Brian’s Blog

November 2​, 2015

Fifty years ago today, November 2, 2015, at about 5:20 p.m., a 31-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison immolated himself 40 feet from the window of US Secretary of War Robert McNamara’s office at the Pentagon. I was a law student in Washington, DC at the time.

Most US Americans know little of our nation’s history and seldom reflect on the moral issues relating to its genocidal origins and imperial nature. And, it seems, they avoid at all costs reflection on anything that may produce “negative” feelings (i.e., the truth).

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Project RENEW

Hai Lang, Trieu Phong Districts, Quang Tri (22 October 2015)

On Tuesday local Quang Tri residents made two urgent phone calls to Project RENEW’s hotline to report their discovery of wartime ordnance, and to ask for assistance.

35-year-old Hoang Van Ty, a villager in Trieu Van Commune of Trieu Phong District, was preparing land to build a temple in the village cemetery when he encountered unexploded ordnance (UXO).  He reported the discovery immediately to commune military officer Nguyen Van Lam, who used his mobile phone to call to Project RENEW.

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Washington Post
By Ishaan Tharoor February 16

People inspect damage at a site hit by what activists said were barrel bombs dropped by forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo’s district of al-Sukari on March 7, 2014. (Hosam Katan/Reuters)

“It’s a childish story that keeps repeating in the West,” smiled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in an interview with the BBC last week. He was dismissing allegations that his regime is attacking Syrian civilians with barrel bombs, crude devices packed with fuel and shrapnel that inflict brutal, indiscriminate damage.

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Fifty years after the first US troops came ashore at Da Nang, the Vietnamese are still coping with unexploded bombs and Agent Orange.

By George Black
The Nation
February 25, 2015

Bombs, Agent Orange and the Lethal Legacy of Bombs in Quang Tri Credits: The Food & Environment Reporting Network and SwitchYard Media

On a mild, sunny morning last November, Chuck Searcy and I drove out along a spur of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail to the former Marine base at Khe Sanh, which sits in a bowl of green mountains and coffee plantations in Vietnam’s Quang Tri province, hard on the border with Laos. The seventy-seven-day siege of Khe Sanh in early 1968, coinciding with the Tet Offensive, was the longest battle of what Vietnamese call the American War and a pivotal event in the conflict. By the off-kilter logic of Saigon and Washington, unleashing enough technology and firepower to produce a ten-to-one kill ratio was a metric of success, but the televised carnage of 1968, in which 16,592 Americans died, was too much for audiences back home. After Tet and Khe Sanh, the war was no longer America’s to win, only to avoid losing.

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