The Great Lie

We are fighting to "Make the world safe for Democracy." These words meant very little to me in 11th grade back in 1964 when my father was preparing to go to Vietnam. I still remember how we watched TV and laughed at odd sounding names no one had heard before, villages and hamlets in far off places. Letters from Vietnam trickled in with messages like "today we had 12 KIA." As she read the letter out loud my Dad’s mother laughed at the word kia until I explained to her it meant Killed In Action. A few years later I was writing my own letters from DaNang: describing the landscape, the war and the people. They were a beautiful people that we were killing to "Make THE world safe for Democracy." Killing and dying, some 35,000 of us and hundreds of thousands of them. Was it really to set them free, make them safe?

It is nearly July Fourth 2009, our Independence Day, and we are pulling our troops out of one war and sending them off to another. Isn’t democracy safe yet? How much blood must flow to stem the tide of what: communism, socialism, terrorism? In the process of "winning" these wars against "isms" we have destroyed most of our democracy here at home. I am a patriot, but once again by God I do not, cannot believe we are fighting a righteous war. Carry in your heart this holiday, and the days to come, the torch of Freedom and the spirit of Independence.

God bless our troops, and guide our nation, as we stumble drunkenly down a dark and bloody road to a destiny as yet unrevealed, but subliminally dreaded. Beware, another great lie is in the making and history being repeated.
Written by David Decker, Instructor, White Shadow Dojo.