Policing America's Empire

Pax Americana

When I was nineteen years old, I did not expect I would live long enough to see my twenty-first birthday. My platoon sergeant said there were two types of Military Policemen—the "quick and the dead ones, like Dungan." Then he turned away in disgust. Two years later, I heard he got shot in the butt in Vietnam while attempting to flee during a firefight. It served him right. When we low-crawled through live fire, he always yelled at me to "get your ass down on the ground." Evidently, he forgot to follow his own advice.

Six thousand years of civilization and we have not made much progress towards repealing the Law of the Jungle. Yes, it is still all about Kill or Be Killed—nowhere is it more evident than war. Take a naive pacifist nineteen year old university student, toss him into the midst of an ongoing war of liberation, stress him far beyond the breaking point, and feign surprise that Sigmund Freud himself could not have helped to crack this nut case, much less a wet behind the ears Veterans Administration psychological technician who hardly earns enough money to pay the rent for his one bedroom studio apartment. Excuse me, but isn't it Uncle Sam's responsibility to restore me to good health considering he illegally drafted me out of college because my social science major was not considered to be essential to the war effort. Four decades later and I still hurt like hell—both physically and mentally—I do not have a right knee. Consequently, I cannot stand or walk and I'm confined to a fall-apart, rickety manual wheelchair. Sometimes I wake-up howling with my five year old male beagle dog. It would be hilarious, were it not pathetic. I rarely sleep more than an hour at a time; never more than five or six hours per night. I look and feel like shit.