Andy at zoo in Karachi, Pakistan, 1974.
Part 1: Please, Don’t Thank Me. Thank you. I received more than I gave. Over the years, I have realized misgivings about my involvement in an unjust occupation. Let me explain … I volunteered even though my draft number was greater than 300. I was in my 4th year of an engineering degree, but grades and future job prospects weren’t hopeful. I’d heard that the Navy had the best technical schools. I also wanted to avoid any direct killing and I needed some practical experience to support all the engineering theory I had been studying. Plus, I liked the Navy uniform. I joined on August 28, 1970. My daughter was just a year old and my wife and I had just taken our first vacation together to New Mexico and Arizona. To get two years of technical computer analysis and repair training, I volunteered for 6 years of service. In return, I got free medical for myself and my family. I got free vacations to Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Hawaii and multiple sites in the Philippines. I got 4 years of technical experience maintaining an on-board ADP computer system. I did sacrifice time with my nascent family - a little over two years in all. While in the war zone, our income increased because we were no longer subject to federal income taxes and we collected a monthly combat pay bonus. Most of this went to my family since I had free room and board on an aircraft carrier. During those 6 years as a sailor, I was introduced to a lot of people I would have otherwise never met and from whom I learned about the random unfairness of life. This was true both in bootcamp, on the ship, and in my visits to foreign ports. After returning to civilian life in May of 1976, I completed my engineering education using my GI benefits, graduated with a BSEE degree and spent the next 34 years working in aerospace near the Johnson Space Center.
Part 2: During the last 25 years, I’ve learned about many new events from America’s hidden history, both civilian and military. In 1921, Black Wall Street was bombed into non-existence near Tulsa, OK. Between 1975 and 2012, oligarchs stole $50T from the 99%. (That was equivalent to $297,000 per American household.) So much abusive hidden history. I learned the attack in the Gulf of Tonkin near Vietnam was a lie. I learned WMD’s and uranium enriching centrifuges in Iraq were lies. So many lies for so many WARs since WWII. I’m proud of honorably fulfilling my contract with the military, but I’m not proud of being part of a paranoid destruction of a poor country in SE Asia. So, please, reconsider thanking me for doing what I chose to do while receiving priceless benefits from our government while it perpetrated misguided death and destruction on a foreign peoples. This misguided death and destruction has continued since Vietnam and my past involvement in it causes more misgivings with each new war. So, thanking me for my service is difficult to accept or acknowledge. The American Empire now has a military budget approaching $1T and around 800 bases around the world encircling any possible threat. We are in a perpetual war mode and we would rather fund a massive, abusive and unquestioned ‘defense’ budget than fund a much smaller, beneficial, infrastructure plan for our working class who are steadily losing their middle class status as oligarchs amass another $50T of other people's dwindling wealth.
Part 3: I no longer accept American Exceptionalism nor the complicit authoritarian economic system that empowers today’s war-mongering oligarchs and their political lickspittle. I never supported America First fascism. Since WWII, and in spite of Eisenhower’s 1961 warnings, we’ve been lied into one war after another to keep WMD manufacturers profitable. All this oligarch greed for endless growth tarnishes my honorable military service. “WAR is a racket. It always has been. This racket is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” — United States Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket, 1935, https://taskandpurpose.com/news/smedley-butler-gangsters-of-capitalism/ The attached photo was taken in 1973, 38 years after General Butler’s realization that he was just “high class …racketeer for Capitalism,” and just 12 years after Eisenhower’s warning against the threats to democracy of a “military-industrial complex” that would rob the nation of its honor and public wealth. The photo was taken during my first free cruise off Vietnam with over 5,000 fellow sailors and airmen on the USS Constellation, CVA-64, which was the last conventionally powered aircraft carrier but is now scrap metal. On that cruise, I got to visit Hawaii, The Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore. I became a “Shellback” after crossing the equator for the first time. I had a bed, all the food I could eat and it was all free. I got more than I gave or sacrificed, so thank you for paying your citizenship dues and helping to pay for all benefits for me and my family.
Military Service - I got more than I gave.
As a Vietnam Veteran, please read my attached statement before considering thanking me for my service.
My thanks to all those who paid their fair share of #CitizenshipDues (taxes) and paid for my training, rm & brd, meals, & health care for me & my fam!