Aviation Week & Canadian Idiots

The February 21st, 2005 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology published an extensive excerpt from "When Thunder Rolled" describing a mission into North Vietnam in which we were fortunate to survive and to be about as successful as we could in a war which Washington was determined not to let us win. We killed two trains and probably a number of the enemy while simultaneously not being killed ourselves. In the process, I was growing up as a young man and learning that I could probably do more than I ever thought possible despite possessing a considerable level of fear along with a very real concern regarding my own mortality. That's the story told in the book and the excerpt has had a lot of lead-up to get to that point.

Aviation Week: Contrails Stealing Hubcaps & Killing Trains


Inevitably, such a publication engenders response. Typically it comes from folks I've known but lost track of over the years, or from someone who has read about the war, the resistance, and the response of America to her warriors during that period. Those contacts are the principle reward for writing these sorts of books, since other than folks like Tom Clancy or Stephen King, there isn't much compensation for publishing anything less than blockbusters.

Occasionally, however, I get pinged by some pacifist mis-fit, often from another nation and usually offering an overlay of their own interpretations on what I've written. That's their perogative, but the blatant stupidity often astonishes.

In the case of the the Aviation Week piece, the sniveling apologist was Canadian. You remember them, that's the nation that lives under our defensive umbrella, harbors our cowards, and undercuts our policies while providing a conduit for terrorists who don't speak Spanish to cross our borders.

This individual managed to somehow determine that the trains were some sort of Amtrak for office workers in downtown Hanoi that were simply offloading passengers on their way to some sort of bedroom burg eighty miles from the capital. I was accused of some level of war crime, "pissing myself with glee" and, of course described in less than glowing terms. The prevailing concept of the pacifist that war kills civilians and therefore is never justifiable or noble is one of the most depraved positions of the modern pseudo-intellectual. It was certainly apparent to those of us who repeatedly went into the Red River Valley that those innocents we were endangering were pretty good operators of SAM sites, radars, anti-aircraft artillery and MiG-fighters.

The whole correspondence left me once again turning to that 18th Century philosopher, John Stuart Mill who wrote:

“War is an ugly thing, but it is not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by better men than himself.”

I doubt that the Canadian would get the point, but I did and the principle has always served me well.