A Thanksgiving Day

   It was Thanksgiving Day of 1943 -- the only one from my childhood that I can truthfully say I remember.

   The Herbert Avenue gang was in the Hembergers' spacious yard, tossing a football around, and swapping tales of  downing enormous quantities of turkey and trimmings and pie -- especially pie.

   Many of us had big brothers fighting in the Great War, kids who had signed up the moment they turned 18, without waiting for a draft notice. One of the big brothers was "Bud" Dougherty.  He had been serving aboard the aircraft carrier Hornet when it went down in 1942 in the Battle of Santa Cruz.  He hadn't been heard from since and was presumed killed in action.

   Bud and the Hembergers' big brother, "Speed," had been stars on an American Legion Junior baseball team that went to the national finals in Pennsylvania in 1940.  They were neighborhood heroes even before they went off to war.  Now they were gods.

   We didn't talk much about Bud when his little brother was around.  He was a sensitive boy, the youngest of the Herbert Avenue gang, and the hurt in his heart was too enormous to violate.

   We talked football -- Ohio State, mostly, and the Western Hills high school team we all aspired to play for one day .

   Whence cometh a wailing and shouting from up the hill, toward the street car stop.

   At first it was incomprehensible but as it came closer we could make out: "He's alive!  Bud's alive."

   It was Bud Daugherty's sister, racing down the Herbert Avenue hill, blubbering and bellowing, "Bud's alive!"

  The residents of Herbert Avenue poured into the street.  They surrounded Rose Daugherty and hugged her until she caught her breath.  She was heading home from work on the Westwood Avenue street car when a sailor with lots of battle ribbons took the seat beside her.  "Do you know where Herbert Avenue is?" he asked.  "I live there," she said.  "Get off when I do."

  "I've got to see a shipmate's family on Herbert Avenue," he said.  "Tell them their son is OK.  He was in a coma for months after his ship went down.  When he came out of it,  I was in the bed next to him.  'Tell my family I'm OK,' he said, when he found out I was going home."

  "What was his ship?" Rose asked.

   "The Hornet," the sailor said.

   Through tears of disbelief she gasped,  "And the sailor's name?"

   "Daugherty," the young man said.  "Bud Daugherty."

   At that moment the streetcar came to a halt at the Herbert Avenue safety island.

    Rose began her sprint down  the street, shouting out the good news.

   She didn't even get the sailor's name.

10 Million Child-Killers

  Don't you just love our government's propensity for euphemism?

  We're not a perpetual war machine; we're "a global provider of security."

  The phrase was repeatedly invoked this week to defend the U.S. government's decision, announced Tuesday by the State Department, not to join a global treaty banning landmines.

  The treaty prohibits the use, stockpiling, production or transfer of landmines. It has been endorsed by 156 countries, but the United States, Russia, China and India have not adopted it.

   The signatories to the treaty will convene this weekend in Colombia to review its terms and compliance records.  The United States will send "observers" to the conference, a State Department spokesman said, because "as a global provider of security, we have an interest in the discussions there."

   That "interest" is a U.S. stockpile of 10 million such weapons and a grim determination to retain its option to use them as it pleases.  "We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention," the spokesman said.

   Just who the hell are these "friends and allies," I wonder?  All but one NATO nation, and most of our other allies, are parties to the treaty.  If most of our allies are pledged not to use the damned things, why are we hoarding 10 million of them?

   These antipersonnel devices (another government euphemism) are in fact child-killers.  Once planted, the lethal gizmos stay in place long after the conflict that impelled their use has ended -- whereupon civilians step on them and get fragged. Landmines are known to have caused 5,197 casualties last year, a third of them children, according to the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which links some 1,000 activist groups.

  Our eloquent President speaks grandiosely about leading the way to a world without nuclear weapons -- a worthy, but impractical, dream at this time.  But the many small, practical steps toward a more peaceful world, the things he could do right now with the stroke of a pen, go undone.

   Things like signing the landmine treaty. 

   U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, a leading advocate for the treaty, called the decision "a default of U.S. leadership."

   You can't hide that behind a euphemism.

  

  

Obama's Sinai

   As I contemplate, and dread, the likely announcement within days that President Obama will send another 32,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan, an improbable memory popped into my head.  It was one of the great newswpaper ledes I have ever read, published in the New York Times when Albert Einstein returned to Princeton from a long sabbatical to think about the Holy Grail of his late career, a unified field theory.

   "Albert Einstein," the Times said, "returned today from his scientific Sinai with a new set of laws for the cosmos."

   Obama has been atop his own Sinai lately, perhaps suffering a sort of Gethsemane as well, thinking about the thorniest of his inherited problems, the Middle East wars.  One hopes against hope that when he returns, his tablet will contain a single law: Thou shalt not kill.

   He should announce that he is directing his generals to draw up a plan for  withdrawal  "with deliberate speed" from Afghanistan and Iraq, and he should dismiss Stanley McChrystal from the group of generals ordered to do so.

   Americans are well aware of the arguments for ending our involvements there.

   A former tennis partner wrote to me recently:  "A million dollars per troop per year!  Two-thirds of Afghans illiterate! And we're going to build a nation in 10 years? Give me a break!  I read an article a few months ago  discussing how we could get some of the Muslim nations to take up the fight there. Not being infidels they are not resented and could do a better job."

   That's a plan, negotiated through the United Nations, that I have advocated, too, but as far as I can tell, the notion doesn't exist in the high command that advises the President.

   I have come to believe that two forces in the United States have become so powerful that not even a President, not even a very popular President, which Obama once was, can resist them.

   One is the oligarchy of finance, a cartel of Wall Street bankers and super-rich mega- corporations whose wealth is based in oil or defense or both.

  The other is the military establishment, the Pentagon generals and the civilian hawks from the defense industries.

   Ray McGovern, whom I consider the most authoritative voice now writing about politico-military affairs and national security, reminds us, however, that there has been, in recent history, one President who stood up to them: John F. Kennedy. 

   A month before his assassination, according to McGovern,"during his last visit to Hyannis Port, Kennedy told his next-door neighbor Larry Newman, 'I'm going to get those guys out [of Vietnam] because we're not going to find ourselves in a war it's impossible to win.'

   A majority of his own National Security Council was opposed to withdrawal. McGovern recalls that Kennedy sent  Marine Commandant  Gen. David M. Shoup, “to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him.” Shoup told the President:

   “Unless we are prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expands beyond control.”

   McGovern writes that, "Kennedy concluded  there was no responsible course other than to press ahead for a phased withdrawal regardless of the opposition from his senior national security advisers. He decided to pull 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the rest by 1965.

   "Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff told James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that Kennedy's mind was fixed on Vietnam the day before he was slain. Instead of rehearsing for a press conference that day, Kennedy told Kilduff:

   "'I've just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We're losing too damned many people over there. It's time for us to get out. The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves. We're the ones who are doing the fighting.

   ""There is no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.'"

  Nor is Iraq.  Nor is Afghanistan.