Today, we leave the hot jungles of  the Vietnam of my youth where, in the late 60s and early 70s hundreds of thousands of soldiers from opposing sides tried to kill each other and where more than 50,000 Americans died, making the ultimate sacrifice.

We arrive 50 some odd years later in the charming and hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery, just outside Washington DC, where so many of the dead from Vietnam have found their final resting place, joining other fallen from our wars.

On 26 August, the cemetery and all its dead were pulled into the political knife fight that is the 2024 presidential election. Once again, as he always seems to do, morally corrupt and remorseless Donald Trump, empty of mercy, pity, empathy, conscience, and guilt, decided that what was in his interest was ever so much more important than any moral considerations for the dead and their loved ones.

As NPR originally reported, on that day Trump visited Arlington Cemetery at the invitation of some Gold Star families whose loved ones were killed at the Abbey Gate of Kabul International Airport while U.S. forces were evacuating Afghan allies three years ago. Thirteen service members were killed after an Islamic State fighter detonated a bomb that also killed more than 170 Afghan civilians.

Trump laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown. Fine, so far. But that’s not all he and his campaign aides did.

Those service members he was invited to mourn are now buried in Section 60, which is the resting place for those killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The Armed Forces considers Section 60 sacred ground, as do the families of the dead who are entombed there.

I’ve been there, and, when I was, I had the feeling of being in church.

On that day, after laying the wreath, Trump and his campaign team cavalierly invaded Section 60, Arlington’s sanctum sanctorum, for a political photo op and video. Members of Trump’s entourage pushed aside an Army employee who was trying to enforce the rules — and federal law — which forbid photos, videos, and anything else that smacks of political campaigning within the gravesites.

Trump got his pictures.

After the incident became public, Trump’s Representative Steven Cheung, said, “This individual was the one who initiated physical contact and verbal harassment that was unwarranted and unnecessary,” As if that wasn’t enough, he added that the employee obviously “had a mental problem.”

The Army said the employee who’d been tossed aside declined to press charges, allegedly because of fear that Trump and his MAGA minions might retaliate against the employee or her family. For the record, the Army said she was only doing her job.

At a campaign rally the next day, Trump blamed the whole thing on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Then he said it didn’t happen. It was a “made up story.” Makes your head spin. But what else would one expect?

Representative Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, wrote to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, asking for the incident report from Arlington, which the Army has not yet made public, as well as a briefing.

With Donald Trump, this stuff is routine transactional business. Incidents like this come fast, so fast they seem like a many-headed-hydra, mythology’s version of whack-a-mole. The result is the nation has become desensitized to their rapid fire and depraved nature. And our mainstream media — I’m talking to you, New York Times — treats them as if they’re nothing more than a little dirty politics, which happens in every campaign, doesn’t it?

An existential crisis for American democracy? Many scholars seem to think so, but you’d never know it from America’s “paper of record.”

Yesterday morning, writing in the Washington Post, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, giving Trump the Voldemort treatment, never saying his name, scathingly rebuked those who had used Arlington National Cemetery for “a political event.”

Admiral Mullen wrote:

But no part of Arlington — or any veterans’ cemetery for that matter — should ever play host to partisan activity. These cemeteries are sacred ground. They represent the final resting places of our best, our brightest, our most unselfish citizens.

Our fallen and departed veterans did not serve, fight or die for party. They fought and died for country, for each other, for their families and for us. They served in a military that defends all Americans — regardless of creed, color, race and, yes, voting habits.

On a hot and humid August day in 1970, a MedEvac helicopter landed on a dusty, wind-swept pad on the western edge of Camp Eagle in northern South Vietnam. Camp Eagle was the base camp for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, of which I was a fully paid up member in good standing.

Eagle, about the size of a small city, was roughly seven kilometers south of the city of Hue where the heaviest fighting of the Tet offensive had happened a little more than two years earlier. America won the battle of Tet on the ground, but lost it in the press. Although the war went on for another six years, Tet was the turning point where we lost the support of the American public, if we ever had any to begin with.

When the chopper landed, I was sitting in the door beside the door gunner with my legs hanging out. Both legs hurt — a lot. With the blades still whirling, a couple of medics lifted me out and carried me to a nearby truck with a red cross on the side of it. They maneuvered me inside the back end of the truck and onto a seat on the side, and off we went to a medical unit somewhere on the base.

This was not my first time making this kind of trip. A couple of months earlier, during a brief encounter with some of our friends from the north, a tiny piece of shrapnel had navigated its way into a fleshy spot just above my right knee. For a little thing, it hurt a lot. So, I’d taken a chopper ride back to Eagle where a medic had frozen the spot, made a small cut, dug out the miniscule metal, bandaged me up, and sent me back to my men who did their best not to laugh about it in front of me.

This latest trip to the rear had nothing to do with shrapnel.

Regular readers may recall the 15-mile march to the sea my men and I made on a hot and rainy summer night, the sand-filled bread we pigged out on, the crammed-in Sampan ferry ride up the South China Seacoast, during which Rusty the Scout Dog crapped voluminously smack dab in the middle of us, all of which preceded our launching what was likely the only amphibious beachhead assault of the entire war, only to be met, not by North Vietnamese regulars with murderous intent, but by Red Cross Donut Dollies with Coca Cola.

All of this so my Commander, call-sign Bobcat, could win his silver star.

I don’t know which was more humiliating, getting hit in the knee with shrapnel so small you could hardly see it, or being the butt of merciless “amphibious assault” jokes from fellow officers I used to think were friends.

But following the battle that wasn’t, the military gods smiled, and my men and I were allowed to hang around for nearly three weeks on the beach we had recently “captured.” It was too bad the Donut Dollies couldn’t hang around with us, but they had Cokes to deliver elsewhere. C’est las vie.

During our nearly three weeks of semi-vacation, we routinely patrolled the lowland area, encountering nothing but a few water buffalo and some rice paddy farmers who would have slit our throats if they thought they could have gotten away with it.

When not patrolling, most of our time by the sea was spent in it, swimming and surfing when the tide came in. It wasn’t until I saw Apocalypse Now nearly ten years later and watched Robert Duvall’s fake troops doing the same thing that I realized we might not have been unique, after all. But there was one stark difference between us and Francis Ford Coppola’s movie — we never had to endure the “smell of napalm in the morning.”

That was no small blessing. Standing on a ridgeline looking across a valley toward the end of my time in Vietnam, I saw what a napalm strike could do as two jets streaked in to release their grisly cargo on the forest below. It looked as if the earth had opened up to have fiery hell rise and devour everything it touched. Made me realize just how right Sherman had been about war being hell.

About a week into our time on the beach, we were resupplied, and some kind soul included a couple cases of beer. Shortly after that, I stepped on a small, pull tab that once sat on top of  a can of Bud. It cut my foot, and I thought nothing more about it, except to order the guys to police the area so it wouldn’t happen again to someone else.

Two days later, the foot began to hurt. A couple of days after that, my right calf started to ache and swell. Over the next several days, what was obviously an infection made its way all the way up my right leg and down my left. The pain was exquisite. I couldn’t stand, let alone walk, and it was at this point that our medic, Corporal Gary Porzinski, said he’d done everything he could, which wasn’t much, and I needed to get back to Camp Eagle to get more sophisticated help before things became serious.

And that was how I found myself on the Huey MedEvac chopper winging my way back to Eagle, then to the ambulance with the Red Cross on the side of it, and finally to a light hospital unit where, along with about twenty other medical inmates also suffering from different kinds of infections, I was told to bend over for a shot of penicillin in the ass twice a day for the next ten days.

We were all officers in the medical unit, which was in a large tent, and I remain convinced to this day that the army nurse with the big grin and the giant hypodermic needle derived great joy in slamming it home with vigor.

But what do you do in the middle of a war in the middle of a large army base in the middle of a medical unit tent? Answer: not much.

Which the guys who ran the medical unit realized. One of them was our Battalion Surgeon, Major Skip Davies — a man  I counted as one of my best friends in Vietnam. We had known each other back on Fort Benning before getting the orders everyone knew would one day arrive. Our wives were friends and kept each other company all the time we were gone. Each of us had baby girls we were hoping to get to know.

After I’d been in the medical unit for about a week, he came to see me while I was in between shots in the ass. I told him it would be nice if the guys recovering in the tent could have a little entertainment of some sort. He thought that was a good idea, so good he told me he’d already arranged for us to have a movie night. “What movie,” I asked him. “Nope,” he said, “It’s a surprise. But you’re going to like it.”

And so it was that the following day a few soldiers rigged up a large screen outside the tent and put about 25 dilapidated, rickety chairs in front of it. As darkness began to fall, we all made our way to the chairs in our hospital johnnies with the slits up the rear to make it easier for Sgt. Caligula, or whatever his name was, to get at us. We settled ourselves in, someone turned on a big projector, and the movie began.

It was Mash, which had come out earlier that year. I have no idea how the army not only got it, but got it to Camp Eagle in Vietnam. Regardless, there it was in living color right in front of us. Directed by Robert Altman, with Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye, Elliot Gould as Trapper John, and Sally Kellerman as Hot Lips Houlihan, it was stingingly hilarious.

We had just gotten to the truly ironic part. Hawkeye, Trapper John, and their ghoulish pals had assembled, just as we had, in chairs in front of a tent within which Hot Lips was showering. They sat waiting, as did we. We knew something huge was about to happen.

And it did. At that very moment Camp Eagle came under rocket attack. Regardless of our infectious states, or whatever Hot Lips was doing, once we heard the first explosion we all unassed the area and ran for the nearest bunker into which we dove, some headfirst.

About ten rockets hit Camp Eagle that night, none of them remotely near us, but movie night was ruined.

The next day, cured, I jumped a chopper, flew back to the beach that began it all, and rejoined my men, who hadn’t missed me in the least. We were only at the beach another day or two. After that we said goodbye to water and sand and choppered north deep into the jungle where the war came back to meet us with a vengeance.

It wasn’t for another ten years that I was able to see the nearly two hour, full movie of Mash. With my wife Marilyn, I finally saw Sally Kellerman’s shower screen drop to the ground to reveal her standing humiliated, naked, and covered with soap to the applause and guffaws of Hawkeye and all his friends assembled in front.

Somehow, it didn’t pack quite the punch I thought it would.

Epilogue

Between the Vietnam war and now, Camp Eagle slowly disappeared. Nature reclaimed its own and erased our presence. If you looked for signs of it now, you wouldn’t find any. It’s as if we were never there. That’s  good.