. simple square platform made of black stone marks the site of the pyre, with the words "Hey   Ram" inscribed near it.

Anyway, Arthur also has had a revelation about the end of Vietnam, and it is contained in the way the Tet Offensive was covered by the press.

In and of itself, this is not news. We have known for years that the military consequence of the great offensive was disaster for the Viet Cong, and a defeat for the North Vietnamese, who it is often said, whose North Vietnamese Regulars were willing to fight to the last VC.

What I find compelling is the description of the Big Lie, and how it came to be.

It was huge. Forty years ago last week, more than a quarter million North Vietnamese soldiers and 100,000 Viet Cong irregulars launched a massive attack across South Vietnam.

The Tet offensive came as the culmination of a series of Communist military failures that accompanied the arrival of major US ground forces in the summer of 1965.

Make no mistake: they were brave fighters, and they incurred significant wounds on the Americans. But there was no question. By 1967, the VC had lost control over the Mekong Delta, the heartland of the insurgency.

By the time the last pockets of resistance were crushed by the Marines in Hue City in March of 1968, the VC had lost their best and brightest. The insurgents had lost almost 100,000 people in two months, and their offensive was a crushing and absolute defeat.

Except for one thing. The communist attacks in Saigon brought the war to the place where most reporters lived and worked. They were involved physically for the first time in the conflict they were reporting mostly from the afternoon press briefings at the Rex Hotel, which were known as the Five O'clock Follies.

Arthur quotes some figures that suggests of the press corps of some 350 accredited journalists, only about forty had seen any real combat until Tet. After that, they all could claim to have experienced something, even if it was only panic and inconvenience.

The editors back home picked up on their distress, and the perception of chaos was what was reported to the American audience.

US combat deaths in Vietnam thereafter were horrific, by the standards applied to Iraq, but they consistently declined with success in the field. In 1970, just over four thousand American kids were killed, down from more than fifteen thousand in 1968, the year of the Tet offensive.

In 1970 and 1971, 90% of South Vietnamese lived in zones under government control. Operations like SEALORDS has secured the waterways in the south, and there were places that could be walked peacefully for the first time in a decade.

The failure of the North's next massive invasion in 1972 at the Easter holiday cost the NVA another 100,000 men. That military disaster, and bombing of the North that went along with it, forced the Paris Peace Accords.

By August 1972, there were no U.S. combat forces left in Vietnam.

The North lied about complying with the treaty, of course. It is so hard to know which lies to believe sometimes. Based on the lie that we had lost, it was easy to believe the truth when we actually did.

I am no revanchist, and I had always believed at least two impossible things before breakfast. This was just another day for it.

Mardy 2 and I got on the elevator, the dog first, taking extra care to ensure that the door did not close on the leash and allow the car to rise, Molly connected to the handle in the lobby, to some awful fate between the second and third floor. She removed Molly's collar and harness before they left the car, since the dog has full reign of the corridors, and is widely known as the Empress of the Second Floor.

That is no lie. I have seen the deference to that dog with my own eyes.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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