Diversity and War: Canada, A/Stan and Vietnam

The Canadian death toll continues to rise. Image courtesy of Master Corporal Doug Desrochers via Flickr user 'lafrancevi' - click for attribution details.

Our war dead now stands at 133 – this week we lost two more soldiers. As I write this, a friend’s son is in harm’s way somewhere deep in Kandahar province, his unit sent to provide security to Afghan policemen, and then, horrors, sent to recover the body of their colleague. Our commanding officers praise such sacrifice. Are Canadians complacent about our war mission? Is there a disconnect between our Canadian betters, telling us what to think about the war, and the reality of bombs on flesh? Establishment Canada seems miles apart from liberal American analysis, these days. And from the voices of at least some soldiers on active duty.

What are Canadians dying for? The Afghanistan run-off election cedes to the putative victor. Now that the NYT has alluded to CIA pay-outs to President Karzai’s brother, now that Ann Jones has again debunked the notion that we are there “for the women,” what explanations remain? Glenn Greenwald examines  the universality of war propaganda  and replicates in full a 2006 op/ed piece by a Russian Canadian, who fought in A/Stan and then buries his Canadian’s wife’s cousin. Note that he links to a Quebecois site.

“After 20 years of trying, I have failed to understand why my friends died in Afghanistan. Now I wonder what Canadians, too, are dying for.” (Nikolai Lanine,  November/2006, Globe and Mail)

A pleasure to receive an invitation to the Canadian International Council’s Global Positioning Strategy presentation, which I unfortunately could not attend. Did other bloggers? On the CIC list of sponsors these words: SNC-Lavalin.

Perhaps Bob Rae, in his lunch time address in November, to be held at SFU and co-sponsored by Canada’s World, will provide  fresh answers about why Canada’s interests are served by the mission in Afghanistan?

Until such wisdom is proffered, I read about Vietnam and the United States involvement there in the 1960s –– the Library of America offers two volumes, Reporting Vietnam, American Journalism 1959  to 1975, and features not only the classics – Karnow, Hersh, Halberstam, Greenfield, but also POW John McCain writing from prison, and contains in its entirety, Michael Herr’s Dispatches.

Just published, an indispensable book: Lessons in Disaster, McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam by Gordon M. Goldstein. Goldstein is a blue chip kinda guy and writes well. At the end of nearly three hundred pages the take away message? Interventions in Asian land wars are always about a choice, never a necessity and on balance, Presidents should just say no.  That Afghanistan will force the current US President to discover this truism is increasingly apparent, despite the concerted efforts of NATO and US military men, including Canadians. Compare Goldstein to General Rick Hillier. He promotes his new book. I heard him this past week on BC’s “other radio station” – the Giant! – and my desire to read his views, waned. In a bookstore, my hand hovers over Hillier but lands on Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Other -“traces how the West has understood non Europeans from classical times to the present.”

In these days of jargon laden gobbledygook about multiculturalism and diversity, Kapuscinski’s spare prose stands out.

And his words inform my attendance at a local Vietnamese Canadian event where a retired ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) hands me a beautifully produced book, Blood and Tears on Truong Son Mountain’s Back – a re-reading of the diary of twenty-seven year old Dang Thuy Tram, a doctor who died in combat as a volunteer for the Viet Cong in 1968. The handwritten memoir, found by an American soldier who kept it for 35 years was published in 2005. It became a cause celebre in Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora.

But my local book, Blood and Tears, is a first person deconstruction of how the diary of this young “idealist” was misused by Communist Vietnam. The author, an upright, soft spoken Vietnamese Canadian, a poet, writes of his convictions about the wrongness of “romanticizing” what he refers to as the Politburo in Vietnam. A refreshing and poignant reminder to me, that here was The Other, in his own voice, claiming literary agency, and decidedly not interpreting history as I or other liberals might.

What do Afghan-Canadians think of our war “over there”? I hope to hear a wide range of views.  I dedicate this column to my friend in A/Stan. May he return home, safe and healthy.